Stop Flock

https://stopflock.com

by cdrnsf • 3 months ago

993 286 3 months ago

stopflock.com

himata4113• 3 months ago

This is just reiterating same points deflock does including mentioning deflock and images from deflock?

Deflock: https://deflock.org/

Also: https://haveibeenflocked.com/

Computer0• 3 months ago

Yes I think this site is not unique, I personally have at least 2 websites I have not shared anywhere with at least all of this information, that I am developing for my local community or just for myself. Its a subject worth discussing but I am also skeptical of the value of this link. I think maybe what is most worth considering is, "does this have value over deflock?" is it more accessible? Less overwhelming? I am not sure but I think that conversation would not be a great use of time in this particular space.

jimmar• 3 months ago

I followed the shooting at Brown University last year very closely. Brown's leadership was heavily criticized for having camera blind spots and not being able to track the shooter's exact movements through campus. I can understand why people with stewardship over the safety of their students/customers/constituents would make decisions to err on the side of tracking. I'm not saying I agree with it, but I understand it.

sfblah• 3 months ago

With most of these things, people are against state power until they are victimized. It’s a common pattern.

the_doctah3• 3 months ago

People hate cops until they need one

nullc4• 3 months ago

With most of these things, people are for state power until they are victimized by it. It's a common pattern.

I've had property stolen. Cameras generally won't help, and didn't help. Limiting ingredient is often not knowing who did it in any case-- in most places most common crime is committed by a tiny number of regular characters. Go look at the mountains of threads online where someone had a tracker enabled object stolen and knew exactly who had it only to have law enforcement do nothing.

mcmcmc5• 3 months ago

Camera blind spots are solved with more cameras and correct positioning, not automated AI surveillance.

bob1029• 3 months ago

Crazy how it's always a data problem in the end.

kyrra• 3 months ago

The criticism around that event, I believe, involved Brown University disablinf cameras trying to protect potential illegal immigrants being targeted by ice. It wasn't the lack of cameras. It was a purposeful disabling of said cameras that already existed.

the_doctah3• 3 months ago

Whoever made that decision should be held liable.

willis936• 3 months ago

Yes and so the real issue is that they outsourced to the wrong compan, gave up control of their camera feeds, and violated the privacy of their campusgoers. Had they just had their own CCTV system then this would have not happened.

sodality22• 3 months ago

This is a very common pattern; my university pushed through a ZeroEyes AI camera/open carry weapon detection contract within 2 weeks of a shooting at a nearby school, even though it’s trivial to bypass by hiding it; it’s most probably just (gruesome as it is to think about) a bad press insurance so if anything happened, they can say they had “state of the art AI detection” and they did all they could. No one wants to be the one caught not doing “all they could” against the media cacophony in the immediate aftermath.

jmcgough• 3 months ago

and then some kid gets tackled by a team of armed police when AI flags a bag of doritos as a gun. https://abc7.com/post/student-handcuffed-doritos-bag-mistake...

crm9125• 3 months ago

I'm sorry... people think that the problem with, a school shooting, is camera placement?

Something, something, forest, trees.

TheTxT• 3 months ago

"No way to prevent this" says the only country where this regularly happens

monooso• 3 months ago

We need more good cameras with guns.

wraptile• 3 months ago

I recently did a dive into ASPD (Antisocial Personality Disorder i.e. sociopaths) and unsurprisingly most what's stopping them from outright killing people is the likelihood that they'd be caught. So one thing is clear is that as long as we have sociopaths and the like who treat crime purely as value/risk proposition some sort of powerful detective tooling will always be necessary.

Unfortunately automated surveillance is considered the best detective tool we have but in reality it doesn't seem to be the case with public self surveillance and good ol' park a policeman box in every neighborhood seems to outperform automated surveillance. So there's much more to this than "surveillance is bad or good" discussions we have right now.

spacebacon• 3 months ago

Correct. The Leviathan. A reasonable person should be able to argue for and against both sides.

bmitch3020• 3 months ago

I don't want to stop Flock the company. I want to stop Flock the business model, along with all the other mass surveillance, and the data brokers. If the business models can't be made illegal, it should at least come with liabilities so high that no sane business would want to hold data that is essentially toxic waste.

Without that, we are quickly spiraling into the dystopia where privacy is gone, and when the wrong person gets access to the data, entire populations are threatened.

stevemk14ebr• 3 months ago

You want to stop the source, which is that the government and other agencies can purchase surveillance data that would otherwise be disallowed by the 4th amendment. We need to end this 'laundering' of information through third parties, and enforce the constitution by its intent.

caconym_• 3 months ago

Honestly it should probably just be illegal for anyone, private or public, to engage in mass surveillance (or "data gathering", whatever) of anybody who didn't expressly consent to it. As long as the data exist, they will be abused.

therobots927• 3 months ago

Means of Control by Byron Tau and Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine. Can’t recommend these books enough for anyone who is skeptical of the above claim.

RHSeeger2• 3 months ago

Not just the government. It shouldn't be possible for any random stalker to find someone's daily movements.

eru• 3 months ago

100 miles around your border is a constitution free zone anyway.

intended2• 3 months ago

A significant chunk of the infrastructure that farms data is now from private organizations, who sell that information because it is a source of revenue.

Government is the bogeyman we are afraid of, but ad tech is doing the actual heavy lifting.

Terr_• 3 months ago

Necessary, but not sufficient.

Even if we somehow, perhaps via magic genie-wish, made the government totally disinterested... these systems would still enable dystopian levels of private surveillance and manipulation.

dzhiurgis2• 3 months ago

Yeah nah I’d rather stop the criminals.

