Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit(newyorker.com) |
Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit(newyorker.com) |
YC is your villain.
Local governments are banning them, and/or cutting deals with investors
I'd be curious to see if Mamdani or someone similar employing Flock or an equivalent would yield the same firestorm; if not, then it's not a principled stand against surveillance, rather just another form of political warfare. Perhaps Antifa wants to not be tracked in certain locales, is less concerned in other politically favorable locales because they know they won't be prosecuted anyway?
Arguably those two types of power are in conflict in terms of desired outcomes.
One after only half the contract was up.
Looks like that was based on experience, there could very well be a lot more freedom & privacy-loving enthusiasts on both the left & right in Texas than average.
not my dowvote btw
YC invests in Flock.
They’ve worked together over the last 10+ years while lying on HN about “the government” being behind it.
Be mad at that by itself. No need for a left/right saga.
Narrow down your real political enemy and define them by name, and lose the mythology.
Your line about capitalised 'Antifa' suggest an unserious lack of familiarity with left-wing groups and causes.
There is no “government” it’s companies - lobbying exists.
The cameras are for ads.
HN is complicit in this propaganda.
I'd rather have the cameras than have family members die to drugged up drivers, or robbers get away with their crimes.
1. Privacy is not secrecy. Your neighbours know what you are doing, they just politely don’t mention it, or try to sell you something on the back of it.
2. Almost everything we do we do in public, with our face uncovered for the world to see.
3. The benefits of a mass surveilled world are enormous - epidemiology is gonna rock in 20 years. New medical insights as well as simple stuff like “how many passengers take the train regularly” (not how many passenger journeys but how many individual people will get inconvenienced if we shut this line down.
4. The problem is not you thought your life was secret, it never has been, the problem is what will we as society allow people to do with this new information. At some basic level treat it like HIPPA or medical data - keep it well managed and use in the best interests of the individual. (I disagree with the Chinese justification of “best interests of society - that can be warped so easily)
In short society is like your grandfathers financial advice - look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves
And very little ability for anyone or any group of people from any walk of life to resist getting screwed by the government if the government chooses to screw them.
The long term cost of putting locks on doors and bars on windows and all the other things that need to be done to deter small scale crime is peanuts compared to the cost of giving up the ability to disobey the government and work counter to the government with a low likelihood of being caught so long as one's profile is low.
I know that by putting it so plainly I'm gonna piss off a lot of people and draw the ire of many who want to see their favorite rules enforces with an iron fist at low cost. I don't care. I have judged those people to have bad ideas and bad morals and they are fundamentally bad people so long as they maintain them.
Sorry to break it to you but if the Feds in the US have it out for you, it won't matter how squeaky clean your record is. They'll fuck you up and ruin your life without batting an eye.
There isn’t, and has never been, a nation in human history where regular people have meaningful recourse against random targeting by the government. This is as true in Sweden as it is in China.
The best you can hope for is that a court eventually rules in your favor, after years or decades of spending all your money and energy on it, having your life utterly destroyed in the process, and at the end you get a half-hearted apology (very often not even that), plus a tiny fraction of your expenses back if you’re really lucky. The shame and desperation will be with you until your last day.
This happens all the time and absolutely everywhere in the world. I’m not even convinced it happens more frequently in China than elsewhere, though people in the West certainly like to pretend so.
and a lot of human rights violations
It would be nice if there were less, but that change shouldn't come at a significant cost.
As an example, the FBI has data on $10-20 billion in property crimes per year in the US. Wow, that's a lot. Of course, there's probably $5-$10 trillion dollars of personal property.
if they have it, everyone does.
If the benefits can be had at too high a price, that doesn't make the price worth paying.
But what's not fine is that capability in a fully automated, fully remotely accessible way, because that openly invites abuse of all kinds.
or are you just making things up
There's been a lot of stalking enabled by Flock cameras.
If people want to surveil the inside of their own homes and businesses that's fine. I think some public areas should be surveilled and others private, with indicators, so if people want to be watched for their own safety when they go outside they can, but if they want to avoid tracking they can go through unmonitored areas. Those will fix your latter and former concern respectively. More centralized surveillance won't help much more but certainly lead to harm (as Flock has, already, by mistakenly accusing people with similar faces for crimes across the country, and letting corrupt cops stalk their spouses).
And who desides what that is? Because right now, in the US, Trump and ICE appear to have strong opinions on that.
2. see above
3. The downsides are enormous as well - Want to know who went to that protest last night? Query your local palantir console. Who met with your former wive within the last 2 weeks? Flock will give you answers.
4. The problem is scale (in the number of people who can observe me, the time frame I can be observed over and the length of time over which that information is available)
The most common response here is “but in the future some other government could do X”. And yes. This was also a major reason for opposition to the orignal “Peelers” in 1800s - a civilian police force. The police today are able to commit many egregious violations but they are mostly held back by laws, and social expectations. It’s not perfect but it beats police in non democratic countries by a mile.
“ Who met with your former wive within the last 2 weeks?” Yes that’s something we have seen police officer and politicians doing - it’s almost always illegal then and should continue to be so.
I think this is about trust in institutions- it’s a problem.
We need sensible laws, a social acceptability of privacy violations just below corrupt cops. The scale is great but so is ability to monitor who monitors us.
And the downsides are disastrous. If you live in a free, open, inclusive and tolerant state, the surveillance might matter little to you. When that starts slipping, you need the privacy, and the secrecy to fight what comes next.
We can't have this safely. It's been proven time and time again that they people with access to these systems are not all to be trusted. The systems will be abused and people will be hurt. I'm all for cameras and so on in isolated areas of high likelihood of crime, but not as a means to tracking everyone, just in case.
No, my neighbors do not know everything I’m doing. We have doors and windows and we quite like it that way. We choose what to share. Same in public, same in any reasonable situation.
Losing the ability to choose what we share with the world is a deeply frightening development and makes for a world that many of us, justifiably, do not want to live in.
You can choose to expose your private life if you want, but don’t pat my head and tell me it’s good for me.
2. But not permanently recorded and stored, searchable and logged for anyone to go back in time. Also, not potentially incorrectly stored and mislabeled as you instead of someone else doing something bad. This is happening.
3. I like the benefits of our current world. I guess those aren't real or considered?
4. I never thought "my life was secret". Cops are using this to stalk ex-partners, harass citizens that raise complaints, and arrest people on false information. No one has shown these cameras directly cause a decrease in crime, and the scant few anecdotal pieces of evidence where they do individual good versus "social good" (wild way to spin this given Flock wants this for the good of all society), do not outweigh the harms, costs, abuses, and loss of privacy.
I have no idea how imposing a permanent surveillance society on everyone-everywhere-all the time at all relates to the proverb raised.
The only way I could come up with a connection is what you wanted to say, but politely, is "shut up, worry about your own damn small little problems in life. The bigger problems? Us VCs have billions to make on".
Which, yea. That makes sense. It is why VCs don't want us talking about it. They stand to make billions, while the rest of us need to count our pennies, because they aren't giving us anything else.
Did I misread that?
(Flock isn't the only one doing this. So is Axon, of Taser fame. They are arguably worse. They come into towns where Flock was removed and just install Axon cameras. Their history is nasty).
Stay strong big brother is watching!
HIPPA is an extremely very poor model for this sort of thing. It's just this side of worthless in terms of maintaining medical privacy. It's actually very difficult to maintain the privacy of your medical data in the US.
Incredible.
The benefits of a mass surveilled world are absolutely not enormous. Like, what the actual fuck?
If you suggest mass surveillance as a "solution" to the next pandemic (I might be wrong on this and maybe I've misread your comment) I'm afraid that the world won't just stand still and face it. The recent pandemic has proven it, we're not all Australia/China.
Truly spoken like someone who lives in neither.
Institutions can go evil, as seen in any friendly dictatorship all over the world in the last 100+ year.
Keeping the police on the legal side of things seems to be challenging (ICE killings? Asset forfeiture? Police brutality?), better to make it harder for them to do something illegal in the first place.
I am still waiting on a working answer to the question of "who watches the watchmen", so far, this has never really worked (NSA/Snowden?). What has worked quite well was limiting the institutions up-front.
What’s already happening is bad enough. What it enables to happen next is a nightmare.
"they're tying to build a prison -- for you and me to live in, for you and me to live in"
The company, which has six trackers monitoring access to a single web page, frames privacy as a worthwhile trade-off for reading an article for free, echoing the language of the social media industry.
Perhaps they could try a different market. The UK seems more amicable to such things.
"We Care About Your Privacy. We, and our 229 partners use cookies and similar methods to recognize visitors and remember their preferences...."
229 "partners".
Oh the irony.
