The problem with this is where do you draw the line? If I film you with my iPhone (e.g. you walk past in the background of my video), Apple should delete my video from my phone and iCloud account based only on your instructions?

Apple hold the data in iCloud, Apple (or a phone network) may be leasing me the phone. That sounds pretty similar to the Flock situation.

I guess the difference is that flock might be sharing the data from a customers camera with other customers. Then they are definitely controlling it.

I think the bigger problem with Flock is the fact that their cyber security is so laughably bad that non-customers can easily access the data.

Not pronouncing about what path is the most distopic, just for the fun of the exercise of what if we push in the direction:

Given the rule, I would expect (IANAL), Apple should not deal with data stored on phones they sold.

People are responsible for what they store on their device. When I take a photo in the street, if someone come to me asking to erase a photo with them or their kids as they were in the background, I'll tell I don't publish any photo online, which is generally what people are thinking of as a concern and that stop there, but if they insist I will remove it from my phone. Because I'm too lazy to actually live edit the photo and remove them from the picture, even if that is certainly doable with a simple prompt by now.

Now if Apple store automatically photo in some remote server they own, they are the ones who should be responsible to comply with making sure they won't store something illegally. Microsoft, Google, and Apple use PhotoDNA to detect known CSAM if I'm not mistaken. Though legally they only should remove once they get a notice about it. Same way, they could proactively blur visages of people not detected as the people that were whitelisted for the uploading account. And, by that logic, they should certainly remove the information regarding a person if they get a notice, just as well as they wouldn't keep CSAM data once notified, would they?

Anyway the underlying issue is not who store what, but what societies lose at letting mass surveillance infrastructures being deployed, no matter how the ownership/responsibility dilution game is played on top of it.

Are you using your phone photographs to track my movements? I don't care about the photographs part, I care about the "collecting data that can track my movements" part.

I don't mean my movements on the internet either. I understand that those things are easy to track. I mean in real life.

As far as responsibility for the data goes, you're right, it's not clear. Therefore, anyone who uses the data -- Flock or their customer -- should be required to delete it on my request.

That seems like a pretty clear delineation, no?

If apple collects all the data and track movement then yes, they should be liable.

A reasonably nuanced defense could likely claim that to be able to do what you want, would have much worse side effects on privacy.

For example, would you want to be able to tell Public Storage (or some other storage unit place) to remove any naked photos of you stored anywhere in their storage units?

For them to actually be able to do that would require they have nigh omniscience on everything stored by/for everyone in every one of their storage units. Even inside closed boxes.

Now, it's not the same thing of course - but hopefully you understand what I'm referring to?

Except that the analogy is that they already have, or can easily create, that list. If they couldn’t, their value proposition would be lame. “We know you’re looking for a specific license plate, here’s a million hours of footage from all over the city, have at looking through it all.”

Only for paying customers, which you aren't of course. If those customers paid public storage to inventory their stuff, then that inventory is their property. Surely it would be inappropriate to use their inventory data to find your naked photos. A violation of privacy even. (/s, kinda)

I was enumerating the likely defense, not that it's valid.

"Existing capability" removes the argument against onerous requirements, in a legal setting.

The law cares about lots of things we don't care about.

The law is there to serve society. If it is not effectively serving society, it should be changed.

The legal term is 'distinction without a difference'. Flock/others can't create a weaselly scenario to pretend it's something else. Otherwise people could bypass all kinds of laws/rules just by giving some weaselly description to everything.

This also falls under the 2026 rule 'everyone Is 12 Now'. Flock is literally acting like a 12 year old to get out of following the rules. My 12 year old tried to use this dumb parsing of things to avoid rules/consequences.