King-Aaron• 3 months ago

I don't want to stop Flock the company. I want to stop Flock the business model, along with all the other mass surveillance, and the data brokers.

Then you want to stop the company.

Which is reasonable.

ceejayoz• 3 months ago

Flock isn’t the only company.

0x10ca1h0st• 3 months ago

This is great sentiment. Companies can be stopped, and then the medusa grows another head. Kill the business model, make the brokering of data illegal, and if caught, fines would be paid directly to those effected. This would go a long ways to promoting privacy first.

someothherguyy2• 3 months ago

we are quickly spiraling into the dystopia where privacy is gone

we are essentially already in that dystopia.

it is now more of a question of how bad it gets, and if the population will ever stand against it in any meaningful fashion.

GolfPopper• 3 months ago

Look at the silver lining - once the paperclip maximizers have crashed both modern civilization and the biosphere, it will be easy for any survivors to find privacy amid the metaphorical and actual ruins.

01100011• 3 months ago

There is a weird fetish with Flock right now. Privacy advocates have been screaming at the public for 25 years now and suddenly the public cares and is obsessed with this one very specific company.

Nevermind license plate readers have been collecting your data for decades. Nevermind you literally carry a tracking device on your person, likely 24/7.

I mean, cool, stop Flock, but don't stop there. Flock is very much not the final boss in this fight. The cynic in me says we will all get bored once Flock is off the radar though.

the_other• 3 months ago

It’s easier to consider responses or solutions to specific problems, rather than to solve for a broad, general principle. You can see this in many areas of life. Solving for general principles requires group effort (usually); you can get buy-in from individuals if you csn focus them on specific cases or subsets. So the Floxk fetish is reasonable at this point, IMO.

There’s also nothing inherently wrong with carrying sensors in your pocket. The “wrong” is in the providers/manufacturers exploiting the position they put themselves in. Managing data is hard, and most people don’t want to do the necessary work most of the time, so the providers/manufacturers offer to do that for their users/customers. However, they also exploit their csretaker position by tresting the data like they own it too, and extracting profit.

If the solutions to the Flock problems could be framed such that other providers/manufacturers had to build systems that were “local first” or “private by default” (as in pre-internet home computing plus explicit, finegrained shsring consents), then it would also be fine to carry sensors. I want my fitness tracker and GPS. I just don’t want the data it generates used to build advertising profiles on me such that ads (and government mass surveillance dragnets) can follow my every other move.

kortex• 3 months ago

I don't think it's a "weird fetish." It's just most of the things privacy advocates have been warning about - PRISM, warrantless metadata requests, tech companies handing over data - are all largely invisible.

A camera pointing at your child's playground or gymnastics class is much more salient.

nobody99992• 3 months ago

Nevermind license plate readers have been collecting your data for decades. Nevermind you literally carry a tracking device on your person, likely 24/7.

While the above is a difference in scale, the various "credit bureaus" have been doing this stuff for much, much longer.[0][1][2]

That's not to excuse the use of ALPRs and tracking on mobile devices. It's all really creepy and collection and trade in such should have strong negative incentives (company breaking fines, loss of corporate charter, jail time, etc.).

In the meantime, one has to deal with at least some of this stuff unless you're willing to go live in a leanto in the woods.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equifax#History

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experian#History

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransUnion#History

neya3• 3 months ago

This should ironically start at the VC level - and that includes YC et al. Some one comes and says "hey, we got this idea, we collect facial recognition data for training proprietary AI models", the response from the VC should "I'm gonna stop you right there. This is unethical."

Not "Did you say I can 5x my ROI? Here, shut up and take my money!"

jychang• 3 months ago

When you put it that way, the answer is obvious:

Assume VCs are brainless profit maximizers who don't understand ethics. How do you get them to say "I'm gonna stop you right there"?

Answer: Make it unprofitable to collect this data. Change the incentives.

So really, the correct answer IS on the legal level. Make a set of laws which make it burdensome at best and completely unprofitable at worst, and then the incentives within the system aligns.

kaliqt• 3 months ago

YC is responsible for Sam Altman, need I say more?

Joker_vD4• 3 months ago

    Capital eschews no profit, or very small profit, just as Nature was formerly
    said to abhor a vacuum. With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain
    10 per cent. will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent. certain will
    produce eagerness; 50 per cent., positive audacity; 100 per cent. will make it
    ready to trample on all human laws; 300 per cent., and there is not a crime at
    which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its
    owner being hanged. If turbulence and strife will bring a profit, it will freely
    encourage both. Smuggling and the slave-trade have amply proved all that is
    here stated.

We today can also add crypto schemes and mass surveillance to the examples.

And mind you, VC are people who are both pretty good at earning money and also eager for even more money. That's how they got to where they are, after all, not necessarily by being virtuous (over a certain minimally required amount, or a social signaling of possessing such an amount).

wnc3141• 3 months ago

It seems like in the last number of years, VC has been prioritizing becoming the beneficiary of the whims of the regime.

In short, I wonder if this has any implications about their confidence in startups' viability in private sectors

boriskourt• 3 months ago

If we can set a legal precedent then this can cascade into policy, or an enforceable standard much faster.

NegativeK2• 3 months ago

Make HIPAA include PII.

That hits your toxic waste goal real fast.

duskdozer• 3 months ago

HIPAA explicitly allows government collection.

Tangurena24• 3 months ago

One simple remedy would be to make companies (that collect such private data) and their directors/executives jointly & severally liable[0] for any identity theft. It should come with "forever" liability equivalent to SuperFund sites[1]

Notes:

0 - Financial penalties would not be limited to "your share" of the penalty. If you have money, and the other parties don't, the plaintiffs can collect from whichever defendant has money.