Largely the US hasn’t had widespread surveillance, it’s been private property ownership of CCTV type systems for security reasons which Americans are ok with. Reading my license plate, face, gait, etc every 100 meters as I move across a large distance loses the security reason and entered the world of mass surveillance. Which while many of us struggle with caring about, is seen as infringing on our right to privacy which itself has a complex legal interpretation of and where systems like this cross a line into what is acceptable. The fact that law enforcement can query flock to learn of an individual’s location without any warrant is often seen as directly opposing a constitutional protection from government search. It might also be important to know that the US Constitution is seen as a law of physics in some areas and that most laymen that read the Fourth Amendment would come to the conclusion that this is not allowed and thus unconstitutional at its core. There’s of course legal things that have happened since that clarify interpretation of the constitution so the wiggle room they have to operate, especially when it’s something the government wants to exists, is enough for now. The Supreme Court would be the ones to eliminate grey area. They recently issued a ruling taking a heavier privacy stance. Meanwhile, people on the street have grown deep distrust in tech and government which is visible as they are destroying these cameras.
Never understood why the outrage of flock in particular is so big online.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-anpr-ser...
Imagine a shooting took place in the downtown area of a major city next week that lacked cameras. Do you think people would praise that city's respect for their citizens' privacy? Or would people blame the city leaders for not keeping the citizens safe?
I can’t trust that HN articles or high karma accounts here are anything more than lies and deception
Unless our judiciary gets serious about what started with 9/11, authoritarianism is inevitable.
This actually is my primary candidate for the great filter.
San Francisco has turned the tide on smash and grab crime through license plate readers and drone response. New Hampshire requires law enforcement agencies to delete unflagged license plate data within three minutes of collection. These two conditions can exist at the same time, in the same place, if we don’t allow the narrative to be pulled toward either extreme. Unfortunately that’s very tough to accomplish in today’s political climate in the US.
It's almost as if they want to convince their audience that the practice is justified. The article spends an inordinate amount of time on flocks history from the point of view of the perpetrators of the practice rather than how it's harming society. This is a typical tactic the establishment uses to keep the focus on an evil scapegoat so the practice can be slipping in under the radar by another less well know contractor.
AI isn't an answer because that really means whoever is running, training, and prompting the AI.
Which is to say I will never, ever be on board with mass surveillance, because those in or of power are conveniently left out of its dragnet.
YC has been working on this for a decade.
This sort of thing is just starting more broadly in the US and Americans are not happy about it.
It’s the new political hot potato where behind the scenes they’re pressured to support it but publicly saying so is political kryptonite.
For US politicians the only thing worse than saying you support Flock cameras is advocating for an AI data center in your community.
https://www.politie.nl/informatie/waar-staan-anpr-cameras.ht...
And he has publicly denounced Flock cameras and data center development in the past month.
Amazing what polling does to a politician.
Just as an example, NYC mayor is going after landlords for violations and tenant rights. He has hearings regularly. However there is no enforcement of the law when it comes to government owned housing projects, which are very often not kept up to code and are outright dangerously mismanaged
Additionally the trust that the government uses these cameras as intended is apparently higher in the UK than the trust of Americans that Flock will not misuse their surveillance technology.
I'm not so sure about that: https://www.newsweek.com/white-house-donald-trump-king-time-...
"Any current issues of public concern?
It is recognised the extent of the UK network is a privacy concern and the scale of that network is likely to remain so for...
The NPCC ANPR lead has established an Independent Advisory Group (IAG) chaired by the Surveillance Camera Commissioner (SCC), with a broad representation from civil society and other..."
Google national ANPR [country]
I’m an American living in Japan, I’ve always felt a great sense of liberty because of how safe it is here; I can live a lifestyle that would get me robbed pretty much immediately in the USA. While crime rates have always been relatively low here; part of that is because Japan got tough on crime around the turn of the century, and one part of that was pervasive rollout of automated license scanners used for reconstructing vehicle movement, like Flock. I suspect that Japanese people didn’t accept this because they don’t care about privacy - they absolutely do - but instead because they have a healthy enough social context to be able to consider the tradeoffs, and a government responsive enough to design around those tradeoffs; rather than immediately flying into a rage and vandalizing their cities like some angry Americans are doing now.
The same thing plays out for other things that would pretty clearly be a good thing, like having a real secure national ID instead of relying on social security numbers for identity verification (terrible). Can’t do it, people (as well as criminals) value the liberty of being difficult to trace far more than the liberty of not being defrauded regularly, or having a civil service that is able to do basic functions like authenticating you for benefits efficiently. Sigh…
Nobody really cared until they realized that it could be used to more effectively round up our precious illegal immigrants.
A big reason is because there's virtually no oversight, and it's managed by a single private corporation nationwide. Neither of those things are true in the UK case.
You should really educate yourself on things like this. They matter, and by your apathy and ignorance you're helping sleepwalk your country into a dystopia.
Artists often start as taggers so it’s not exactly a clean separation. It’s a similar relationship as the one between “real” hackers and skids.
We all know that governments are going to be corrupted. We all know that democracy sucks sometimes or even alot of the time. At least if there is a government agency to communicate with that collects that data and keeps it over time, when the government changes there is the possibility to seek redress.
If the information and systems are held by corporations or other unaccountable third parties who may not be subject to public scrutiny or records keeping requirements, then how do you seek redress and enforcement over time?
> Britain rated worst in Europe for protecting privacy
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2007/dec/31/uk.eu
> 'UK surveillance is worse than 1984' says UN privacy chief
https://www.wired.com/story/uk-digital-surveillance-joseph-c...
For instance, in July 2026 the D.C. Department of Health Care Finance discovered that two reports published on its own website contained hidden underlying personal data that unauthorized users could access. The reports were supposed to show aggregate statistics, but the accessible data could include Medicaid IDs, birth dates, provider names, race, gender, ward, and ethnicity. The exposure potentially existed from 2023 until July 2026.
Do you want to guess how many billions in fines or people were fired due to the leak?
In other words, you are trying to make things much more simplistic than they actually are.
Get all those folks marching, you aren't going to get good decisions out of everyone.
But the expression of the people is hard for those in power to ignore.
Which is kinda why people are upset enough to set shit on fire.
His newer car, which was replaced, now sits and is at once again an object that the previous thief can steal again, and again, and again.
The cycle repeats. The thief, if caught, does not restore the car owner or is even owed compensation. The thief pays in time served, the thief's expenses are paid for by the car owner, through taxes, and the cycle repeats.
End the cycle. End the thief. The value of the human life is set by the thief, not the owner.
The more power granted, the heavier the collar and chain should be.
Society is not rich enough for the government to skim enough off of us to provide itself with the kind of resources it would need to go after every petty deviant or inconvenient activist the way they'd go after a mob boss.
They set the example that even if you're not related to the person shooting the gun, or even at the location, you moving vaguely political speech is a federal crime.
Are you suggesting this is not happening with the goverment suddenly criminilizing the status of legal immigrants? (this is in addition to enforcing laws against illegal aliens)
FTFY
Using your exact suggested query for Germany will quickly tell you that mass retention of ANPR data is illegal, and only matching against "targeted suspect databases" is acceptable. Even usages of the technology in private areas have to comply with data protection rules.
I like how you're so nuanced when I'm pretty sure you never heard the acronym ANPR before
Martin Luther King Jr. was subject to the same bullshit. https://www.reddit.com/r/agedlikemilk/comments/iia9lq/this_c...
Not bad for a few lines of text... very efficient.
Of course your whole statement is ridiculous - the notion that a poem is the foundation of a belief rather than a good conveyance of it, is so stupid that all you are saying is that you can't come up with a good argument and are reaching for bad, unfunny snark to deflect.
This poster is from 2002:
https://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/collections/collections-online/po...
>>We have the name and address of everyone in the UK without a TV license. Inspectors on on their way now to your home to investigate.
Also lookup “TV detector vans” which is another hilarious bit of the theatre of the UK police state
Seeing that as someone visiting the UK on vacation was a real eye opener, like what the heck kind of police state is this
Most Western countries have 2-3 times as many police officers per capita as China and Russia. Many people in China have had not a single encounter with authorities in their lifetime (other than basic administrative tasks).
Meanwhile, in some EU countries, you need government approval to add a roof window to your own house, and you better believe there are inspectors and fines enforcing that.
We can debate whether the government has a legitimate interest in ensuring that rooftop windows don’t make house fires dramatically more dangerous, but I don’t think there’s much debate to be had about whether it should be a crime to own a picture of a man standing in front of a tank.
Not sure which is worse, actually. At least everyone in China knew that you shouldn’t mention June 4th. When there’s a clear line, you can avoid it or use indirect references to make your point.
That describes most Western countries today.
Higher yields mean more overhead for taxes. More overhead more taxes means more money for the lord. More money for the lord means more men at arm. More men at arms means more ability to shake down the peasants for even more.
It's a self feeding cycle, well until you get out competed by the next country that didn't waste all that overhead trying to enforce a local maximum.
