It's pretty clear to be that governments shouldn't be able to 'subcontract' their way out of the limits placed on them via the constitution.
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).
> It's pretty clear to be that governments shouldn't be able to 'subcontract' their way out of the limits placed on them via the constitution
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. Privacy laws, for the most part, protect what people do in private.
The other thing that's going on is that Flock is essentially an always-on "dragnet."
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.
Recently was driving in the middle of nowhere in Texas.. And I saw a few flock cameras watching both ways in highways there too. So it is not just cities, states are implicated too.
It's for a good cause! This has enabled the DEA to keep all dangerous drugs out of the country and avoid any sort of drug abuse epidemics! Think of the children!
I'm guessing this was /s sarcasm given the "think of the children" reference. Just saying so in case others didn't get the reference and thought you were being sincere...
Uh, the rest of the comment is obviously false and sarcastic as well. Dangerous drugs are at an all time high and the epidemic is immediately apparent in downtown streets
No. It is not and to claim otherwise is hyperbole. The key difference is police stopping and/or questioning people en masse without reasonable suspicion is in fact illegal unless under extreme circumstances. Simply noting everyone’s license plate is wholly legal, and more importantly for this conversation, is drastically less intrusive and qualitatively different from a so-called dragnet. You don’t get to just conflate the two scenarios to better fit your personal preferences of what is or is not legal.
While I'd generally agree that Apple is the better of the two on the privacy side it's still a false choice because you pretty much have to pick one as a regular person as things currently stand.
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).
The fact that most people in the western world have two terrible companies to choose between in order to have normal life conveniences is outrageous. (Here in Europe we actually have no choices that operate under our laws!)
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).
This style of argument is nonsense because deciding between Android and Apple has about a hundred unrelated but equally important consequences. There is no choice that aligns with all of your wishes (and rights).
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.
Well, nowadays, Google location history is stored on-device. Google Maps sends your position to their servers, both for geocoding and to power their traffic estimation. Even when location history was in the cloud, you could turn it off. It even asked when you opened Maps for the first time. Most people chose the default blue button to leave it on. You could also just turn off location on your phone entirely when you didn't want Google to know where you were.
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.
I think there's a reason that they've pushed to get these things up all over the country in a very short amount of time. I feel like the more entrenched they are the less likely the Supreme Court is really going to find against them and tear up the business model, regardless of whether it would be logically consistent or not.
In their defense, Flock didn't start off quite this way. They were initially offering a product geared to HOAs and private entities to help with simple violations and things like that. At some point they stumbled on this loophole of allowing LEO's to sidestep restrictions on collecting and storing this kind of data, and then it took off. They were well past the YC investment at that point.
(and just to be clear, at this point I think that Flock has turned into an anti-Constitutional threat to US Citizens and should be wholesale banned and put out of business).
> I didn’t believe it at first, because I’ve always considered YC, in spite of its flaws, to be politically astute.
YC's current CEO is Garry Tan, who has a lot of ties to effective accelerationism and the dark enlightenment movement (The Curtis Yarvin/network state/cuckoo for cocoa puffs far-right tech broligarch movement that wants to end all democratic oversight of tech companies).
So, yeah, not only is Flock a YC company, but YC's current CEO produces a lot of propaganda for them. For example, this:
...which is perhaps the most obviously Claude-generated AI slop content I have seen (and since the internet is becoming a firehose of this shit, I've seen quite a lot). Like somehow every fucking sentence in it is peak claude-slop.
Flock will be a big curriculum that tarnishes YC. Already under YC videos, comments are related to the Flock scandal. Denizen will want to make it a pain for YC until they fix their ethical problem.
There is not generally an expectation of privacy in public. Things in public can be recorded without consent. Filming a car on a street and giving that video to the government is not the same as me giving private information to a third party, and then them giving it to the government such as Carpenter v United states covers.
Edit: Note that this is not an endorsement, rather stating that recent supreme court cases may not be applicable.