1 - Everyone who ever owned the site with the toxic waste is liable for the cleanup. This is why when a gas station is sold (in the US), all of the fuel tanks are dug up and replaced - this way, none of the future leakage can be attributed to the previous owners.

itomato• 3 months ago

Without their unique business model, what is the company? The product?

What is the addressable market for ubiquitous public surveillance devices? Who is the customer?

razster• 3 months ago

When you have dedicated groups of ppl on IRC and Newsgroups showing how easy it is to access these systems and teach others, you know it’s a bad thing. There are dozens of them and most of the people gathering this information and using it is not for good. It’s a flawed system

amazingamazing• 3 months ago

I’m curious if there were some consortium of all private businesses with their own surveillance cams deciding to aggregate their footage could it be stopped?

__MatrixMan__• 3 months ago

I worry about this. It's easy enough to go around putting bags over flock cameras, but it would be harder to justify targeting ones that just maybe are doing double duty.

We need to find a way to make partnering with flock a liability.

dopidopHN2• 3 months ago

Home depot and lowes have contract with Flock, as an example.

In New Orleans, a private rogue network of surveillance camera has been erected in reaction to a too constraining live facial recognition ban.

I think it would be much harder to stop.

khuston• 3 months ago

I’m all for mass surveillance of roadways, but I want to see results. Every day I see and hear people breaking laws with their vehicles in ways that make life worse for others around them.

mcmcmc5• 3 months ago

Yep. Automate the whole thing and be done with traffic cops abusing their power to meet quotas or harass minorities. It would likely make car insurance cheaper too since people would drive more safely, and the cost of investigations and arbitration drops down with readily available video evidence.

themafia3• 3 months ago

Just make quotas illegal. Make enforcing them a felony for command staff. Lock up body worn camera videos so they can't be used for "performance review." That footage belongs to the public, for legal purposes, it shouldn't be a "tool" outside of that.

More importantly, can I borrow you car? I have some, uh, stuff, to go do.

diordiderot2• 3 months ago

You aren't allowed to automate law enforcement because of disparate impact

MegagramEnjoyer4• 3 months ago

This is a dangerous attitude.

We don't need mass surveillance for traffic control. It can be done by the police if they really wanted to do it. Truth is, they don't care enough about road safety. This is about surveillance of citizens for control. First step is just infrastructure setup - next step is using it to prosecute those who dare to challenge the rise of fascism.

Be an advocate for your own rights to privacy. Don't simply accept it as normalcy.

M3L0NM4N11• 3 months ago

Unless you want a police officer on every street corner at all times, no, it cannot be "done by the police".

Cider9986• 3 months ago

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

You want this on our roads? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud8kFCmalgg&t=112s

sofixa4• 3 months ago

Driving recklessly is not an "essential liberty". Safer roads equals less deaths and injuries on them, which is not "temporary safety", it's literally life or death.

0xbadcafebee2• 3 months ago

Mass surveillance is by definition oppressive. I think you mean to say you're in favor of targeted surveillance, targeted at criminals, who are on roadways. This is the distinction that's getting lost.

Give me a database of everywhere you have ever driven, and I will find multiple ways to make you look like a criminal.

BrenBarn• 3 months ago

The problem is how do you know who's a criminal beforehand.

intended2• 3 months ago

Agreed. In the end the results and outcomes are what matter.

I really wish we had a more robust information environment where we could discuss things with more nuance.

chris_wot• 3 months ago

Michel Foucault's Panopticon is alive and well I see.

diogenes_atx• 3 months ago

To the list of references provided by this post in the section "Further Reading," I would add the following book:

Sarah Brayne (2020) Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing, Oxford University Press

https://www.amazon.com/Predict-Surveil-Discretion-Future-Pol...

An academic study about the use of surveillance technology at the Los Angeles Police Department, the book documents the LAPD's use of data brokerage firms (e.g., Palantir) that collect and aggregate information from public records and private sources, as well as automatic license plate readers like Flock, and Suspicious Activity Reports generated by police and civilians, which include reports of mundane activities such as using binoculars, drawing diagrams, or taking pictures or "video footage with no apparent aesthetic value." All this data ultimately gets parked in Fusion Center facilities, built in the aftermath of 9/11, where federal, state and local law enforcement agencies collaborate to collect, aggregate, analyze and share information. As the author observes, "The use of data in law enforcement is not new. For almost a century, police have been gathering data, e.g., records of citations, collisions, warrants, incarcerations, sex offender and gang registries, etc. What is new and important about the current age of big data is the role in public policing of private capitalist firms who provide database systems with huge volumes of information about people, not just those in the criminal justice system."

SonOfKyuss• 3 months ago

I could be convinced to support public cameras if access to the footage was tightly controlled and only used for solving serious crimes, but government officials and flock themselves have repeatedly shown that they can’t be trusted to use them in a responsible manner. It’s too powerful of a tool to put in the hands of untrustworthy individuals

icapybara2• 3 months ago

Why only serious crimes?

If someone breaks into my car and a Flock camera sees it, is their right to privacy in a public space more important than my right to not have my property get stolen?

gbear6054• 3 months ago

Yes.

jedberg7• 3 months ago

We need a law that says if you hold any data about a person, they must be notified when anyone accesses it, including law enforcement.

I used to work in criminal investigations. I understand how this might make investigation of real crime more difficult. But so does the fact that you need a warrant to enter someone's home, and yet we manage to investigate crime anyway.

