Dissecting Flock Safety: The Cameras Tracking You Are a Security Nightmare [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY

by emsign • 8 months ago

222 55 8 months ago

echelon• 8 months ago

These cameras are showing up everywhere in my state. It's creepy. I had no idea what they were, and now suddenly they're at every intersection, gas station, you name it.

I don't like that the government is tracking everyone's movements so openly. I knew they were doing this with cell phone data, but that wasn't so brazen.

extropic-engine• 8 months ago

did you know that flock has a data sharing contract with ring cameras? amazon’s panopticon is much larger. i believe it is on by default and users have to manually opt out, but i don’t have a ring camera to verify.

diogenes_atx• 8 months ago

Here in Austin, the city council no longer allows Flock ALPR's (automated license plate readers) on city streets, but Home Depot and other businesses still use them in their parking lots, and they scan your vehicle license plate every time you enter and exit the premises. Flock sells its data to ICE and law enforcement.

wldcordeiro• 8 months ago

Plus they'll position them close to an intersection in the parking lot of a business so they can get around something like the restriction Austin put in.

projektfu• 8 months ago

Here was the CEO back in 2017:

"Alexro, there are clear and large signs about the cameras at the entrance to our neighborhoods.

"Our neighborhoods are not large public roads, they are typically 100-400 home communities. You would never have to enter the community."

Now, it's clear that the cameras are not always obviously marked, they are not always in small communities, and they are often now on public thoroughfares. i go past at least one every day and it is not within a subdivision, rather it's on a main thoroughfare. It is marked, but a sign that is readable at 5 MPH is not necessarily readable at 35 MPH. It doesn't help to mark it "Flock" because I don't know who it is for.

Presumably, someone who has permission to the data can use it for legitimate investigations. Or they can use it for illicit investigations. Or share it with others for their own investigations. Or exchange it for other data they care about. And since we're not the "customer", what can we do about it? We're the target.

RandomBacon• 8 months ago

I take down scam bandit signs [0]. Since I noticed the Flock signs in one neighborhood, I no longer enter that neighborhood to take down the scam bandit signs.

[0] "Text us to see if you qaulify for (some non-existent) government program to get free (things)"

I hope that neighborhood enjoys the flock cameras more than the visual blight and their neighbors getting scammed.

walterbell• 8 months ago

"Find Nearby Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR)" (70 comments), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487452

Adversarial computer vision and DIY OSS $250 RPi Hailo ALPR (2M views), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ

"Tire Pressure Sensor IDs: Why, Where and When (2015)" (30 comments), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45490202

baby_souffle• 8 months ago

Ooof. When I heard "android things" I knew they had a problem. It was a google project that had little adoption and was killed only a few years after it was announced (so, better than average for google, then?).

I wonder what they estimate the "replace with newer" cost to be versus the "figure out how to deploy $modernAndroid fleet wide" costs. Bonus points if you express it as a percentage of CEO's compensation / company wide revenue.

conradev2• 8 months ago

The camera companies always end up having a lot in common:

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/2123068verkadac...

JumpCrisscross6• 8 months ago

…what’s the commonality?

spaceguillotine2• 8 months ago

lack of security it looks like

conradev2• 8 months ago

Should've included a bit more but the title does a good job:

  The Cameras Tracking You Are a Security Nightmare

It's pretty consistent across camera tracking companies. Facial recognition more broadly, like Clearview AI as well. I don't have a unifying theory other than it's a very obvious business model that naturally accrues power as well. Not unlike... selling drugs.

The model is not entirely unhelpful: selling better drugs might be one of the few practical solutions here. If cameras have undeniably visible benefits for private companies and public safety (I think they ultimately will), then the question is how to build them in a way that avoids accrual of centralized power while providing the benefits. You can attack that problem from a lot of angles, but at the moment it is undeniably hard to build video sensing in a way that doesn't rely on centralized (computing) power.

NicoJuicy• 8 months ago

Not all of them. At my workplace (the parent company, actually), security and privacy are among the highest priorities.

Competing with companies that don’t share these values is a “slow path.”

For instance, one of the most common requests is integrating our VMS with Chinese cameras, because of cost. While we’ve done it in the past, using a hardware device to prevent unexpected protocol communication, our CEO concluded that it was ethically questionable given our principles.