And that's not to even speak of your lived experience if you're an ethnic minority in China. Tibetans don't self-immolate out of boredom.
Can't speak about Russia, the Russians I know personally all left before the Putin era really got going and isn't reflective of the current state of affairs over there, but what you said is the opposite of truth regarding China.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/public-attitudes-... [2] https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/florida-bans-highwa...
Maybe people oppose Flock because it's not going far enough! Or maybe there is a coordinated campaign against a license plate reader for some weird reason
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/03/17/public-more-...
It's the equivalent of 'wire fraud' in the US.
The most common case is Lucy Connolly, who was arrested for inciting racial hatred and pleaded guilty to the crime which carries a prison sentence.
Or are you just a random non UK citizen who has been reading disinformation on social media?
Thankfully the supreme court seems to agree here in two ways:
1) Just because a third party (Google in Chatrie case but Flock here) collects the data and the government requests it from them, doesn't mean that that isn't a 'search' which requires a warrant ("obtaining someone's cell-phone location history from Google constitutes a Fourth Amendment search.")
2) Delegating "searches" to a private party isn't permitted if they are acting as an "instrument or agent of the Government" (Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives’ Association (1989) - also cited in Chatrie).
In the Google case, users have a private relationship with Google where they elect to let Google track them and retain their information... but when the Police ask for that information it's a 'search' and requires a specific warrant.
In the Flock case the entire REASON the cameras are there is the the government (Police or local municipality) has contracted Flock to surveil the public. Asking flock for the whereabouts of a specific person seems like it should likewise require a warrant. That's inherently different than a crime being reported and then going to dig up a video from the area from Flock - which is different than seeing someone in that video and asking Flock to find every time they've been captured by any Flock camera anywhere... that would seem to be a 'search' and would require a warrant (which in this scenario would probably be easy to get).
A "dragnet" is when you set up police checkpoints everywhere and essentially put entire cities under watch to find a fugitive. This happened in Boston after the bombings.
"Dragnets" are illegal except in extreme circumstances (like a bombing).
Flock is a "dragnet on demand." You have a digital dragnet in place not just in one city but potentially in every city, and with a single search can pull the results of the dragnet on anyone for any reason.
The government does not and never did require any warrant or justification to record people in public spaces. Not just the government, but normal people too: you can whip out four phone and start recording people in public any time you want.
Elect to is a bit strong here. Acquiesce to, maybe, or perhaps suffer to.
Google has since redesigned this feature so that the history lives on the phone itself, not on their servers (removing the possibility for police officers to request this information from google - search warrant or not).
The tricky bit is the cell tower location. That cannot be disabled unless you go into Airplane mode or turn your phone off. Broad location (which tower are you associated with) is needed for the network to route your calls, while precise location is used for E911.
Edit: Note that this is not an endorsement, rather stating that recent supreme court cases may not be applicable.
Is it legal for US citizens to all put cameras on their cars and set up a network where we can all see where all police are at any given time?
Seems like a good idea at this point.
You don't expect privacy in public in the sense that you might bump into other people that know who you are.
That doesn't automatically mean that you expect walking into a public area means a system will start investigating you and seeing if you match with crimes.
Assuming everyone in public is a suspect and continually investigating them, is a big change in how society works.
And that's the problem, because if there isn't an expectation of privacy, and we record everything that's "in public", we land in a dystopic hellscape.
The problem is really that "privacy" vs. "public" isn't a binary choice. Yes, I expect people to see me in public if they happen to walk by. That's quite different from every movement being recorded and made searchable. Most privacy laws don't really account for that being possible.
“Respondent does not actually quarrel with this analysis, though he expresses the generalized view that the result of the holding sought by the government would be that "twenty-four hour surveillance of any citizen of this country will be possible, without judicial knowledge or supervision." But the fact is that the "reality hardly suggests abuse," If such dragnet-type law enforcement practices as respondent envisions should eventually occur, there will be time enough then to determine whether different constitutional principles may be applicable.” — United States v. Knotts, 460 U.S. 276, 284 (1983)
The third-party doctrine is a United States legal doctrine that holds that people who voluntarily give information to third parties, such as banks and phone companies, generally have "no reasonable expectation of privacy" in that information. This precedent, established in Supreme Court cases in the 1970s, allows the U.S. government to obtain information from third parties without a legal warrant and without otherwise complying with the Fourth Amendment prohibition against search and seizure without probable cause and a judicial search warrant. "
Under current case law (Carpenter and recently affirmed in Chatrie) it will definitely be a search, IMO it is just when the sensors become dense enough according to the court (absent states do not make regulation themselves to require a warrant for historical data).
This is _not_ universal. Many jurisdictions take a different view on this.
I retch when people say there is no expectation of privacy in public as some naive defense of the panopticon.
Which is entirely different from an expectation of a generalized systematic loss of practical privacy in public.
They are not even close to the same thing.
The willingness to kneel to others baffles me. Loss of practical privacy is loss of power - to somebody(s). It may not seem so for one person. But when it is true for everyone, the system will adapt to using that power.
Throw in AI and data integration. This is clearly a B.A.D. idea.
A private company can have plenty of legitimate reasons to film in public spaces, and to incidentally film people.
Flock's ends are to explicitly track people, and to use that data to accuse them of criminal activity. Those are the ends that the 4th amendment is written to explicit protect us from that, and not exclusively from governments, either.
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Surely we can agree the point of this technology is to change the level of privacy one should reasonably expect in public?
The US government, the 4th reich, cannot be trusted with these tools, especially their law enforcement.
This is being done by investors for ads.
Somr govts are cutting deals, those that aren’t are banning them.
Never trust HN articles or high karma accts
Bigcorp has a tendency to treat "anonymized" data as if it were up for grabs. The moment they strip the obvious PII from a data stream, they consider it anonymized, and they can do whatever they want with it. They "value" your privacy--that anonymized data is gold. Of course, such data is such high value and they don't "sell it to third parties", so they technically uphold their pages-long EULA, should they ever be charged in court.
But the nature of a lot of high value information, like fine-grained location and telemetry data, just cannot be effectively anonymized. I mean, how do you think they get real-time traffic information? It's "anonymized" GPS location / speed data from Android phones. And it is from the location services layer, not from Google maps.
It’s very hard to regulate outcomes when the component steps are legal. Not saying we shouldn’t try, just saying that path is well-trodden and rarely works. See: media consolidation, etc
IMO it is much more practical to regulate and penalize the activity of using such a network than to preempt its creation. Heck, BitTorrent can be seen as a surveillance network. But intent and usage make it obvious it’s not.
At least in the US, they can't. This is already the law.
But what so many people don't understand is that the government does not and never did require a warrant or some other permission to film people in public. Flock isn't allowing the government to bypass limits placed them by the Constitution. Privacy laws, for the most part, protect what people do in private.
One thing the Flock debate had revealed is how many people simply assume everything they don't like is unconstitutional.
Created it.
Do we know this for fact? Surely, the police are they're biggest consumers, but do they sell access to the APIs to anyone else?
I'm sure we're a golden statue or private jet away from the supreme court having a change of heart there.
But honestly, law enforcement is the least of my concerns because the industrial surveillance complex has shown time and again that the commercial entities are the ones with the never ending thirst for squeezing ever more profit from every person they can. To me, the far more insidious problem is what happens when Flock needs to keep showing growth? What's to stop them Flock from selling data to any and all comers?
The possibilities are literally endless:
* Perfect price discrimination. Parking garages, stores, car washes, fast food places perfectly adjusting price based on what you can afford (based on where you've been).
* Car insurance shadow telematics. You don't want a GPS-tracker installed on your ODB? Fine. They'll still know where you drive and how fast.
* Clinic-visit based healthcare inference. "Looks like this guy has been going to a cancer clinic. NO HIRE."
* "Where has your spouse been?"
To me, this was always the armored gauntlet underneath the velvet glove of any private entity with strong technical locks, Apple included.
The best you can reliably say about any private entity is that they're treating their users well at the moment.
Ultimately, profit always trumps user alignment.
>The possibilities are literally endless:
Zero chance of any of those examples happening when they already have contractual relationships with municipalities they can leverage. They can simply just extend their services to civil enforcement. Follow the concrete trucks and the contractor vans and everything else around with the cameras and drones and then fine everyone for everything. "You were seen wheeling a water heater out of Home Depot. You got a permit for that". "It sure looks like you bought a lot of Henny last time you were in tax free NH, are you sure none of that wound up in your brother's restaurant."
There's already screenshots of "Your 80k registered truck was seen on a road not open to this traffic with no corresponding overweight permit, pay up" mail violations floating around (I have not vetted them).
And unlike price discrimination, the useful idiots will cheer, because the victims will have on paper broken the rules and can be construed as <checks list of buzzwords> "scofflaws", "antisocial" and "not paying their fair share" even if they have done nothing morally wrong.