Your data should be an extension of your home, even if it's held by another company. It should require a warrant and notification. You could even make the notification be 24 hours after the fact. But it should be required.

tptacek9• 3 months ago

The entities holding the information here are literally police departments. The information itself is evidence, used in active criminal investigations. It's good to want things, though.

jedberg7• 3 months ago

I know, that's why I said "including law enforcement" :)

thaumaturgy2• 3 months ago

The information is not in any way restricted to use in active criminal investigations, and further, has been found to frequently be used for a variety of other purposes.

It's a bit like saying pornography is used in the study of human anatomy.

nullc4• 3 months ago

Alternatively, one could create serious civil damages for those capturing surveillance imagery that causes various harms including false prosecution for any data they collected, even if it was unlawfully taken or used after it was collected. ... then let the liability work out the problem by making it too risky to run non-targeted mass surveillance apparatus.

This would avoid having to define what is and isn't a mass surveillance system. Any camera recording off your property would have a legal risk for the operator-- but if you're just recording locally and only using it to discourage or solve crime you're suffering the risk would be minimal and justified.

Xcelerate• 3 months ago

Is there not some concept that utilizes cryptography in a way such that information about people is accessible, but if it's accessed, then the access request is added to a ledger (akin to blockchain) such that who made the access, when, and about whom becomes provably public knowledge?

otterley13• 3 months ago

Your data should be an extension of your home, even if it's held by another company.

Nice idea, but at least in the U.S. (with the lone exception of LE obtaining cell phone location records), courts have consistently held that if you give your data to someone else, you are no longer entitled to an expectation of privacy in it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine

If you want your data to be considered an extension of your home, at least for now, keep it at home.

TZubiri4• 3 months ago

I think the notion that data would be a home is beyond weak, but the explanation you gave for why isn't solid either, since the objects of data do not need to and in this case haven't consented.

That is, recordings of people in public settings (in some jurisdictions) are property of the recorder, but it still isn't a home (just imagine how that would work in some jurisdictions, someone takes a picture of you and it's trespassing? Would you be able to shoot them?)

mixmastamyk• 3 months ago

Nice idea (2), but many companies and govt agencies force one to give lots of data or you will not be receiving services, sometimes very important services.

TZubiri4• 3 months ago

Trying to understand the position here.

This would be excluding gag orders correct?

And regular orders currently notify the service provider, but they don't necessarily notify the target, they just don't have a prohibition on the service provider notifying the target.

Finally, recordings of public areas actually aren't be impacted by warrants at all, right? But what you are saying is not just that LEA would need warrants to look at public recordings from a willingly cooperating camera owner, and that the warrants can't be gag orders (unless specified), but that the targets must be notified, even if the subject under search were someone else, the fact that I'm included in a recording would compel the LEA to notify me?

And how exactly would I be notified? Wouldn't that necessitate even more privacy invading features like facial recognition and a facial to contact information technology? Not an uncommon paradox.

Again, just want to understand the position, my position might leak as the question being leading, but I can't help it.

jedberg7• 3 months ago

This would be excluding gag orders correct?

Much like you can't gag a search warrant on a home, you wouldn't be able to gag these orders either.

And regular orders currently notify the service provider, but they don't necessarily notify the target, they just don't have a prohibition on the service provider notifying the target.

True, but my proposal would require that they notify you.

Finally, recordings of public areas actually aren't be impacted by warrants at all, right?

No, but I'm saying this should apply to any time a 3rd party releases information to anyone, including law enforcement. In this case the Flock cameras feed into a private database. They should disclose when someone looks something up.

And how exactly would I be notified?

Presumably if they can identify you then there would be a way to notify you. But those details could be left to the author of the bill.

My main point is that your data, when housed with a 3rd party, should be considered an extension of your home and offer the same guarentees and protections as the items actually in your home.

jojobas4• 3 months ago

We'll sooner get a law that will forbid notifying a person when such data is passed to law enforcement.

burnt-resistor3• 3 months ago

That will never happen in America without a focused political revolution because anarcho-libertarian techbro billionaires profit extensively from personal data trafficking and bought off the majority of politicians to keep it that way.

It sounds good but the implementation would be harder than achieving single payer healthcare that's better than what Medicare is now destroyed by for-profit prior authorizations and fake healthcare with lifetime limits.

Tangurena24• 3 months ago

PATRIOT Act & Bank Secrecy laws make it illegal to notify a person that they are being investigated, or that they are a subject in an investigation.

scarmig3• 3 months ago

Although I oppose the surveillance state, it's important to understand the motivations and incentives involved in the move toward Flock (and its eventual successors); until those are resolved, governments are going to be implementing Flock style programs with relatively tepid opposition.

Police departments are seriously understaffed in many major cities, and officers are much less efficient than they used to be. This has led to the decline of the beat cop, who provided a kind of ambient authority that helped create, both a sense and reality, of public order. People really want the sense (even more than the reality!) of public order; without that, they will jump to faddish solutions that promise it, regardless of the data for or against it.

The best counter to Flock is to provide alternatives to it, not just reject it while keeping the status quo going. We need a new, vitalized police culture, that shares mutual trust and engagement with the community.

aldebran• 3 months ago

Police departments aren’t understaffed. It’s a priority problem not a lack of resources problem. I live in a tech heavy, wealthy city. It’s small. No violent crime. Barely any crime at all. There’s occasional break ins and car break ins. When this happens it’s a big deal.

We had one last year. Everyone around has cameras. The cops refused to do anything about it. They refused to get recordings. The neighbor went door to door and gathered it herself. Cops refused to do anything even though you can see the car and the plates from multiple videos, multiple angles.