Private citizens filming in public and police forces setting up arrays of surveillance cameras in public somehow don’t seem equivalent. I’m not a lawyer so I can’t properly articulate what the legal difference is. And if there isn’t one then the law needs change. Clearly the majority of citizens agree with me.
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?
> 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?
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).
> Private citizens filming in public and police forces setting up arrays of surveillance cameras in public somehow don’t seem equivalent.
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.
It's legal to film publically - what's not necessarily legal is what you then do with that.
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...
> it's not necessarily legal to use information to dox if that can be construed as harassment.
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.
I guess I'm more cynical at this point. This isn't the 1970s when a congressman freaked out that his video rental history might leak and passed a law making them private for everyone as cover. They've evolved beyond that. They'll pass a law banning it for individuals but leaving a loophole for themselves. Like how Chat Control always contains a provision so that officials messages aren't a part of the dragnet.
I loathe surveillance networks. As much as I loathe them, I'm sadly forced to concede that probably citizens setting up a trivially join-able, anonymous, open source surveillance network is probably the only way to get the powerful to think about what they're doing.
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.
The language doesn't really cover things correctly.
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.
>Assuming everyone in public is a suspect and continually investigating them, is a big change in how society works.
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]
These systems aren't perfect recognition oracles - there are lots of errors, especially as you scale up the technology. At the end of the day, it's a probabilistic identification correlated to a stream with a mix of of reported or suspected crimes. Your framing completely misses the reality. I'd argue that the OP's language is a much better fit.
>There is not generally an expectation of privacy in public.
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.
Likewise being recorded on a cctv camera which sits on a vhs for a few weeks and then is consulted when a crime has occurred is very different to being recorded on a camera and being immediately processed, analysed, and information kept forever, including “person X arrived at time Y accompanied by person Z”
Rehnquist anticipated but unfortunately did not prevent the abuse of the third party doctrine back in 1983.
“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).
> There is not generally an expectation of privacy in public.
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.
Flock goes far beyond that, they allow the government to retroactively string together a person's history of movement. Prior cases establish that continuous and retrospective tracking like that violates a reasonable expectation of privacy and requires a warrant.
Prompting a system to give a history of a person’s movements (even if they’re movements “in public”) is not something that has any historical analogy. The law has slapped down the “it’s in public” argument in cases like this, see eg Baltimore’s ubiquitous aerial surveillance (they put a wide-angle lense on a surveillance plane and recorded everything, so they could rewind and search anyone’s locations.)
Yes, there is an expectation in the history of free society that the government is not proactively observing every person on every block, asking for ID, and following them down the streets, then documenting that and correlating it with other people's activities and making it accessible to law enforcement personnel without a warrant across the country.
I retch when people say there is no expectation of privacy in public as some naive defense of the panopticon.
In human terms, frequency, impact, and scale matter. If my little dog puts a few ounces of pee in some random person's front yard, it's seen as a micro-infraction at best. Vs. Flock's ideal is more like a factory farm just up the hill, with ever-leaking urine retention ponds.
Without any real privacy laws, Americans should not have the expectation of privacy in private spaces either. Your search history, real time location, biometric data, consumer habits etc. are all for sale to anyone who wants it.
Cool we should maybe change those laws then, these definitions of privacy came about in a world where there weren't cameras on everyones face and front porch.
The US government, the 4th reich, cannot be trusted with these tools, especially their law enforcement.
> 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.
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.
We can absolutely say that, for instance, taking pictures in public is legal but surveilling is not. We could say that recording public spaces systematically, for the purposes of surveillance, is not permitted. That does not require us to say that individuals cannot record in a public place. We can even say that individuals or companies are not allowed to collude to effectively turn individual recordings into systematic public surveillance (e.g. you can't build a product that searches everyone's personal videos of spaces and turns them into a spotty surveillance network).
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.
The GDPR is far from perfect, but it does cover this. It talks about acquiring and storing information that can be used to identify people. It doesn't specify what counts, so now that face recognition is pretty, it automatically applies to images.
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.