It's the sort of thing that could only exist beneficially in some sort of communist system where deal with crime in some sort of fair way and where access to the information on these networks was regulated and equally available and the non crime information could be used to instead feed a command economy.
It may surprise many that we don't live in that world.
I wish people could see that the very reason and way in which flock popped up almost immediately simultaneously all across the country is because it ids actually a domestic spying matrix, not a policing tool. It is a hostile, domestic and foreign enemy capability; not just some misguided mistake.
As long as the capability exists, it is “vulnerable” to back door access by foreign “intelligence services” that are just pass throughs to the CIA/FBI in this case through the “five eyes”+.
It may be illegal and unconstitutional to do domestic surveillance, which is still done under various “fingers-crossed and therefore the Constitution does not apply” enemy fabrications like national security laws/letters that are not even public, even if they are of course checked and approved by Judge Trust me Bro; but nothing stops, e.g., the various illegitimate American departments and agencies from asking the Australians, British, Canadians, Israelis, etc. if they happen to have any information about who you have met with over the last 5 years, or your country asking if you, foreign civil rights advocate, have met with anyone in America that might be helping spread civil rights in their country in exchange for some other NS deal with tweet another devil.
I wish we had a legitimate government that could actually be trusted with something like a verified, bullet proof Flock camera system that can only be accessed in a verifiable and auditable manner to actually prevent and solve things like abductions and drug/human trafficking and identify lost elderly; but wet love in a society dominated by devils that make deals with murderers, violate the Constitution constantly and consistently, carve out exceptions where none exist or are permitted, and are pedophiles devious criminals of every order and magnitude. I know all these things for a fact in addition to the fact that flock is not the first or the only method/network of mass surveillance that is already fully deployed around the country and world, and gaslighting, narcissistic lies are used to placate people and bribe them with shiny things and “convenience” to be ok with it.
People thought the future would look like some draconian and dystopian 1984, but in reality it is actually the Matrix or even the Minority Report, only far more hidden and with far more Soma.
The point being is that there cannot be any compromise at all, because as I will adapt what was said about the topic, “he who trades basic freedom for false security is guaranteed to receive neither.”
There will be numerous unevidenced accusations about fraud this midterms. It will blanket the internet and air waves.
Despite republicans being incredibly nervous about trumps chances these midterms, republicans will win the house and the senate. Trump will reaffirm a supermajority, and policies he decreed will only be expanded.
Emboldened, tariffs will continue and expand. The Iran war will continue and expand. Flock cameras will continue and expand.
The supreme court will acquisence slowly piece by piece to ever more draconian constitutional violations.
This is only the beginning.
It doesn't seem slow to me.
I don't think this is going to work out like you think it will...
I'm genuinely taken aback by that.
I can clearly see a bunch of brand new accounts brigading the thread, YCisComplict, YCisBad etc. Presumably bots or something but this is still bad even discounting those accounts.
We need more Aaron Schwartz’s in the world. Shame he's gone. Lads like that seemed kind of dorky and a bit pretentious in their pursuit of righteousness back in the day but my god their absence is noted in this day and age.
People make new accounts all the time to shit talk YC, HN, dang, etc. Anonymity (in some limited form) is a feature.
in either case, it really leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
1. An erase-me feature if they gained over say some X unique/active users.
2. Disclose to their best legal abilities on warrants served in the countries that allow such disclosure. Allow for strong whistle blower protection if warrantless wiretapping becomes a thing.
It went under the radar but is a good example of _some_ incremental positive improvement over centralized storage.
— Frank Wilhoit
All others will made to obey, if they don't? they will find things to punish you, literally
Palantir, Anduril, telcos, and more are contributing to the erosion of our privacy.
It’s been 2 decades since we learned about the secret NSA room at AT&T. 13 years since the Snowden revelations. This is not new and we need to be vigilant.
Besides, money keeps businesses in the economy afloat, it's an artificial good with (more or less) constant value. Money's a systematic means to an end and rarely an end goal, its purpose is the transportation of value, and not the communication of value.
I don't think they care beyond being rich. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower
I'd personally agree to put Flock-levels of civil vigilance in the same bag.
- Larry Ellison
https://www.businessinsider.com/larry-ellison-ai-surveillanc...
Now, let's hope you agree with Larry Ellison's definition of what constitutes best behavior or they will soon be sending drones after you.
> "You just have a drone follow the car," Ellison said. "It's very simple in the age of autonomous drones."
- Garry Tan
They need to be able to track and depose of the rioting hordes without getting their hands dirty.
Do this to him and you'll likely be in deep trouble.
”We don’t really turn it off… without a court order”
I think the Americans should push for a constitutional amendment that protects one's right to privacy.
I wonder if we can win that battle as a society over the decades. A "traditional" human-only surveillance state is bad enough, but with LLMs involved it's just a nightmare. It would be extremely cheap to now have full automated surveillance over cameras, phone lines, etc. "Computer, send me a scored list of any dissident violations conducted on any channel under surveillance in District 14 over the past two weeks. Cut off their credit cards and send a notice to appear in Civilian Oversight Court".
prove it.
It's even actively advertised as a feature: https://www.flocksafety.com/products/flock-freeform
https://www.404media.co/how-cops-use-flock-to-track-people-n...
DEF CON 34 - ESP32 as counter-surveillance platform - Cybertiger, Colonel Panic, The Wrew
https://urban-privacy.com/pages/anti-surveillance-clothing
fock flock
However, I'd be interested to see if opponents of mass surveillance could draft good legislation to curb potential abuses. For example, the laws around who owns/controls data from cameras could be changed/redefined, as could the process of accessing that data.
Most everyone can understand the utility of monitoring their own doorstep. They might even think it useful to start tracking the patterns of traffic on their doorstep. I expect that most people could not articulate the line between acceptable and unacceptable surveillance.
Second test, please ignore me
They'll present them like that. Not my idea, but from [0].
Primary example:
U.S. government officials pressuring social-media platforms through intermediaries to suppress constitutionally protected speech.
The problem with mass surveillance rollouts in the West is that they are incomplete: the cameras might go up, but not all infractions caught on camera are actually punished. Meanwhile, in China vandals and other disruptive people do get traced back to where they live and apprehended. I think that if such a vigorous policy were applied in other countries, even on a contrarian forum like this one you wouldn't see much opposition to the cameras.
You think the commenters on HN would sacrifice liberty in return for safety? I get the opposite impression.
Many East Asian countries try to write their laws so that niche cases are covered, and enforcement is tighter. In the West we leave endless loopholes in overbroad laws so that (a) everyone is probably breaking some law frequently and (b) the only people who frequently face consequences are politically disfavored groups, “troublemakers”, or those who harm elites. It’s all very Soviet.
Man unless you have different definition of so called social harmony, you can't be more wrong. Literally everyone is talking about 社会戾气 on Chinese social media and there are a big bunch of people seeking extreme means.
> Meanwhile, in China vandals and other disruptive people do get traced back to where they live and apprehended.
Nope. You think Chinese police force have unlimited amount manpower? We say the first lesson young people learn upon entering society is calling the police, 报警是社会第一课.
My wife is at the point where she would probably like a flock camera on our street. I’m at the point where I wouldn’t mind a patrol car circling the area, like a damn police state. What else would you suggest people support when they are harassed by crime this much?
(Edit to expand): instead of just complaining I’ll meta-point. People will vote for things like flock cameras when society is unsafe, or they feel unsafe. Right now, in the USA, lots of places are visibly unsafe and people deal with actual threats from bad actors much more often than they deal with police overreach. If you want people to vote against mass surveillance then you need to support policy that makes mass surveillance unnecessary, and you need to do it now instead of “in a future communist utopia there will be no crime” kind of policy (I use this because it’s what I see a lot of in Seattle). Weak on crime is anti-urban, weak on crime is pro police state.
Very strange that Americans now view a patrolling policeman as a "police state". After all, a strolling constabulary (which would drive in the US since no one walks) was part of even the 19th-century progressive "policing by consent" model that is still well regarded today.
How would a flock camera deter a thief from breaking into your garage? It's a false sense of security. I had a guy break into two tenant spaces with a screwdriver with cameras pointed all over the place. He just wore a surgical mask and hood while keeping his head down. Nothing could ID him. I had all the locks upgraded and one tenant installed an alarm system. That's all we can do.
A better question to ask is why is there so much blatant and rampant crime? Have you attended any community meetings with local representatives and voiced concerns? Have you spoke to your neighbors about these incidents (do you know your neighbors?) Maybe you live in an area who's government takes some silly light handed approach to policing, justice and reform. You either deal with it or move.
Hard/bad/no jobs? People will steal. And the thefts may cost $3000 to replace, but $300 in theft goods.
And even if you have a good job, inflation and US citizens getting fucked over by trump tariffs and inflation makes every year that much harder.