Guess what the cops always have resources for? Hiding behind bushes and trees to ticket people going 5 over. Or at turns where they know they’ll get people before people see the cop car.

Our HOA came together and asked the police department about this. They gave us bullshit about how custody of evidence etc is hard and even if they put people in jail, the lenient judges will let them go anyway. It was fucked up.

Our HOA was going in hard about installing floc cameras everywhere. I had to fight hard not to get that done. One of the reasons I won wasn’t because privacy, it was because the cops literally were like unless we can directly pull video feeds from cameras, we won’t do much. And that access wasn’t available to those police department. At least at the time.

There have been many other such stories I’ve personally witnessed in the cities I’ve lived in.

Cops seem to have plenty of resources to bully people of color, seize assets and hide behind trees and bushes to ticket people, reduce the period of orange lights so people get more tickets etc. but never enough to actually do their jobs.

tptacek9• 3 months ago

I agree that police department staffing is less of a real issue than people claim it is, and that many departments have target staffing levels that are artificially elevated. But I'm struck by your comment about cops "hiding behind bushes to ticket people going 5 over", because in the ultra-ultra-progressive inner-ring Chicago suburb in which I live, one of the chief complaints about policing over the last couple years has been the lack of traffic enforcement.

scarmig3• 3 months ago

I live in a tech heavy, wealthy city. It’s small. No violent crime. Barely any crime at all.

Compare to e.g. Oakland, which recently approved a Flock expansion:

https://oaklandside.org/2025/12/17/oakland-flock-safety-coun...

Why?

https://sfstandard.com/2023/06/09/oakland-crime-police-respo...

https://oaklandside.org/2025/10/08/oakland-watchdog-audit-po...

https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/oakland-police-off...

Now, will Flock help with this? No. But the visceral lack of safety people feel makes them more likely to see it as a necessary evil, not snake oil.

gunsle3• 3 months ago

Police departments in a lot of major cities are absolutely unstaffed relative to population growth after decades of demonization in the media. You are ignorant.

TZubiri4• 3 months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47124169

I've noted this in the age verification debate, and in the Android developer verification debate as well.

Just denying the tradeoffs isn't productive, if tradeoffs affect others, just pushing your position disregarding the tradeoffs as fake or not important is divisive. In actuality I think that both parties become incentivized to solve the problems of the other group of people too, but as a centrist that position often gets pushback from both sides who seem to collaborate only indirectly from a place of adversarial competition and good vs evil framing, which I think is less productive than just recognizing the conflict and negotiating, but perhaps it's more engaging...

bearjaws• 3 months ago

Most cities are spending 9-10 figures on Police staff, and somehow are understaffed?

We simply aren't getting effective policing, and technology isn't the solution.

Reality is cops have become police report writers, traffic accident helpers, and domestic abuse arbiters, that is over half the job.

scarmig3• 3 months ago

I agree with everything you say; my "police departments are understaffed" is too generic, and might be better stated as "too few resources are devoted to traditional beat policing." Which isn't to say that the other things are unnecessary or pointless, but it's a different set of skills.

edmundsauto• 3 months ago

Law enforcement has also burned its goodwill with the public, making everything harder.

contagiousflow3• 3 months ago

If you take a look externally to other countries and cities, do you attribute their relative safety to good policing?

gunsle3• 3 months ago

No that would be cultural homogeneity and extremely low immigration.

lopsotronic• 3 months ago

To add to some of what others are saying, another problem is the measurement problem.

DAs and police in general are almost universally evaluated based on arrest numbers. Only very rarely on actual crime rates, and never on something as abstract as quality of life or local revenues or property values.

Gauging how good law enforcement is just by looking at arrest numbers is probably the wrong dial to be looking at.

gunsle3• 3 months ago

You’re not going to get nuanced law enforcement discussion on this site considering the commentary here is Reddit tier these days. I agree with you though - the mayor and city council here in Minneapolis continuously defunding the police and refusing to give them resources predictably led to sharp increases in crime. It’s baffling to me large liberal cities have demonized the police and gaslit their base into thinking everything is just fine.

mike_d• 3 months ago

The "Take Action" section is missing the most obvious solution. Everyone just goes and takes down a camera. We as a society do not consent to this use of public space and simply have a national "Take out the trash day."

There is no way Flock could practically ramp up production or manpower to replace the entire fleet before failing to meet contractual requirements with their customers that keep money flowing in.

daxaxelrod• 3 months ago

Who are you to speak on behalf of society? Wouldn't society also be better off if those who stole your car got caught?

Further, I'm not sure why there is an expectation of privacy in public places. You don't have to consent to being filmed when you're walking down a public sidewalk.

gbear6054• 3 months ago

You should.

eemax• 3 months ago

The Illusion of Security
Flock advertises a drop in crime, but the true cost is a culture of mistrust and preemptive suspicion. As the EFF warns, communities are being sold a false promise of safety - at the expense of civil rights* (EFF).

...

True safety comes from healthy, empowered communities; not automated suspicion. Community-led safety initiatives have demonstrated significant results: North Lawndale saw a 58% decrease in gun violence after READI Chicago began implementing their program there. In cities nationwide, the presence of local nonprofits has been statistically linked to reductions in homicide, violent crime, and property crime (Brennan Center, The DePaulia, American Sociological Association).

These are incredibly weak arguments. I haven't personally looked into how good Flock cameras are at actually preventing crime and catching criminals, but if this is the best counterargument their detractors can come up with, it makes me suspect they're actually pretty good.