I could probably be convinced that some sort of panopticon license plate reader network could be a net positive for society IF it had the necessary and demonstrably infallible audit and oversight systems - especially with respect to the 4th amendment in the United States (i.e. search warrants).
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?"
In an age where your TV is spying on you and your fucking refrigerator is showing you ads, do you really think Flock doesn't already have thousands of ideas on how to monetize commercial surveillance data in the post law enforcement phase?
It exists to give an information asymmetry enabling a maximally extractive market at the cost of inefficiency.
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.
>. To me, the far more insidious problem is what happens when Flock needs to keep showing growth?
>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.
Elison and Oracle are a big threat, they have an obsession with holding as much data as possible, for every single US citizen they can get their hands on, and it is no coincidence they not only sell electoral targeting demographic data, but also are trying to install dystopian level servers under the whitehouse.
You are of course correct, the issue with this reason and legality based arguments ignore the issue and fact that the capability is the real problem, not whether some local deputy can stalk someone. It’s something I’ve argued with several legal advocacy and rights groups, this is not the time to compromise and rely on case law.
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.”
Were pretending we can still have a socratic discussion about this with any consequence.
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.
Corporations are more accountable than government agencies. A government agency can switch vendors or you can drag their CEOs in front of Congress. Try that with some internal bureaucrat in an agency you've never heard of.
Leaders of departments (i.e. the government equivalent of a CEO) are dragged in front of congress all the time.
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.
Not even remotely true, Idk how you can say this with a straight face after all we have seen in Trump 1 and Trump 2.
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.
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.
Welcome to the thunder dome. YC is not our friends, they just host what (was) a niche forum where early tech peeps could have mostly civil conversations. It’s become increasingly hostile in moderation and sharp political opinions, that a lot of the joy here has fumbled out. (sorry mod team..I know you deal with a lot and traffic/spam keeps growing).
To be less cynical, I think it would require editing to original submission. I also see why editing the “bad press” company submissions could have undesirable optics. So, maybe the mods just choose to be a bit more laissez faire than normal and lets the community self moderate the related posts. Probably within some reason in the comment section, but they allow us all to be quite critical in ways that could easily be considered against the HN guidelines and they’re not squashing it either. I think that is perhaps the best stance for them to take honestly.
I assume it's because Flock is a YC company, and HN is the YC board, and somebody has instituted a policy of not making the link clear (and it worked on me! I had no idea) due to the negative publicity - but that's so obvious, that you must be thinking of something else.
Perhaps its time that YC mentioned explicitly that if they are going to fund a company which holds specific PII data(i would include precise location history to start with) they would have to guarantee:
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.
Why would they do that? Venture capital isn't there to serve people like us or to protect any kind of common interest. There is only one thing they know - money.
Sure, but YC can enforce it if they want to. VC after all is a private body governed by private individuals, they can make moral choices. VCs could even support this by offering terms to offset the costs.
I cannot believe that a company cannot be profitable but at the same time not build for at least some better privacy guarantees.
A bit concerning how some people in this thread will bend over backwards to defend mass surveillance. Not surprising given who owns the board, but still.
I still am opposed to anything capable of mass surveillance because of how easily it is abused. But living in Seattle, my car has been broken into 4 times this summer alone (with nothing taken, because we leave nothing there), thiefs dug up the side of my house to steel copper wires, on my block someone dumped gasoline all over a tree and lit it on fire just because, people went around the neighborhood smashing front flower pots, many of the local businesses have had their windows smashed by robbers twice this year. Last year someone broke into my garage using a lock pick and stole a bunch of tools and my car license plate (and the cops actually caught him because he was driving in the hov lane with my reported-stolen license plate on lol).
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 proper support when they are harassed by crime this much?
A lot of techies have lived in China and seen how that country has stronger social harmony than the West and is gradually outpacing it, so mass surveillance clearly isn't an obstacle to the general prosperity.
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.