And when you KNOW the folks at the top (either party) are cheating, have always cheated, and will continue to do so - why the hell should I follow the law? It can be tax cheating, or copyright infringement, cutting down Flock (YC17) scameras, or more.
And when you KNOW you don't have any upward mobility and are stuck socioeconomically, well, it leads to what you see.
If we look at China, they have a whole different set of problems. The simpletons here will just bemoan 'Communist China' and are stuck in a McCarthyism mindset.
Look at the recent Meta settlement. Society in general has known that Facebook and social media as imagined by the tech industry as an algorithmic targeting platform is largely harmful, but instead of holding them to account the US allowed them to settle with some small fines (18B is a lot, but only 10% of the gains they made from settling the case).
Now, Meta will make changes again, and then violate the rules and expectations while claiming cover from following the rules and it will take another decade of investigations, complaints and negotiation before there is an improvement.
I've been involved in civil liberties for over three decades. I was a member of the EFF and ACLU when I could afford it, and follower of the early cypherpunks. Like a lot of EFF members, I was advocating against the Patriot Act a d the methods used to pass it after 9/11.
But this feels different. The fact that there is large support feom the left behind this makes me very cautious.
The examples of police stalking is another thing that adds up to something fishy.
I'm very glad that dangerous stalking by those with authority and power is being addressed and dealt with. But I have to wonder if the true people with power aren't using this to create laws tailored to them around future citizen surveillance methods.
I had a possible opportunity to work in a really interesting space with wildlife management and sensor networks, including cameras. It would have been a dream, because it was an awesome space to bring educational material to families about the world around them. Interactive embedded sensors and media integration thst let them learn about nature.
I didn't take that position because of healthcare and medical issues. Bit as a kid who grew up exploring science museums, I would have loved to have given back to the community. I am heartbroken for the result.
But with Flock and the crackdown on cameras, the company is also directly in the path of the legislative and public consciousness shift.
I know whatever they build will keep up with their focus on customer safety, humane wildlife management and public safety. But there's now going to be extra focus on protecting the public from employees of the firm. It shifts the narrative.
It takes focus away from just educating the public. But I guess there are other large companies who can do a better job just focusing on education and inspiration.
It makes me sad. I don't expect those new people against Flock to understand. I'm personally happy about the focus on privacy. But it's not just privacy and education now. The early cypherpunk view has been subtly co-opted.
Why does that make you cautious?
Where were those activists when it was already clear what these companies are doing, but before the famous ad? I am not trying to be nasty, if one wants to be outraged about something bad happening, its 24/7 job and then some more.
Whack-a-mole with problems is fine, but better to unplug the machine or something similarly drastic if you want to see some sort of permanent improvement and general direction change.
Behavior you describe is some sort of well meant extremism (isn't all of it well meant from certain perspective?). Not something you easily win masses with, just add polarization into society. Clear win would be flock simply going bankrupt since their revenue becomes close to 0 consistently.
I do like the spirit of it all though.
Were I to draft legislation, the first thing I'd do is ban any sort of surveillance network from giving data to non-governmental 3rd parties. Google and mcdonalds don't need to know exactly who I am and what sort of places I like to visit or products I buy.
The next thing I'd do is require a search warrant for each access. If a crime is committed then the cops need to go to a judge and say "A crime was likely committed here and we need a warrant to figure out who was there and where they went". None of this "well, here's the same case number I use for all my searches".
I would probably classify the likes of traffic cameras as something different than a surveillance network as there's not much of a real network. They are all watching one location for violations and reporting them when they happen. That to me is fine (though, again, they shouldn't share that data with private 3rd parties).
And this goes beyond surveillance networks, but I'd setup a national registry of police misconduct and bar cops who abuse their authority from ever getting a job as law enforcement again. All these cases of cops stalking exes would result in those cops needing a new career where they can't abuse the public's trust.
Isn't this just warrants? We have infrastructure in place, if police have reasonable suspicion a crime has occurred, they go to a judge and convince them they have enough evidence and the judge gives them a warrant. The problem is police and Flock are constantly arguing they shouldn't need a warrant to use the data, and it creates a system designed for abuse.
I get where you're coming from, but there's a big problem: our laws did not evolve to be enforced effectively. They are appropriate when they are enforced selectively, with discretion. Many are wholly inappropriate if simply enforced 100% of the time to the letter of the law.
That's not to say we couldn't change laws to work if enforced near-100% of the time, but it would take our legal institutions quite a lot of time to adapt.
Current governments have used the mass surveillance to go after people for abortions and for being too foreign-seeming (even if here legally). If those don’t affect you, surely you can think of something that the next wave of government officials might be opposed to, which could use a surveillance network to take away from you.
Having laws to prevent abuses doesn’t help when the lawmakers change and can just revoke those laws, while the full infrastructure exists to do whatever they want.
> Red light cameras, for example, strike me as unalloyed good.
This actually makes me think that your post is satire, due to the heavy debate on whether these cameras actually improve safety [0]. Lots of studies that contradict each other on that. I agree we need to prevent the recklessness of drivers, and there is an argument to be made here. But it’s not at all obvious like you imply.
From [0]:
> When the Houston cameras were removed, angle accidents increased by 26 percent. However, all other types of accidents decreased by 18 percent. Approximately one-third of all Houston intersection accidents are angle accidents. This suggests that the program’s drawbacks canceled out its benefits.
> Our study showed no evidence that cameras reduce the total number of accidents. We estimate that total accidents are reduced by a statistically insignificant 3 percent after the cameras are turned off.
> Likewise, there’s no evidence that the camera program reduced the number of traffic-related injuries or the likelihood of incurring an incapacitating injury.
[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/red-light-cameras...
> Just wait til we have an administration in the White House (I’m guessing not this one?) which directly threatens your freedoms in such a way that they can easily use cameras to prosecute those who they disagree with.
"You must not be gay/trans/black/hispanic/female or you'd agree with me" is not a good argument.
We're living in a brave new world where cameras and storage are cheap, networks are fast, etc. People have cameras at their front doors, stores have cameras, appartment buildings have cameras, etc. We need to deal with these facts productively, i.e. with legislation and serious thinking, rather than inane comments like "women seeking abortions have been tracked therefore we need to ban cameras".
No such thing. Unless it is mathematically impossible for the government to abuse you, then you will be abused.
What seems to me to have worked is understanding that a government is necessary, that it has the potential to misbehave, and therefore we should carefully design laws and processes to constrain it. I would like to see opponents of mass surveillance do this, which seems more productive than what I normally observe.
Then there were some expose pieces about how the data is routinely used by police to do things like track people's everyday whereabouts (which should require a warrant). There were also a variety of other issues:
- They misidentified someone's license plate consistently, leading to him being harassed by the police.
- There were big security vulnerabilities which meant people could live stream the video from some the cameras and access some of the data.
- They have been used by police officers to stalk people for romantic/sexual reasons.
- They are being used to enforce a lot of laws that people think are unjust (abortion bans, immigration laws, etc.).
Flock was accepted into YCombinator's Spring 2017 batch. Prior to YC, Flock CEO Garrett Langley had had a couple of fair-to-middling business successes and was looking for his next opportunity, which included better toilets. The story goes that he got the idea for Flock after a local police interaction where he happened to have helpful video footage. [1]
Flock quietly expanded into HOAs and neighborhood associations [2], and by 2020 had begun developing partnerships with police departments across the country and fusion centers [1], which are regional clearinghouses of data from multiple sources assembled together for law enforcement purposes.
By 2025, Flock had managed to grow to 80,000 cameras operational across the country. In June of that year, 404 Media, an independent journalistic outfit comprised in part from former Vice journalists, broke a story about Flock being used in the investigation of a woman who had self-administered an abortion in the state of Texas [3]. Flock quickly released a statement trying to "clarify" the situation, but everyone involved was lying through their teeth [4].
Up to this point, Flock had spread across the country in a pretty clever way: they built direct partnerships with police departments through sites and resources they commonly used, like https://www.police1.com/, and by hiring former police officers for sales positions. Police departments were coached to consider Flock an "ALPR" (which it very arguably isn't), which would make it not "new" technology under most local police technology procurement processes, which meant that police departments could purchase it without city council or other local agency review. To make the purchases, Flock helped to connect police departments with public money in the form of grants. For example, funds might be available for programs meant to reduce "organized retail theft", and Flock would say, "well, we qualify!", and then police departments would not use the systems to investigate organized retail theft. [5]
Throughout the Summer of 2025, people started asking questions about these weird cameras popping up everywhere, and 404 Media managed to produce one widely-shared article after another about Flock [6]. Other media outfits started to pick it up, and stories getting national attention included law enforcement officers using Flock to stalk former romantic partners or love interests or anyone else they wanted to (because Flock was built without any controls in place to prevent that kind of abuse; Langley himself repeatedly said it wasn't their job to do); Flock sharing direct access to data with federal agencies; Flock lying about the direct access that federal agencies had; then federal agencies using Flock's data-sharing capabilities to easily get around the really thin limitations that were put on that after reporting about it; Flock being used to surveil protestors; and on and on and on.