Crime is extremely bad. Mass surveillance is bad too, especially if abused, but being glib or dismissive about the real trade-offs is counterproductive.

Also, recording in public spaces (or private spaces that you own) is an important and fundamental right just like the right to privacy; simply banning this kind of surveillance would also infringe on civil liberties in a different way. I agree that laws and norms need adjusting in light of new technology, but that discussion needs more nuance than this.

icapybara2• 3 months ago

I also thought it was interesting that the author basically argues Flock cameras are too effective at figuring out where criminals are, but then also argues they aren’t effective enough at reducing crime.

nullc4• 3 months ago

I am somewhat skeptical that either the ACLU or EFF are effective organizations for this cause. The ACLU in particular have drifted significantly from a civil liberties focus, and EFF's privacy track-record for corporate run surveillance has never been the best and of late they seem to be following the ACLU away from civil liberties.

greyface-• 3 months ago

There is an increasingly popular idea that all libertarianism, including civil libertianism, is inherently partisan and specifically right-wing. I think it has done a lot of damage to these organizations' ability to effectively fight this and other issues. I've shifted a lot of my support for ACLU/EFF towards IJ in recent years.

beloch• 3 months ago

For the Canadians sitting at home, tut tutting more American foolishness that could never happen up here... Flock started their expansion into Ontario this very month[1].

We should probably oppose this.

_________

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/07/toronto-r...

VladVladikoff2• 3 months ago

Good luck. Dougie and the popo are BFFs.

VladVladikoff2• 3 months ago

Boy would it just be terrible if someone hacked into the flock network and manipulated all the camera results ever so slightly. A letter here a number there, license plates or matches never quite lining up. It would take years for them to find the source of the “bugs”. Not saying I know anyone doing this or anything, just saying it would be oh soooooo terrible.

teraflop• 3 months ago

Here's a modest proposal: what if we made it a serious crime for anyone to retain automatically-recorded surveillance footage, or data derived from it, for longer than some limited period of time (say, 7 days) unless said footage is released to the public within that timeframe?

That is, you can put up cameras wherever you want, but you can't gain any kind of competitive advantage by doing so.

I think the public would be more alert to the dangers of mass surveillance if the magnitude of that surveillance was more obvious. And if everyone was watching everyone, at least it wouldn't as easily abused for purposes such as selective prosecution or blackmail.

otterley13• 3 months ago

Why do people consistently and falsely believe that they have privacy in public settings? You are literally out in public. If you don't want your behavior in public to be observed, then either don't behave in such a way that you wouldn't want observed, or stay home.

UPDATE: don't conflate stalking with observation. These are not the same. You can observe, but you cannot intimidate.

themafia3• 3 months ago

Would you mind if I parked near your house, such that every morning, when you drove past, I could follow you. To work, to the store, to the gym, you know, wherever.

Then on the way home I'll park where I left off. If anyone asks me I'll them everything I know about you. It's "public" information after all.

otterley13• 3 months ago

Should I be concerned that you're stalking me, or that you know this information? The former is illegal, the latter is not.

SecretDreams6• 3 months ago

So you'd be cool with us crowdsourcing a film crew to follow you and your family around in public at all times?

otterley13• 3 months ago

Should I be concerned that you're stalking me, or that you know this information? The former is illegal, the latter is not.

lucaspm982• 3 months ago

Every entrance to my neighborhood has a Flock camera from my local police department. Tracking the exact time I enter and leave my home is at the very least right at this line you’re trying to draw.

M3L0NM4N11• 3 months ago

How that information is accessed and/or used is where the distinction lies.

ianpenney• 3 months ago

Obligatory reference to PIPEDA and GDPR.

Edit: not a low effort comment. This is something you should all read and demand the same of. I consternated on how not to call your regime moronic. It _is_ moronic that you don’t have these basic protections and we keep having to listen to you all whine about that.

freakynit• 3 months ago

We are heading towards the exact future shown in the show "Person of Interest".

reboot81• 3 months ago

So with 100k cameras crime is down how much?

casey2• 3 months ago

Stopping crime is a horrible business model. Committing it on the other hand...

contagiousflow3• 3 months ago

Stopping crime is a horrible business model

You've obviously not read the 13th amendment...

stopachka• 3 months ago

I am surprised how overwhelmingly negative the comments are here. I would have expected at least a few voices defending Flock.

I'll step in and add a voice. Ultimately, Flock is solving a real problem with crime. This is why police departments when them.

Stopping Flock doesn't address the need that got police departments to use them. If you want to "stop flock", you need to address that need better.

ryanjshaw• 3 months ago

I am not American, but in my extremely dangerous country we have many privately-operated cameras and I don’t know a single person who is against them. We also have strict privacy laws.

So I was disappointed by what felt like very weak arguments in the article. Basically seems to come down it “it can be abused”. But many things can be abused. The solution is to fix the abuse problem.

I’d like to hear stronger arguments against these devices, so that I’m better informed locally.

whilenot-dev• 3 months ago

Basically seems to come down it “it can be abused”. But many things can be abused.

This isn't your life pro tip to get you some additional 20% discount on the next McDonald's order, or some ethical kind of abuse that gets you your needed treatment, because the healthcare system is just too nonexistent to care, though.

Any criticism against the use of surveillance technology needs to resort to the rhetoric of COULD, because any other choice of words would put the final nail in any surveillance companies' coffin, with evidence from either whistleblowers or circumvented security issues.