> A lot of techies have lived in China and seen how that country has stronger social harmony than the West and is gradually outpacing it, so mass surveillance clearly isn't an obstacle to the general prosperity.
They also have no political freedom and limited human rights in China, which is a tradeoff I'm not willing to make. Especially because America isn't going to get the social harmony even if we do the mass surveillance. Our demographics and history don't allow for the same kinds of solutions they use in China.
> 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.
"The problem with the totalitarian authoritarian surveillance state is that it isn't totalitarian or authoritarian enough" is for fucking sure a take.
Yes, the problems are trust and consistency of enforcement. We have neither in the US and I’m not sure how we would ever get there.
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.
We need to keep our surveillance of the surveillance state broad. There’s a lot of focus on Flock right now (rightfully so), but they are merely a single player in the privatized surveillance state architecture.
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.
At the very least they need to make public accessible all data collected about all employees and owners of Flock, and everyone in government agencies that contract with Flock. This means we can see all photos and videos of these people, every trip they make, etc. All searchable with AI, with no audit trail (just like it is for government agencies).
You seem to be missing a basic fact about how the world works: there are two classes of people, those who make the rules, and those who are expected to follow the rules. These classes are largely disjoint.
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
I'm generally in favor of mass surveillance, as long as it's in public. I think it can prevent a lot of crime and I don't believe we have a right to "privacy in public". Red light cameras, for example, strike me as unalloyed good.
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.
I generally actually agree with you. The real issue with these cameras is the network effect that allows them to stalk anyone anywhere.
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.
That sounds like an argument for anarchism. I am very unimpressed by political philosophies that take arguments to their logical conclusion.
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.
No, it is an argument that the best way not to abuse something is to not have access to it. If you enshrine a ban of total surveillance on a deep and universal level in a country, it'll be a lot more difficult for a future bad actor state to reinstate it. We need the most extreme legal hurdles that can exist. More importantly, if the technology isn't actually physically installed, it becomes even more of an uphill battle for a future corrupt government. Your proposal is for surveilling everyone but making a pinky promise that no one in the chain will ever be corrupt at any point in the future, because all it would take at that point is changing some words on a page, refusing to prosecute an abuse of power, using some loopholes or pushing a software update.
The modern legally bound nation state has done much better at guaranteeing rights and protecting freedoms than any other configurations despite the fact that it's constained largely by "pinky promises" (i.e. laws, courts, etc).
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.
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.
This post is a good example of why I find the anti-surveillance people so tiresome
> 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".
> Red light cameras, for example, strike me as unalloyed good.
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.
Right, and while we're at it, we can stop theft by having the thieves choose not to steal.
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 red light cameras are incorrectly calibrated, that seems like something that could be challenged in court and changed.
> 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.
At some point Flock will be drones that fly for 30 minutes, get a replacement drone in its place, and the 30 minute one will land, automatically swap batteries and take off again and get into a different zone.
Multiple things can be true at the same time... do you think the seller doesn't want a closely surveilled world with no exits?
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 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.
That was a reference to a Bryan Cantril speech, and it's more about the lawnmower's ability to gravely harm your person without having any intent or feeling beyond doing what a lawnmower does.
It's hard to see how you wouldn't at least be okay with that outcome if you were actively making it happen. But maybe this is just explaining why I'll never have that much money.
This is the drug-dealer justification -- "if I don't [sell drugs|provide mass surveillance at an unprecedented scale|crush these kittens] someone else will"
There are buyers who want drugs for recreational reasons, murders for emotional reasons, or spy cams on hotel rooms for business reasons. But those are simply 3 instances where existent demand doesn't mean we should be allowing any offer to exist.
I'd personally agree to put Flock-levels of civil vigilance in the same bag.
Fundamentally this is silly because Flock only tracks cars and not individual people. It doesn't do facial recognition surveillance. Society decided a long time ago that driving is a privilege that can be regulated in a variety of ways.
There is a societal consensus that driving is a privilege which can be restricted or revoked, not that you give up your rights by driving. In fact the opposite is true, the courts have found that drivers have fourth amendment rights for instance.