Essentially, Flock became a textbook case study for every single abuse of state surveillance power you can imagine.
Garrett Langley attempted to navigate all of this by absolving Flock of any responsibility, denying any wrongdoing, outright lying in some cases, and referring to people running crowd-sourced maps of Flock installations as "terrorists" -- which, many months later, he would get around to walking back. A little bit.
Some groups were able to legally acquire some devices and found that they had really, really poor security generally, and also that they had capabilities that weren't being advertised to the public. The prime example of this is that Flock would coach police departments to tell the public that Flock was "just an ALPR" and "only captured pictures of license plates", but meanwhile the software on the devices was written to capture images of people and bicycles and cats and dogs. On the one hand, the public would be told that the system could only track vehicles; on the other, Flock's own marketing materials advertised the ability to find pedestrians by a description of their clothing, and police departments were being trained on how to use the system to follow bicyclists. In another case, Flock representatives would say the system didn't have a "heat map" capability (showing a density of hits for a particular license plate in a particular area over time), and then it would turn out that not only did they have that capability, but internal trainings with law enforcement departments were explicitly describing how to use the system to predict where a particular person might be at a particular day and time (called a "pattern of life" search).
In 2026, public opposition to Flock has become a national conversation, and states like Oregon have started developing more restrictive legislation around the use of it and similar technology.
Flock wasn't the first ALPR company. The technology has in fact been around for a while and there are other established players in the space. However, Flock quickly had all of the hallmarks of "surveillance capitalism" -- an effort by investors like YCombinator, Founders Fund, Andreesen Horowitz, and others, to build out a national realtime surveillance network of everyone's movements and then monetize it, most obviously by providing access to an increasingly authoritarian federal administration. Americans, surprisingly, have found the will and energy to organize against this in large numbers that cross the typical political divisions.
[1]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/talon-flock-safety-cameras-p...
[2]: https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/09/03/early-stage-this-surv...
It’s a question of scale and ability.
- FISA courts, re: 4th Amendment
One a company goes public though, or has significant external input (VC etc), things start on the slippery slope.
Well that's not exactly how it would work.
Everyone is tracked, but only certain people are watched. That added to the fact that any nation with a sufficiently complex legal system has no law abiding residents. You've always broken some law, somewhere.
So it would be more like:
>[Pick any person from] everyone in public [and the system has the capacity to list the reasons why that person] is a [criminal]
The "only certain people are watched" hinges on pinky swears, winks, and nods. IMO it's a distinction without a difference.
On strict sites like these, everyone runs sock puppet accounts and throwaways directly in response to the moderation.
A site with nothing like that would have far fewer accounts and engagement.
Ah ha!
Had nothing to do with any regulations though, actually didn't want to give anybody any ideas either way.
There were so many better things to do back then, and now even more variety of opportunities although not every "ecosystem" turns out to be a net positive if you're not careful.
Though GDPR would also ban this probably.
I'd regulate the database side of things.
What makes mass surveillance systems such as Flock, Ring, etc., incredibly objectionable isn't really the cameras. It's the databases they feed into that allow for the unprecedented invasion into our daily lives. That's also true for non-camera surveillance systems. The concentration and correlation of individually innocuous information adds up to an egregious assault on us all. That's the part that needs heavy restriction and regulation.
It also talks about uses cases where such things are allowed to be recorded, and forbids all others.
> IMO it is much more practical to regulate and penalize the activity of using such a network than to preempt its creation.
Hard disagree. If such a network is created, foreign adversaries (or domestic ones that don't abide by the laws) can hack them. Has happened quite a number of times.
(2) It can be both - we can ban the government from having direct access to mass surveillance and data privacy laws which makes retaining and using data on individuals much more restrictive.
The Frank Wilhoit quoted in parent is just some random dude who posted a pithy comment on a blog post. so good news, you can engage with the quote without any Kissinger or CIA baggage.
I love this analogy. It’s hardly a crime to kick my lawnmower until it starts to come apart. Vandalism at best. If you want to entirely dehumanize these people, at least go all the way.
It becomes harder over time to function in society without a smart phone (I know this because I barely use mine and it usually lives at home but my partner runs her life off hers).
We need laws mandating open and interoperable interfaces and standards for all the things a modern life takes for granted: public transit, banking, digital ID, etc.
Once that's in place, we can start talking about what people are "choosing". Because currently our "choice" is at best between a rock and a hard place (or as we say in my native tongue: between plague and cholera).
Privacy? Just buy Apple (largely an urban legend at this point, but regardless).
Actual ownership? Just buy Android.
Security? Just buy Apple (or Pixel with GrapheneOS).
Repairability? Just buy one of these 4 Android models.
Headphone jack? lol.
A camera pointed at a public street isn't the same constitutional question as LE searching a persistent database to reconstruct someone's movements. The latter falls into fourth amendment search territory.
The request is not taken at face value, you have to have it approved.
Edit: thanks for the downvotes? Genuinely curious on GPs experience.
https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/hearings/testimony-of-anthony-f...
How many Americans had heard of internal bureaucrat Anthony Fauci and NIAID before 2020?
Thanks for proving my point.
The government at least has a theoretical obligation to promote the public good. It isn't much but it's better than corporations whose only obligation is the shareholders.
The government is also subject to safeguards like freedom of infermation requests which level the playingfield somewhat.
I'm not saying that the government is good. I'm just saying that corporations are much worse.
Elected officials are basically the CEOs of each of these agencies, they have massive unilateral control and, apparently, can simply choose to unmake the agency at any point.
Except unlike CEOs, they require regular voter approval or they get punted out. If they make a stink the public hates the next president can easily axe their ass. That alone is infinitely better; how many of these horrible companies have 10-20 year CEOs pushing all this shit?
>drag their CEO into congress.
So they can lie and stick their tongue out for days, or just not show up? There is never any consequence for this, congress is functionally toothless. Only the courts and the executive can actually use punitive action.
The fact that there is an avenue of redress at all for public officials makes them so much more accountable than any corporation. Which is exactly why corporations spend so much money influencing public election and congress, they need to subvert the only system than can keep them in check.
Secondly, the DEA controls what my doctor can prescribe me (I am "blessed" with chronic pain), and those fuckwits have no business in the doctor-patient relationship.
And this will go on forever, because propaganda has brainwashed the populace that people need to be "protected" from dangerous drugs. Sure, drugs can be dangerous but the way it's being done now is beyond stupid, it is inherently evil.
Do I sound angry? Perhaps it's because I am. There's so much needless death and suffering and people just shrug their shoulders.
I say this as someone who agrees, cameras don’t work much. But my point is that people had better support some alternative then, instead of blocking every other attempt to improve the situation.
It's not dealing with it because its lazy passive action where citizens shrug responsibility off to a 3rd party who only cares about making money and not the people on the other end. Nothing actually happens because cameras won't deter anything and only increase the ability for the government to abuse people.
Dealing with it means learning from the past and taking action. If the lock on your garage was picked then harden the garage lock. If your car was broken into then maybe it's safer in the garage. Buy your own motion sensing cameras with remote viewing. Install security bars or security windows and doors. Motion sensing lights all over. You either sit around and cry for someone else to magically fix the crime problem or defend your possessions.
What a load of bullshit victim blaming.
Fundamentally impossible. Power structures are inherent to all human social activity. Even if we instantaneously abolished all governments and all power structures, new ones would spontaneously form immediately after.
> I am very unimpressed by political philosophies that take arguments to their logical conclusion.
People's inability or unwillingness to take things to their logical conclusion is why mainstream political philosophy is doomed to fail. If you want to test principles, then you must assign extreme values to all variables and see how the system copes. Everybody breaks under this simple test.
> we should carefully design laws and processes to constrain it
Those already exist and are routinely ignored. The US government routinely disregards the rights of its own citizens, and nothing happens, all it has to do is say the magic words "national security" and it all goes away. Every once in a while, evidence of abuses somehow surface and they are so egregious that they have no choice but to do something about it, but due to survivorship bias you must assume the abuse is far more prevalent than what you're actually seeing.
Only structural solutions meaningfully change this calculus. It must be impossible for the government to abuse you in any way. Anything short of that will fail.
The current President would be happy to give Flock's CEO a pardon, if the price is right. (For example: https://www.newsweek.com/ceo-pardoned-by-donald-trump-arrest...)
And from the original description it certainly sounds like you are living in an area where there is no enforcement. That is clearly a failure of you local municipality of which you are a part of. Now with that in mind, again, tell me how flock cameras are going to fix a seemingly non-functional government and police department?
> What a load of bullshit victim blaming.