It's certainly hard to look behind the curtains - fair, but in a world where the top companies are selling advertisements by accumulating and correlating large-scale tracking information from every person on earth, regardless whether they're users of the products or not, it should be much harder to shrug off such a possibility as dystopian nonsense than to see it as the fucked up reality (circumvention of fundamental rights included) that it is.

latexr• 3 months ago

The solution is to fix the abuse problem.

No, the solution is to fix the societal issues leading people to resort to crime. Surveillance cameras are not a solution, they are a band-aid placed several steps away from the wound.

Finbarr3• 3 months ago

Agreed. Flock has been a key contributor in solving numerous crimes. I'm happy for Flock to be in my county and would like the police to have more access to technology like this, not less.

saghm3• 3 months ago

Does your country also have a recurring problem of police shooting unarmed citizens? If not, it probably helps to understand the dynamics of why the police are not widely trusted here

ellefire• 3 months ago

"stopping a real problem with crime" i.e. employing mass surveillance to hunt down women who want to terminate a pregnancy

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/flock-safety-and-texas...

fffernan• 3 months ago

Live in a neighborhood that privately installed cameras. The city also installed cameras. Before the camera's cars used to come and raid houses and worker's trucks. It was quite common. The neighborhood has statistics and tracks how many stolen cars / plates drove through the neighborhood. All crime statistics dropped, police show up and arrest people. Saying its an illusion of safety is bullshit. It's all fake until you're a victim of a crime. We need our own way to fight back against gangs, etc. I'd rather have more cameras and less police. Also lets get some drones as well, they work fantastic in SF. The city owns the data its not getting sold. It gets erased unless a crime is reported.

self_awareness• 3 months ago

I understand the privacy argument. There are a few questions though:

1) Suppose there will be another shooting. Don't you want to know what exactly has happened before you go to the protest? Suppose your child will be hurt. Wouldn't you do anything to capture the culprit? How exactly would you feel if the police would tell you that they couldn't get the video with culprits face, because watching it would be a violation of someone's privacy?

2) Everyone has a camera in their pocket. Someone is filming all the time. Police can seize this video. Isn't that a privacy risk? Should we ban cameras in smartphones?

3) Should we even be private in the public? Doesn't privacy in public spaces encourage crime? I will die on a battle to keep the privacy in my home, but in public? I personally prefer to be safe, than private, in public.

4) What about private cameras near homes filming 24/7? Are those risks for privacy?

5) People in power will always be corrupt, have bad intentions, will use public goods for personal gain. Should we disregard broader benefits because there will be isolated cases where those benefits will be exploited?

Happy downvoting.

hmry2• 3 months ago

1) If someone killed my child, I would probably want to kill them back. And yet we don't consider that sufficient reason to make revenge killing legal. The wishes of the victims need to be weighed against the cost it imposes on everyone else, including those who are innocent. The cost of violating everyone's right to privacy, the social impacts of mass surveillance, and the risk of that data being abused.

2) > Isn't that a privacy risk?

Yes, it is!

Should we ban cameras in smartphones?

No? How about making it difficult for the police to seize everyone's videos without a good reason? We already do that for phone videos, it's called warrants. But Flock doesn't. They just ask cops to enter any arbitrary "reason" text into a HTML textbox and instantly get access to everyone's videos. And if the people explicitly said they don't want those specific cops to have access, like many people decided about ICE? Well, just ask the next county over and use their system, it's not checked in any way.

Manuel_D2• 3 months ago

People don't have a right to privacy in public (at least in the US). Do people not realize anyone can photograph or film them in public at any time. Heck, photographers can even then around and sell the without the subject's consent. Case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nussenzweig_v._DiCorcia

I'm really struggling to see the parallel between being filmed in public and committing revenge murder.

Lio• 3 months ago

The best way to block Flock is probably to find a way to track billionaire celebs like Taylor Swift and Elon Musk.

If they were able to successfully change laws so they can fly anonymously they can probably change laws on cameras in public places, at least for them anyway.

Privacy for the special people.

https://gizmodo.com/taylor-swift-and-elon-can-finally-fly-pr...

burnt-resistor3• 3 months ago

It's taxpayer-funded dragnet-warrantless surveillance, data harvesting, and stalking. And it is local elected officials' deliberate voluntary or bribed choice to invite Big Mommy into the lives of their constituents and people passing through. The anti-privacy doomers don't get to force their invasive anti-values on everyone else who wants respect for and to preserve their right to not be autonomously surveilled and monitored every single second when not in a business or organization premises.

jimnotgym• 3 months ago

Every time I see Flock mentioned, it makes me think it will be about the Linux lock file tool Flock, and I wonder why people want to stop it

hariseldom• 3 months ago

a missed opportunity, going with StopFlock instead of FlockOff dot com

solaarphunk• 3 months ago

Counterpoint: vehicle related crime is way down in SF. Which is great.

LurkandComment• 3 months ago

What might be more productive is to suggest legal ways law enforcement can prevent and enforce the problems this was designed to stop. It will help you see where the laws are limited, what needs to be updated so you can balance the risk of privacy vs. the need to enforce laws (or the need for new laws all together). Right now we're osilcating between gaps criminals exploit and infringing on fundemental privacy rights.

josefritzishere• 3 months ago

Flock should be illegal. Full stop. These people should be in prison.

0ldblu3• 3 months ago

Lawmakers won't care until it is them and their kids that are being tracked by "hackers". Flock API's are poorly protected and the individual cameras are hackable as shown by Benn Jordan in multiple YouTube videos.

enaaem• 3 months ago

Btw, flock employees have been caught watching kids gymnastics class and pools.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-193593234

Why does the VP of strategic relations need to watch the kids gymnastics class?

d3rockk• 3 months ago

That is absolutely terrifying.

rdevilla2• 3 months ago

It's for their, and your, own safety.

bko4• 3 months ago

I think the answer is better technology, not less of it.

