Simply ask the police if it is valid to call them every time you know you are being watched and recorded. If they say it's ok, start dialing 911 every time you pass a Flock camera. Seems logical.

Futile, at best temporary solution. It would be like a cooks' union demanding that nobody cook/microwave food at home, instead always buy food from a restaurant, or at the very least force grocery stores to raise prices so that home cooking at home is more expensive (e.g. frozen TV dinner minimum price $20).

The lawyer in question here claimed he didn't know that AI can hallucinate. What better way to have the message spread than make an example out of him and any other lawyers doing the same thing? Humans learn best on extreme examples, so disbar the lawyer and make them pay for a retrial including a replacement attorney of their client's choice (which I'm sure will be the top firm in the country), and such a story will very quickly spread through the attorney community, therefore making all lawyers aware of the severe consequences.

Sometimes your only purpose in life may be to be a warning to others!

That would require new laws. Flock itself could easily force this by including in their contract something like $1M fee for unjustified search, with the money going to a fund to defend anyone unfairly accused with the help of their technology (yes, you can tie the payout to winning the case, but I'm sure there will be attorneys willing to take the case contingent on a win if they can charge $1,000 per hour). Any cop who racks up a few million dollar bill to their department will be promptly dispatched from their position, and likely charged with theft of services. Such high liability would also force the departments to oversee their own officers to avoid multi-million dollar bills every month.

Tesla is not the first one to try this. I do remember renting a Prius once without instrument cluster behind the steering wheel, instead a speedometer in the center of the dash. While I disliked it, I got used to it, i.e. it became tolerable by the end of the week long rental period. That said, young people today have other opinions. My son likes the Tesla's no instrument cluster behind the steering wheel - he would not pay $199 to add one (I offered to install it for free). I suspect he would pay to not have it, so I think he would appreciate being able to get a car without an instrument cluster behind the steering wheel, especially if it's cheaper.

So while old geezers like us may hate the idea of no instrument cluster behind the steering wheel, I applaud Hyundai for offering their customer a choice. And yes, it costs more to add a display, so that cost is added. And not, you cannot just add up the cost of parts. I ran a business selling a hardware product (non-automotive) and pricing the product at 2.5x the landed cost is the break even point after including returns, lost/stolen shipments, fraud, warranty replacement, etc. I also worked in the consumer electronics design, and IIRC every $1 of parts costs ended up $10 in MSRP of the product.

Ok, now let's talk about the stupid touch controls for everything - insert old man yelling at the cloud meme.

I consider myself a tech enthusiast.

Lots of things in my house are controllable from my phone. None of them rely on any cloud service (if I am outside of my house, I have to VPN into the house to control them - my own server running open source VPN software). All my phone needs is a web browser which hits an internal network only web server I setup on my home network to control all the devices. Heck, one of the companies from whom I have a bunch of devices (20+) no longer exists (went bankrupt after the pandemic), but it's not preventing me from being able to control them. Some of the others may be gone too, but their devices talk over open or at least documented interfaces, and none require the cloud. Ok, full disclosure, my NVR does keep on trying to connect to alibaba.com and few other places, but it's on an isolated, dedicated network with no internet access - it doesn't make it not work, I even access it just fine from my phone via VPN.

Apple supports charging from PD chargers no problem.

Apple doesn't give you cheap headphones and wall warts because most people don't need them, as they have better ones already, so they just end up in the trash eventually, or stashed away at homes never used. I have a stash of such accessories, all the way back to blackberry days (yes, blackberries shipped with cheap wall warts and even headphones, well one headphone and microphone - never used them). Imagine if every shoe rack came with included shoes, yes, cheap, generic shoes.

... if you'd rather not pay for the extra screen. Not everyone wants an instrument cluster. The most popular car in the world doesn't have one (Model Y).

They could in their contracts embed a clause that any search not tied to an an official investigation or otherwise deemed as abuse will be billed at $1M per search to the law enforcement agency from which it originates, with a stipulation that the department will pay no matter what, even if their officer was not authorized - they can sue the officer to try to recover said charges on their own. This just might motivated the law enforcement agencies to do some very strict internal regulation to avoid millions of dollars worth of obligations. A couple of bankrupt police departments could serve as a warning to others, motivating them to setup very tightly controlled access.

^THIS

Indexing it with AI and making those indexes searchable is where it turns into stalking and opening it to potential massive abuse.

The problem is not license plate being observed in a public place, but rather a company which has access to tens of thousands of such videos, which can then index and make them searchable. That can be a very dangerous thing subject to massive abuse. No different than me seeing you leave your house is not illegal, but if I followed you everywhere you go, that would be stalking.

If the conversation between a person and AI is not privileged conversation, can prosecutors and defense attorney subpoena any AI conversation a judge might have had with AI during the case?

BINGO! The university program I attended (a long time ago) has a simple rule - after first year, your final grade CANNOT depend in any way on your homework grades or attendance. This essentially meant that your final grade was based on mid-term and final-exams, and in some courses a term project (1 per term), and possibly some large labs (projects in laboratories, usually 1, occasionally 2 per term). Graduates from these programs were highly sought after by tech companies

Why do you still have a FB account? I'm genuinely curious, as I've never had a Facebook account myself, never saw the need, saw it as a waste of time. I also found the studies claiming that having a FB account increases overall stress in life rather credible (most of them at the time were theorizing the problem was forcing people to be the same person to their friends, family, coworkers, bosses, etc - where in real life people tend to have different personas with their family than they have with their bosses for example). My wife had a FB account for a while, then deleted it years ago on her own accord - still doesn't want one. Not sure if my kids have FB accounts, last I asked (few years ago) they all said no.