I agree that Flock and other license plate readers should be regulated. Law enforcement should be logged and have rules for how and when they can access these records. What I would strongly disagree with is the idea that flock and license plate readers are unconstitutional and should be banned.
Tracking vehicles lets you strongly infer who's driving them. Individual people have already gotten into trouble over their vehicles being spotted by Flock. If it could not be used to track people, the technology would be almost useless. Just because driving is a privilege (it's more of a requirement in the US, but the US at large doesn't really understand coercion) doesn't let you do anything you can come up with to people possessing that privilege.
I've been very pleased to see the reaction to Flock in the US. I was talking to a younger guy, very normal kid who keeps his nose clean, studying criminal justice in his junior year at college. I jokingly mentioned to him that maybe he could bring some anti-surveillance awareness to whatever law enforcement agency he goes to work for and he said, very seriously, "oh yeah, definitely. I've only gotten two cameras so far but I want to get at least five." It turns out that he and his friends all follow an app that marks the location of Flock cameras and there's a whole youth culture around knocking them down.
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".
Those battles are only ever won over decades. The problem is that technology has vastly outpaced our ability to regulate and respond to it, and the system meant to provide checks and balances has been vastly corrupted.
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 very pleased to see the reaction to Flock in the US.
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.
Are you trying to conflate wildlife tracking and monitoring with this police state dragnet? If so that's a wild take. I'm pretty sure modern wildlife tracking practices are not what's at stake here.
Honestly, most the flock cameras are installed on a fence post that is easily vandalized. This movement will be matched by sturdier construction and the resistance will likely sigh, get bored, and move onto something else.
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.
When I drive by a Flock camera, my streaming music in my 2014 Rav starts to get scrambled. These cameras are intercepting bluetooth. It seems Toyota didn't account for that latency :facepalm:
The solution to this is legislation. Legislation enshrining a right to not be studied, a right to be forgotten, penalties for even creating certain kinds of datasets.
I think the Americans should push for a constitutional amendment that protects one's right to privacy.
The real protections are where and how the data is allowed to be used, the state has had the technical capability of breaking into your home, following you, and reading your mail forever. But they aren't allowed to use it in court to prosecute you.
Nothing new about that desire. Only thing different is the technology has caught up with the desire such that some technocrats can make living in that hell a reality.
Not an American, what made Flock special compared to other surveillance cameras?
Informationized or intelligentized surveillances cameras arent a new thing.
Mass deployment on public property and the network effect that having them all connected and using things like license plate readers is all pretty new.
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.
The fact that they allow unlimited access to any law enforcement organization, where they can surveil anyone across the entire country. Police have used it to stalk ex-partners, for example. The number of cameras are also an order of magnitude higher. I can't leave my driveway without being tracked.
It's interesting to me that most of the people who are motivated to vandalize Flock cameras seem to balk at vandalizing Ring cameras. Indeed, they may own and operate their own Ring cameras.
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.
Lots of people are opposed to Ring. Sentiments grew much stronger after their Superbowl commercial creeped people out. Many tech minded people moved towards cloudless solutions for their home cameras.
Ring cameras don't record and index every single license plate that it sees and hand that data over directly to law enforcement. There's a huge difference between surveilling your own private property, and a massive network of ALPRs feeding data directly into government systems.
The article reads more like a reverse psychology article directed at the public rather than a real criticism of mass surveillance.
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.
The sad truth is that many citizens want a closely surveilled world. Flock delivers the product they want.
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?
Mass surveillance is a crime against humanity. They want us all to live in an open air prison. Garrett Langley should be regarded as a domestic terrorist and be in a real prison.
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.
I hate that this has to be an all or nothing conversation. There is a path where technology can deliver benefits without significant harm to individual privacy.
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.
I don’t disagree, but effective enforcement of the law as it is written has to play a role. There is a kernel of truth behind the broken windows theory of policing. When it’s widely known that the law can’t be reliably enforced, crime escalates, and quality of life deteriorates.
