Part of the backstory here I think is that ALPR cameras are a commodity technology. They're not defensible by themselves medium term; the market will go to whoever ships the cheapest most reliable cameras with the best pre-sales team, which is a tough space to compete in. For Flock to defend a growth-stage startup valuation, it needs to come up with value-adds.

For a while it looked like that was going to take the form of single-pane-of-glass fusion products (think: Grafana for public safety orgs), but post-AI that seems pretty hard to defend too; Axon doesn't need deep roots in SFBA tech culture to compete on that anymore.

So I guess expect a lot of wacky ideas.

Hm, two questions:

- Who is paying for surveillance? - To whose benefit is it used?

Pretty sure this is the same person who made "your flowing data" many years ago. Assuming it is, that was a really cool project!

You could follow their twitter account and DM semi-structured messages at it. He would generate personalized charts and tables from the message you sent.

Looks like it's the same account, but that service seems down at the moment.

https://x.com/yfd

Really great demonstration that created value from semi-structured data streams.

I’m not convinced that there’s any solution to this besides direct government regulation and an enshrinement of privacy rights into the law. Cities stop paying for flock access? Other cities still will. Regulations preventing public property from being used for cameras? Private companies will allow it. Vigilantes destroying cameras? Start using mobile drones or something. It’s a losing battle, and everything done so far to fight it is just causes an escalation. Constitutional right to privacy (from government and private companies) is probably the only durable solution.

The CEO of Flock said his mission is to "completely eliminate and eradicate crime in America". I think I saw that movie, it was called Minority Report.

Highly anti social people (flock executives, mark zuckerberg, other surveillance capitalists, etc.) should simply be expelled from society to a separate island to fight each other for scarce resources.

Fitting the typical stereotype of a villain company, the greed with no ethics isn’t surprising, what’s surprising that it’s backed by “hacker” news.. shouldn’t HN be backing the counter efforts against such company not the other way around?

For an Amber Alert that could be really helpful.