TLDR: The feature was dropped, and you can imagine that this decision had a significant impact on sales.

Pretty bold move, honestly.

Because of things like that, that's why I stay.

rpcope1• 8 months ago

It's not just Flock anymore. Another Y Combinator startup, Blissway has been putting cameras in a lot of places in Colorado, and you can't tell me it's not going to be used for exactly the same shit.

JumpCrisscross6• 8 months ago

Would the local laws banning Flock also apply to Blissway?

JumpCrisscross6• 8 months ago

Could someone who’s been successful at getting these banned at the local level speak to how they did it?

(We’ve recently had some high-profile political fundraisers in my town. Our state’s FOIA is halfway powerful, and a few of us were considering publishing maps of the routes they and they security details took, to illustrate how these products compromise our safety. But that strikes me as more of a fun publicity stunt than anything that would force the county.)

spaceguillotine2• 8 months ago

request every shot taken outside of police depts and compile a list of private plate numbers for all the cops, watch shit change hella fast

tptacek6• 8 months ago

Why do you think this would work? First, even where Flock data is FOIA-able, raw camera feed data probably isn't ("probably" because I don't know the law in your state, just Illinois). Second, what do you think you'd find?

sbuttgereit• 8 months ago

This is the most serious effort I've seen:

https://ij.org/press-release/judge-rules-lawsuit-challenging...

Not exactly trying to get new legislation passed but working within the courts to set some boundaries.

cfraenkel• 8 months ago

This article might point to a way: https://neuburger.substack.com/p/cities-panic-over-having-to...

thaumaturgy3• 8 months ago

I have been able to get them deactivated in two cities. They have not yet been physically removed but that is looking like a likely near-term outcome.

Flock has been a "side project" that's been eating about as many hours as a part-time job since late June. I have spoken at city council meetings in two cities, met individually with city councilors, met with a chief of police, presented to city councilors in Portland, am in almost daily conversations with ACLU Oregon, have received legal advice from EFF, done numerous media interviews, and I have an upcoming presentation to the state Senate Judiciary Committee. I may also be one of the reasons that Ron Wyden's office investigated Flock more carefully over the Summer and recently released a letter suggesting that cities terminate their relationship with the company.

All of which is to say I've been in it for a while now and have had some wins.

Good and bad news: it's a lot easier to fight it now than it was in June, but it's still going to take more effort than you probably imagine.

You'll need a team. I'm one member of a community working group. We have a core group of about a half-dozen active organizers. We have filed (and paid thousands in fees for) tons of public records requests, done a lot of community organizing and outreach, built partnerships with adjacent activist organizations, and done original technical research.

There are a couple of different strategies to pursue that can kick these things out of a community. My recommendation is to find the one that you like best, and find other people that like other ones, and pursue them in parallel.

Depending on your local police department, you may find them to be surprisingly cooperative, or you may find that they dig in and start putting in an equal amount of effort to block yours. I've had both. Odds are that your city councilors are not aware at all of what Flock is or how it works, so your first step is to raise awareness. I strongly recommend starting with an approach that makes you seem like a reasonable, honest, and reliable member of your community.

I realize this comment isn't super helpful by itself. I'm a bit distracted at the moment and I don't think I could figure out how to write a helpful, comprehensive, and yet concise comment here on this. I need to put together an info packet for people that want to get efforts like this one started in their own community. In the meanwhile, you should be able to email contact@eyesoffeugene.org and I'm happy to provide advice and assistance to anyone that wants to take this up in their city.

JumpCrisscross6• 8 months ago

Would you be open to consulting for a group that's trying to do the same in west Wyoming?

There are a couple of different strategies to pursue that can kick these things out of a community

Would love to hear more about these, even if it's just a wall of links or brief thoughts.

tptacek6• 8 months ago

I've written about how we did it in Oak Park, IL:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40227280

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41927777

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45506690

Cards on the table that I was not a full-throated supporter of cancelling our Flock contract, for complicated reasons, but past that I'll take a fair bit of credit for the harm-reduction work we did, which ultimately created the procedural tracks we used to kill the contract.

Short answer for how we did it: message board nerding.