If your local government isn't doing anything then you need to step up and protect yourself in its absence. Sorry if reality sucks.
>they can't be manipulated
if you want something that cant be manipulated or abused, the solution is technical, not legislative.
If your approach is that we can fix abuses by having the abuser write down rules that say they're not allowed to abuse us, why limit it to public surveillance? Stick cameras in everybody's houses while we're at it. Think of all the horrible crimes that go on behind closed doors. Solve the privacy issues with legislation.
> If your approach is that we can fix abuses by having the abuser write down rules that say they're not allowed to abuse us, why limit it to public surveillance? Stick cameras in everybody's houses while we're at it. Think of all the horrible crimes that go on behind closed doors. Solve the privacy issues with legislation.
People have a constitutional right to privacy in their own homes.
When the current administration is wiping its ass with the constitution on a daily basis, are you really so daft you can't see the direction we're headed in as a society in regard to an unregulated surveillance dragnet?
People have a constitutional right to due process and to not get murdered in the street by ICE (that's pronounced T-R-A-I-T-O-R, btw) but look how well that's been going.
You're correct that the government can't use a third party to circumvent privacy laws. But privacy laws never prohibited what Flock does. The government could directly set up its own cameras in public, and nothing about that violated the Fourth Amendment.
This is not true. The question is whether you have a "reasonable expectation of privacy." If you do, then the government needs a warrant. This is why the government can't tap a payphone without a warrant even though it is in public.
It is true that a single police officer can post up somewhere and scan license plates without a warrant. The difference here is scale. The question of whether scale affects a "reasonable expectation of privacy" has never been addressed by the supreme court, though it has been raised before and discussed in concurring opinions.
If not, why not?
If you do have a problem with public access to these cameras and tracking software, then it would be hypocritical.
Do they need a warrant to photograph the exterior of your house? No. Do they need a warrant to photograph you in public? No
This isn't the case of law enforcement using a third party to get around constitutional requirements. The government could set up their own cameras doing exactly what Flock does, and it would still not violate anyone's constitutional requirements. Because people don't have a right to not be recorded in public, no matter how much you want that to be the case.
The same amount that you do, dude. You're in every single one of these threads, and despite being proven wrong over and over again you keep being "confused" about how people are against this technology. Even in this thread, you keep responding with the same points based on your equivocation of an individual taking a picture in public and a state law enforcement organization aggregating and tracking individuals who haven't committed crimes.
Try reading some SC cases and actually paying attention to the responses you're getting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49629159
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49629142
And yet you still start yet another thread insisting that a database makes public facing video cameras a privacy violation.
When have I been "proven wrong over and over again"? The court cases you've cited are all about governments demanding private cell phone location information. You're trying to take decisions that amount to, "the police need a warrant to demand private cellphone location data from telecoms" and make the enormous leap to your imaginary decision, "the police cannot record people in public and search those recordings".
The reason these strategies (for the same goal) don't seem equivalent is due to the nature of oversight. Flock as a centralized private company governed by a procedural system, can be corrupted and abused more easily than a distributed network. Flock's systems have already been abused and will continue to be.
Re Title: Flock doesn't "want" anything in particular, other than to sell more contracts and make more money.
There are already precedents - for example it's legal to film ICE agents in public spaces, it's not necessarily legal to use information to dox if that can be construed as harassment.
Even if you crowd sourced the identification of somebody involved in a potentially criminal act, you can only share that with the police and not the wider public.
The law is asymmetric here because the police have powers reserved for themselves to stop vigilantism.
Perhaps an interesting angle here would be if you can make the case that companies like flock are involved in harressment themselves...
This is an incorrect understanding of the issue, these individuals are protected using a unique and unusual statute. In a mass broadcast scenario, without identifying their profession in context, there's arguably no crime here. There's certainly no crime to broadcast that you've seen their license plates with no association with their names (the statute doesn't cover that.)
> Even if you crowd sourced the identification of somebody involved in a potentially criminal act, you can only share that with the police and not the wider public.
What are you talking about? This is most certainly legally false in the United States. If you are incorrect about someone you might be found against for libel, but there's no crime here. This is basic First Amendment activity. Have you never watched the news or read a newspaper? Allegations are part and parcel.
These are also entirely the wrong analogies. Both of these are highly individualized scenarios that are not akin to Flock. "Public Flock" is more like a public traffic cam that anyone can view, and these already exist without issue.
Every door man, every hotel employee, every uber driver, every concert-goer, every grocery shopper, every student, and on and on and on. Anonymously streaming their encrypted feeds. Have them turn their cameras onto the street. Especially, say, in front of hotels or at certain restaurants and resorts. Ohhh, and at convention centers as well. Just to show it can pick out subjects at busy places and track them around any city reliably.
Naturally, we'd need some sample facial recognition queries just to show how to use the system. We could start with, say, public figures like Representatives, and Senators? And just to prove it works for less famous people, maybe we could have some example names of regular, everyday employees. Like employees at, I don't know?? Palantir, Flock and Clearview maybe? Just to demonstrate the value and effectiveness of public surveillance networks.
Sure. There's absolutely nothing illegal about monitoring the location and activity of police (unless you broke some other law to do so, like hacking).
Hell, most of them will simply tell you where they are and what they're doing, as they tend to broadcast over unencrypted radio (which is also not illegal to listen to).
In theory, sure. In practice? Good luck.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2025/10/03/apple-t...
Though bizarrely in the UK that's legal if you do it via Waze, not if you do it via whatsapp.
"Reasonable expectation of privacy" covers things like restrooms. Not highways, streets, parking lots, etc. This isn't relevant for Flock.
people love saying this as if its some sort of gotcha.
ive been campaigning for candidates i believe in since ive been able to vote, which is over 40 years now. additionally, i voice my opinion locally and online (hi).
which is something that only happens after abuse occurs, is costly (time and money), presents a risk of retaliation, and offers no guarantee of being made whole.
>What's the alternative to fixing this with laws/lawsuits?
not doing mass surveillance means we don't need legislation about it.
>Do we riot when "the police and governments break laws"?
why did you scare quote this?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States
The fact that the data is owned by a private company or that some of it is considered private by the individual doesn't matter: it's about tracking individuals over time.
> A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere. To the contrary, “what [one] seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.” Katz, 389 U. S., at 351–352. A majority of this Court has already recognized that individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements. Jones, 565 U. S., at 430 (Alito, J., concurring in judgment); id., at 415 (Sotomayor, J., concurring). Prior to the digital age, law enforcement might have pursued a suspect for a brief stretch, but doing so “for any extended period of time was difficult and costly and therefore rarely undertaken.” Id., at 429 (opinion of Alito, J.). For that reason, “society’s expectation has been that law enforcement agents and others would not—and indeed, in the main, simply could not—secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period.” Id., at 430.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/16-402
Edit for your edit: you haven't refuted anything man, you keep trotting out the same arguments in those linked threads:
- The data includes "private movements" which is why it's unconstitutional (the SC said aggregation of public data can impel privacy concerns)
- An individual or LE can take a photograph of you or your house, therefore collecting photographs from geolocated cameras and tracking you over time is not constitutionally distinct (but it is)
- The specific technology at the center of these cases are not ALPRs, therefore the rulings have no bearing on Flock (despite the fact that courts are not litigating the specific technology, but rather the constitutional principles of their use)
But does it? You keep insisting this is the case, but your attempts to back up this claim are cases with totally different scenarios. Namely demanding that telecoms hand over location information.
> - An individual or LE can take a photograph of you or your house, therefore collecting photographs from geolocated cameras and tracking you over time is not constitutionally distinct (but it is)
The point is to emphasize that the information collected by Flock is in plain view. The plain view doctrine is well established. The police don't need a warrant to observe publicly visible things.
> The specific technology at the center of these cases are not ALPRs, therefore the rulings have no bearing on Flock (despite the fact that courts are not litigating the specific technology, but rather the constitutional principles of their use)
The cases you've cited all involved private information being obtained without a warrant. You can't just ignore the fact that a GPS tracker or cell phone location information also reveals private movements, as opposed to public facing camera which only record public activity.
"To the contrary, “what [one] seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.” Katz, 389 U. S., at 351–352. A majority of this Court has already recognized that individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements. Jones, 565 U. S., at 430 (Alito, J., concurring in judgment);"
This is about the police planting a GPS tracker on someone's car - that's that "Jones" is referring to here. That case involved the police tracking someone in public and in private.
For example:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/federal-prosecutors-char...
or https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/santa-monica-man-pleads...
The statute in question is 18 USC § 119: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/119
To preface: this statute is very arguably prior restraint and unconstitutional, which is likely why you only see those cases (non-affluent, non-connected defendants.) Furthermore, you'll notice that it requires "intent to threaten, intimidate, or incite the commission of a crime of violence."
