Wouldn’t companies also be able to do it on any WiFi device, like a phone or a smart watch?

I remember daily driving Gentoo unstable in the early 2000’s on my rig in college. It was like trying to beat a Dark Souls boss every time I wanted to do an update.

You can afford to go out for dinner?

Yep. My wife was interested in watching the Odyssey. It would take ~5 hours, including travel, and about $75 for tickets, gas, and ONE snack and ONE drink. For that amount of money, we can buy pizza on the way home, buy/rent the movie, and watch it on our couch, AND do it again for a second movie, and still have money left over.

We are entering an age where impatience is a luxury. I can wait for the movie to be available for streaming.

The advantages are starting your car remotely in the hot or cold months to pre-cool/preheat the cabin, defrost the windows, etc. and let the engine warm up for a couple of minutes.

People have no idea. I read an article a month ago or so that said that WiFi 7 can use radio/sound frequencies to identify individual people in its range. About 20 years ago a theory was proven to be 80+% accurate at capturing passwords by using a microphone to remotely listen to someone type on a keyboard for a while. Websites, applications, operating systems, hardware, carriers, satellites, vehicle manufacturers, payment processors, healthcare systems, watches, GPS, TVs, etc. are all collecting information whether in good faith or not, and various entities, including the government and private companies, are paying and/or using regulatory enforcement to gather it all. The fight for privacy has already been lost. And most people don’t care or are willing to accept it. The silver lining the thought that it’s not worth fighting it anymore is kind of relieving.

Flock cameras are not LPR cameras. They are regular security cameras, with server-based AI. They even show demos to potential customers showing how the their product can search for specific people based on clothes, animal types, children/babies, strollers, carts, etc. across the entire country from one web-based interface. It’s all very Orwellian and I don’t think this issue either starts nor stops with Flock as a company. This type of surveillance is going to be ubiquitous regardless of what company(s) show up for making money from it.