This is looking more and more like a clown show.

"multiple former Apple employees now working at OpenAI reached out to discuss returning Apple-issued work devices they kept" if you leave a job or project and take employer/client equipment don't be surprised when the lawyers come knocking. It is called stealing!

Today's LLM based AI sure looks like a process that moves all the internal knowledge and IP a business has out out of the business to unknown 3rd parties to use for their own profit.
And paying for the honor of torpedoing their own businesses and employees to boot.

Hook'em while they're young!

The illusion of value.

I don't want any backups out there somewhere in the control of someone
I still get dunned you need to accept the iCloud terms,
You need to Sign into iCloud to finish the setup.
Your device has not been backed up to iCloud, Accept terms and Backup now.
I suspect Apple is doing backups to the cloud anyway. After all it is the customers data that is of value to Apple.

"easily audited and controlled" funny! Can you point out a some large cities we can look at and see the police department/mayors office/city council and prosecutors office in action, doing it right?

"Turned Flock's Nationwide Camera Network Into a Stalking Tool" It always was a corporate owned and operated generalized stalking and surveillance tool.
That is what it was designed for! (SSaaS) Stalking and Surveillance as a service.
As for the police doing it? The police are just a cross section of humanity the good and the bad!
In fact I would wager that a greater percentage of police are honest and respectful of others than the general population across the board.

They marketed and sold Artificial Intelligence letting the customers fill in the blanks, knowing they just had automation.
Because they believed the company with the biggest pile of cash and compute would win the race to AGI. So far! they have lost that bet, at this point all they have is a huge pile of debt.

A Clown Show!

Look @ where this is coming from! This is more likely an attempt to keep small independents off the charts to protect the big operators!

government ID mechanism then this won't work!
And if there is a government ID mechanism that works then there is no anonymity or privacy because the
government and corporations are incapable of keeping information secure and/or not using it to attack their
opponents(political and business) for power and profit.

I still won't use chrome as my go to browser.

Our AI is more criminal than their AI!

to do mass general surveillance. And they can not give the right to businesses and then buy the surveillance either. Companies like Flock are the cockroaches of our communities.