This stuff is more easily available in rudimentary systems. Consider the model of recording everything and just dumping tapes somewhere. Much harder to monitor abuse than a well designed system with an audit log. Better yet, have computers process the data and only expose what's absolutely necessary. Technology lets you do that.

But I want to push back against this idea that we have anything resembling a police or surveillance state. Nothing will dispel this myth more than an experience reporting a crime to police. Think about thefts in drug stores. They have security guards, cameras, security devices, etc, but every day the same group of people walk in and walk out with stolen goods. Everyone knows who they are, but police do absolutely nothing to stop them, because there is no political will. So the solution is to put deodorant behind lock and key and close down stores in high crime areas.

So besides these one off creepy stories of people abusing the system, this stuff amounts to nothing. I want to use technology more and perhaps our murder clearance rate can stop going down.

https://www.murderdata.org/2021/10/homicide-clearance-in-uni...

culi4• 3 months ago

Heart disease accounts for 22% of all deaths in the US; cancer is 19.8%; injuries like car accidents come in third at about 7.8%. Homicide doesn't make it anywhere near the top 10.

When it comes to firearms, the vast majority of deaths are suicides with homicides being about a third of that. And the majority of homicides are domestic violence which usually happen inside the home.

The fact that the homicide clearance rate has decreased DESPITE turning our entire society into one of the most advanced surveillance states in human history pisses me off. That's MY tax money going to subsidize these companies that are taking away ALL OF OUR rights. In 2021 China's supreme court banned the use of facial recognition technologies in public places and then further strengthened that ban in 2025. They also got the PIPL in 2021 which is an even stronger version of the GDPR. In these respects, the US has regressed beyond The People's Republic of mf'ing China.

Your answer is to give these companies MORE of my money. I think the answer is to force them to pay us all back and let us reinvest it into problems that are actually relevant to anyone who doesn't obsessively consume True Crime podcasts

Anvoker• 3 months ago

The fact that the police won't use surveillance data in a way you would consider good and effective does not mean you don't live in a surveillance state.

One of the key aspects of police and surveillance states is that the incentives are structured so that the policing and surveillance need not be done with the interest of public welfare in mind. As you said there is no political will.

czhu12• 3 months ago

This movement reminds me of the "protecting democracy" message that was run on the national stage that pailed against the backdrop of rising inflation.

Privacy is important just as democracy is important, but crime and lawlessness feel more immediate and will always take center stage.

Any message to try to address the spread of flock and flock-like business models have to address what replaces it. If the only choice people are given is either having flock, or car break-ins, then I think we can probably guess what people would choose.

SFPD at least, has credited flock and flock-like tech for why property crime has dropped so much in recent years.

tbojanin2• 3 months ago

As much as I dislike flock. There's definitely a case to be made for the business model where first responder companies can generate huge amounts of taxpayer funded ARR in "sanctuary cities" due to criminals never getting actually serving sentences. If criminals are stuck in the:

"Commit crime -> brief retention period -> activist judge lets you go" loop, then you can definitely build a business model that just capitalizes on the fact that there's no consequences to committing a crime, and local/state governments have to waste copious amount of money due to the incredibly inflated demand of first responder services.

duped3• 3 months ago

Two points.

First: that's not what a "sanctuary city" is. That term specifically refers to cities that don't let their local law enforcement and courts assist ICE/CBP. The idea is that local crimes happen to everyone regardless of immigration status and we don't want a situation where undocumented people live lawlessly because they can't talk to police or court officers without fear of deportation.

Second: there's no "activist judge lets you go" loop. In practice judges are pretty tightly constrained by the law when it comes to pretrial detention. However, there _is_ a "cops refuse to do their job out of protest" loop.

And also: none of this is a technical problem! It's all political/social dynamics and surveillance doesn't affect it at all.

tonymet3• 3 months ago

Do you think the city councils who declare “sanctuary city” status turn around and tell the DAs to be tough on those same individuals?

They go hand in hand.

tbojanin2• 3 months ago

- I used "Sanctuary city" as a synonym for a "soft on crime" city.

- An example of who I classify as an "activist judge" is Teresa Stokes. She let out the repeat offender with 14 prior arrests that stabbed Iryna Zarutska in Charlotte[1].

[1] https://timmoore.house.gov/media/press-releases/congressman-...

hitekker• 3 months ago

You’ve identified an interesting loop which I reckon is deeply uncomfortable for the Progressive type.

Nonetheless, it’s true for most voters in Oakland or SF. Just last month, a judge let a homeless stabber back on the street after he threatened and tried attacking SF’s mayor and his bodyguard. The Progressive reaction was to blame the mayor and the police— and then the newly freed homeless guy immediately broke the law again and had to be re-arrested.

5255652• 3 months ago

I misread the title

ccorcos• 3 months ago

Its worth checking out a recent interview with the Flock CEO on Cheeky Pint (Stripe's podcast with John Collison) [1]

As much as I fear the Orwellian future this could turn into, I think its important to recognize that the burden of preventing that is on lawmakers, not companies.

He explains in the interview that he would love for laws to be passed to create tighter controls over how these systems are used. The problem is that police departments don't want it! Perhaps they can elect to do it themselves, but then they expose themselves to competitors who have "more powerful features".

Something like 70% of homocides go unresolved! I think its cool that Flock is trying to help police departments fight crime. But it's time to yell at your lawmakers. Don't hate the player, hate the game!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYm2nXFDaB0

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