Facebook got a lot of mileage out of that, running long after public scandals confirmed the early hints of possible sketchiness, back when Google was an attractive alternative.
Though I don't know that's still necessary. The job markets are different now, since there's not many tech employment options that aren't either sketchy or reviled. Anti-AI-worker sentiment seems high lately, outside of HN circles -- much more widespread and negative than I recall any kind of perception of pre-AI tech workers -- yet there aren't a lot of non-AI employment options.
So, some Flock employees might want to leave, over ethics, social status, or company internal culture, but... if they end up at a AI company, they might soon still be seeing a lot of social negative feedback anyway.
("Hi, nice to meet you. ... Me? Oh, I work on, uh, software. ... Yeah, AI is really disrupting things in my field, too. It's been a bit rough, but we're hanging in there.")
In other words, since surveillance of the public by definition involves the public, the public should have a say in how it is conducted and the companies that attempt to profit from it should have their revenue streams depend on a healthy relationship with the public.
If you know you are and don’t care, culture fit ! :)
Now we just need the same shame for broader surveillance capitalism (Google, Facebook, AI companies, etc).
I'm sure most people who work for flock compartmentalize their jobs to "I work on fingerprinting vehicles" or "I work on advanced OCR", or "I work on creating camera to camera trajectory graphs". This way they don't need to think about (too often) the larger ramifications of what they are doing. When the press points out what is the reality and that most people are pissed at Flock then the employees likely have to confront what they do in a way that they never had to.
I didn’t know that Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil was something people willfully embraced.
Being a magnet of attention as a despised surveillance corp has to be tiring
I wonder what Paul Graham says to the Flock executives now?
I mean look at NSA, Presidency, etc. "no conscious, no problem!"
Just "other" victims and imply they are all criminals somehow someway and you can dismiss any feeling of doing wrong
For some reason, Flock became a rallying point on both the left and the right.
Flock provides nothing direct to the consumer which means this is going to get worse and Id stake a wager they rebrand after raising their next huge round.
Idk, doesn't seem that surprising that it ruffles more feathers.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/28/more-americans-oppose-poli...
Historically, surveillance is used for good and evil. Certainly, Nazi Germany would have killed many more Jews if flock had existed during that time. Their surveillance was pretty primitive by modern standards, and they still managed to track, identify, and execute millions of Jewish people.
Ultimately, we have to take a step back and analyze if our incentives and systems are designed such that surveillance is used for good, and evil use is deterred. And, regardless of political affiliation, the answer to that analysis should be a resounding no.
Do we keep our officials and law enforcement officers accountable? When surveillance is misused, does anyone even know, let alone prosecute? How difficult is it to misuse surveillance? How much transparency is built-in to how the surveillance is used? These are the questions we should be asking.
I think you would be surprised. Now, whether or not the average local politician is indifferent is not the same as the average person.
But Americans are raised from birth with the idea of “freedom” and a camera pointed at you recording your every move is antithetical to that. They somewhat tolerate it in private establishments like malls and restaurants but not in public spaces.
Those departments buy their products. If they took that angle publicly I bet many departments would suddenly been much less interested in buying/renewing. Accountability seems to be super unpopular (which says A LOT) with their customers.
Like, when the police were saying "we can't turn on body cameras all the time because it might violate victims rights" the correct response from axon was "we also happen to sell a very expensive victim redaction software on a separate SKU, until you buy that probably just want to let your officers use discretion wink-nod."
(I am maybe unfairly assuming here that their actual intent was to make money rather than protect the public from police abuses. I'd love to hear from folks at Axon if that isn't true!)