You're interested in getting the cameras taken down in a Wyoming muni. One advantage we had in Oak Park that you might not in WY is that our cost function priced bogus stops of Black drivers very high. So, if I was strategizing killing cameras in a major metro suburb, my strategy would be:

(1) Create procedural rails to collect your own transparency data on stops.

(2) Do the analysis to trace "real" stops to crimes meaningful to your muni (for us: enforcing failure-to-appear warrants for neighboring suburbs was not high-value work for OPPD, so many of the "legit" stops had negative value).

(3) You'll be left with some subset of real crimes cameras were involved with, and in only a subset of those will the cameras have been meaningful.

One thing that complicates Flock deployments in Illinois is that they depend on the ISP LEADS database as their hotlist of stolen vehicles, and LEADS is not maintained well enough to use as a real-time information source (or even a week-by-week granular source), so we had a bunch of bogus stops.

A super important thing I think everybody should know about Flock cameras:

You do not in fact need to be enrolled in Flock's sharing system to get data from neighboring muni cameras. In fact, I think Flock even has a product you can buy that just gives you access to sharing data without even owning cameras.

Since "we need to share our data to get access to other muni's data" is the only reason to have sharing enabled on these things, it should be pretty easy, as a political lift, to turn sharing off.

aerostable_slug3• 8 months ago

Why would a stop for an outstanding warrant have negative value for your community? If word got out that OPPD will come down hard on anyone with warrants, perhaps people with warrants would stay away from your community. I'm not sure I see the downside; deterrence is a good thing.

Analogy: criminals know Target stores have a policy to prosecute all shoplifters, so when there was still a shoplifting subreddit that fact would be regularly trotted out and criminals were warned by their peers (the best kind of testimonial) to stay away. I would love it if my neighborhood had that reputation.

gnarlouse• 8 months ago

Make Classwarfare MAD Again

wakawaka283• 8 months ago

We're talking about cameras my dude. They see everybody.

throawayonthe2• 8 months ago

not everybody sees what the cameras see, what's your point

woliveirajr• 8 months ago

I'll just leave this one here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15075384

lgleason• 8 months ago

Assuming that one is in favor of the use of these cameras, the security issues seem like they are a big problem. The leaking of police officer personal data and locations was pretty egregious.

Would love to hear from one of the founders on what they are doing to address that.

culi• 8 months ago

This map of Flock cameras[0] is pretty neat. It actually utilizes OpenStreetMap data. It was controversial but at some point in the last decade OSM decided to allow annotating surveillance cameras. You can add all sorts of characteristics including what they're mounted to and which direction they're facing. As well as the manufacturer which is what that map is based on.

The open-source project Every Door has been a really convenient on-the-go tool for contributing these annotations[1]

[0] https://banishbigbrother.com/flock-camera-map/

[1] https://every-door.app/

catgirlinspace• 8 months ago

That’s just an iframe embedding https://deflock.me/

Fairburn• 8 months ago

And..?

AstroNutt2• 8 months ago

I was recently in Atlanta GA for work and noticed these cameras were EVERYWHERE! They even have white cars that randomly drive the streets with a camera on each corner of the car, plus one on the roof. 5 total on one car!!!

I was wondering why Atlanta was so dystopian and creepy, then I Googled the guy posting here, Garrett Langley. It makes sense now.

"Flock was founded in 2017. It was co-founded by three Georgia Tech alumni:

Garrett Langley (chief executive officer), Paige Todd (chief people officer), and Matt Feury (chief technology officer)."

tinix• 8 months ago

Waymo is self driving car lol

financetechbro• 8 months ago

This cracked me up haha

bob1029• 8 months ago

I have developed conflicting feelings over these cameras.

I think putting them in high traffic retail areas is a great idea. I've noticed my local Walmart has stopped locking up razors. Home Depot is getting bolder with what they'll chain up in front of the store. I believe these cameras are having some positive effect on our public places. Putting them in private driveways or in residential areas is where it starts to get really obnoxious.

If you are not happy with the idea of things like felony retail/automobile theft, there aren't unlimited solutions available. Some kind of dystopian surveillance grid is perhaps the least crappy option today, all things considered. If you want to see an alternative, look to Singapore for the ~other option. I would be very open to a conversation about trading the Eye of Sauron for caning.

Dissecting Flock Safety: The Cameras Tracking You Are a Security Nightmare [video]

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