I hate to get specific into this one very questionable statute, but no general/broad restrictions exist with regards to disseminating the video data or license plate information contained within. License plate data doesn't fall into the statute's definition of "restricted personal information," and the operator of a hypothetical service that doesn't single out these "protected" individuals amongst the rest of the population cannot be possibly construed as having malicious intent. This is an extremely unusual statute, few others like it exist.
A "public Flock" would let any interested party query the entire database of observed license plates. Collection isn't individualized to any one person, use and intent resides with the individual consuming the service.
I can see how a public flock, which is just a queryable database, would be ok under the current rules. But would it make the government want to regulate? They could just continue to go after data use where legal asymmetry already exists.
You could frame almost any use as some sort of stalking/harassment.
Even in this case if they shut it down, government carve outs would apply.
Law enforcement searches a database of recorded, retained, aggregated data about people who have not committed crimes: this constitutes a fourth amendment search. Go ahead and record all you want, but when law enforcement decides to use that data, they have to get a warrant.
This is far removed from a camera set up in a public space.
Police do need a warrant to place a GPS device on your vehicle.
Data continuity is a function of data point frequency [0]. If all public space (and some participating private space) is monitored, the practical difference between a GPS device and a retroactive dragnet system disappears.
You are correct that police do not require a warrant to follow someone around in public, but these systems aren't that, and in practice much closer to the GPS tracking, which does require a warrant. It's unclear without trying this further in court which this should qualify as.
IMO: If the system has seen me exit the public space outside my home, or work, or someone elses home, or a store, or whevever, the system knows where I am at all points in time, like a GPS, with very little exception.
You seem to be under the impression that the opinion of the court in the Jones was that everyone's public movements are private and the police need a warrant to track your public movements through and any all means. But that was not the decision of the court. The police and still just follow you, Jones notwithstanding.
You can desire your public movements to be protected by the Fourth amendment all you want, but that does not make it so.
And maybe it wasn't the decision in Jones, but Carpenter specifically cites Alito's concurrence for the proposition that a person has a 4A privacy interest in aggregation of movement data and describes GPS tracking in Jones as raising those privacy concerns.
Again, this is far removed from a camera in a public space.
...and including movements occurring in private.
> The fact that the data is owned by a private company or that some of it is considered private by the individual doesn't matter: it's about tracking individuals over time.
More importantly, tracking their private movements over time, not just their public movements. You're hand waving away an important part of the case. And the decision does not extend to ALPR readers, from what I can tell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States
> The Supreme Court's ruling in Carpenter was narrow and did not otherwise change the third-party doctrine related to other business records that might incidentally reveal location information, nor did it overrule prior decisions concerning conventional surveillance techniques and tools such as security cameras.
Trying to interpret Carter v. US as prohibiting public security cameras is a very big leap
> A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere. To the contrary, “what [one] seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.”
This would still be an issue even if they weren't recorded in private spaces. At issue here is the reconstruction of data, regardless of if it happened in public or private spaces.
Persistent technological tracking of a person's public movements can constitute a search. The fact that each individual movement occurs in public does not automatically eliminate fourth amendment protection, nor does it matter that its a third party that does the collecting (Google, Flock, whoever). What matters is that LE is conducting fourth amendment searches using that data.
> The fact that each individual movement occurs in public does not automatically eliminate fourth amendment protection, nor does it matter that its a third party that does the collecting (Google, Flock, whoever).
Sure, doesn't eliminate Fourth Amendment protections: the police can't just search your car because it's in public. But that doesn't meant police can't record public spaces.
> What matters is that LE is conducting fourth amendment searches using that data.
Recording public spaces isn't a Fourth Amendment search. That's what distinguishes Flock from the other cases you mentioned.
"Flock and other ALPR tech is illegal"
And
"Flock and other ALPR tech is legal. But it's my personal prediction that some future Supreme Court decision will make them illegal."
For reference, US v. Jones was a 9-0 in the SC, in favor of Jones, though bipartisan split on the reasoning, which might be what carries over to any case that gets tried regarding this tech.
It's legal until your expected Supreme Court decision lands. This is just another way of saying "Flock tech is legal, but if the Supreme Court rules the way I want then it will become illegal."
> For reference, US v. Jones was a 9-0 in the SC, in favor of Jones, though bipartisan split on the reasoning, which might be what carries over to any case that gets tried regarding this tech
"Might be" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. And again, until the court actually gives that ruling, Flock is legal.
Carpenter's reasoning concerning comprehensive records of an individual's movements (regardless of private or public) are relevant when LE uses aggregated Flock data to reconstruct a person's movements over an extended period.
By contrast, a person can stand on a street corner with their phone and record everything a Flock camera records.
And again, a person standing on a street corner is constitutionally distinct from LE following and tracking individuals movement over time.
Specifically, the GPS coordinates logged by their cellphones.
> So you're kind of agreeing with me here: the data is either private and subject to a warrant, or it is in public where individuals do have a reasonable expectation of privacy wrt aggregated location information.
You're missing the point: Flock camera's don't record where people have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
> And again, a person standing on a street corner is constitutionally distinct from LE following and tracking individuals movement over time.
Wrong: as long as law enforcement are only tracking your movements in public, they don't need a warrant or probable cause.
Only when that tracking is done via cell phone location information. The Carpenter decision did not apply this to all forms of public monitoring. You keep ignoring the fact that the decision was narrowly scoped to cell phone location data, and continue to erroneously claim that it applied to public tracking in general.
"A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere. To the contrary, 'what [one] seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.'"
> But that doesn't meant police can't record public spaces.
> Recording public spaces isn't a Fourth Amendment search.
I'm not saying either of these things. The quote that you're responding to literally says "What matters is that LE is conducting fourth amendment searches using that data". I don't care who collects the data (Flock, or Axon, or Google, or whoever): if the cops are searching a persistent database which monitors and tracks people over time, it is a 4A issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States
> The Supreme Court's ruling in Carpenter was narrow and did not otherwise change the third-party doctrine related to other business records that might incidentally reveal location information, nor did it overrule prior decisions concerning conventional surveillance techniques and tools such as security cameras.
You're trying to expand the scope of the decision on Carpenter to encompasses video cameras, or location tracking in general, but that is not true.
> The quote that you're responding to literally says "What matters is that LE is conducting fourth amendment searches using that data".
No, it does not. It says that public activity may be protected, not that it is protected. And you're conveniently ignoring the fact that this decision was narrowly scoped to the context of phone location data.
> if the cops are searching a persistent database which monitors and tracks people over time, it is a 4A issue.
Carpenter only established this in the context of phone location information. You're inventing your own decision when you try to expand this to public facing cameras.
> nor did it overrule prior decisions
I'm not saying it overruled prior decisions. I'm saying the reasoning of the judges has an effect on future surveillance technologies.
> You're trying to expand the scope of the decision on Carpenter to encompasses video cameras, or location tracking in general, but that is not true.
No, I'm saying that the same principles that led to the outcome of Carpenter also apply to technologically-assisted tracking (which includes LE using surveillance cameras to track movements over time).
And this is just a factually wrong statement about the Carpenter decision. The Supreme Court didn't apply the same principles to other methods of surveillance. They could have. But they did not, and instead gave a narrowly scoped decision that was limited to cell phone location data.
What you think the Supreme Court should have decided is irrelevant.
> A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere. To the contrary, “what [one] seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.” Katz, 389 U. S., at 351–352. A majority of this Court has already recognized that individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements. Jones, 565 U. S., at 430 (Alito, J., concurring in judgment); id., at 415 (Sotomayor, J., concurring). Prior to the digital age, law enforcement might have pursued a suspect for a brief stretch, but doing so “for any extended period of time was difficult and costly and therefore rarely undertaken.” Id., at 429 (opinion of Alito, J.). For that reason, “society’s expectation has been that law enforcement agents and others would not—and indeed, in the main, simply could not—secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period.” Id., at 430.
You can continue to tell me that the court narrowed the scope of the final decision, but "A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere" is quite clear. Cool, the final decision narrowed the scope to cell phone location data; that is irrelevant to what we're discussing and doesn't negate that the concurrence literally states that part of the reasoning is that people don't lose 4A rights just because they're being surveilled in public:
> A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere
Just because you want to claim that cell phone location data is somehow completely distinct from photographic location data because people can take photographs in public doesn't make it so.
And even then your quotes are much weaker than you seem to think:
> what [one] seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.”
"May be" means that there are some situations where it is protected, but also means ther exist other situations where it is not.
"the ball is blue", and "the ball may be blue" are two vastly different statements. Even if only a fraction of one percent of balls are blue, we can still make the statement "the ball may be blue".
> ...law enforcement agents and others would not — and indeed, in the main, simply could not — secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period.”
Flock cameras don't monitor every movement of a car - only where those cameras are present. Furthermore they're not secret: Flock cameras are publicly visible, and many governments public maps of where cameras have coverage.