No property on earth is equal to that of a human life. Want to lower property crime? Decrease wealth inequality. It's amazing to me how people who make far more than the average person get so worked up over property crime. I can afford to replace anything of mine that's stolen, it's literally not that big of a deal.
Surprised Pikachu face when the public who carry spying devices in their pockets, purchased HomePods and Echos for their homes, championed American big tech, bought lots of other smart devices by the bucketload, gave away all their data...find out it will eventually then be used against you
Linked cameras everywhere all the time has been coming for a while. Cheap hardware, connectivity, and analysis means who pays is not only not limited to governments and big companies but is barely even relevant. The remaining question is what if any rules there will be.
Flock wants people like you and me in a closely surveilled world. Flock cameras will never catch aristocrats committing aristocrat crimes, only regular people finding money in a parking lot.
As a non american, can someone explain the Flock story from a US perspective (ideally a reasonably centrist one)? .. i keep seeing them in the news here on HN .. apparently ~178 results in the past month . and it seems to get a disproportionate amount of front page coverage
Here's my understanding (please someone correct me if I'm wrong). Flock sells license plate reading cameras. Lots of cities and states bought these and no one noticed.
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.).
I'm not centrist, but I think I can give a reasonably fair account. I was among the first to organize against Flock (YC S17).
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.
I find palantir and flock are more obsessed with rules on data. The seriously insidious companies tend to be international and change names every year or so. The idea that you could get that flock CE to bend the rules for the feds are basically 0. Some random middle eastern country, the issue is trusting them .
I agree YC funding Flock is bad but I don't think you're helping. You're making it seem like there is an orchestrated effort to discredit YC rather than articulating this is poor form on their part.
Whenever someone says things like this without at least addressing the "who watches the watchers" problem, I know they're being disingenuous. It's such an obvious problem that if you have no answer, the hidden answer must be "I believe that myself and my cronies will be the watchers" or perhaps the naive and delusional "we will find morally incorruptible magic people to be the watchers."
AI isn't an answer because that really means whoever is running, training, and prompting the AI.
I’ll get on board with mass surveillance just as soon as every single elected and unelected leader, business executive, politician, celebrity, oligarch, Capitalist, all board members, all C-Suites, and every single VC has a live, uninterrupted, 24/7 publicly-accessible feed of their lives as they live by example and demonstrate the benefits of such a regime.
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.
The political left has really decided to go nuclear over Flock, but I'm not understanding the fundamental principle from which this view arises. Libertarian sorts don't like it either -- but that's entirely consistent with their entire existence. Is this a broad-based phenomenon on the left, or are sections perfectly fine with it? Some of the other comments here seem to endorse full on 1984-style surveillance, so perhaps this is just a libertarian-left-leaning Silicon Valley strain of leftism that's in revolt against Flock? While possible I don't traditionally see outfits like New Yorker falling in that category. When the worldview is very permissive of broad state power and often admiring of Europe, which has itself been struggling to fight off legislation weakening encryption, it's hard to make sense of this.
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?
My understanding is that broad state power to the benefit of the people, Scandinavia style, is not the same as broad state power to monitor and/or control the people.
Arguably those two types of power are in conflict in terms of desired outcomes.
In Texas the political right has just canceled some contracts with Flock.
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.
It's almost as if people can have a variety of opinions, and support institutions and states they don't agree with in every dimension. 'The left' is a wildly broad church, comparing 'the new yorker' with say 'the socialist workers party' adds more heat than light. Similarly 'Europe' is a very big and populous place, as is the subset of it that's in the EU. Most EU citizens very much oppose attacks on encryption, the digital millennium copyright act etc. Those are pieces of legislation pushed by the European Commission - a body that is not democratically elected.
Your line about capitalised 'Antifa' suggest an unserious lack of familiarity with left-wing groups and causes.
That's only for bad people who don't agree with the right thoughts and the right thinking. Don't worry as long as you don't disagree with the government you'll be fine citizen, after all you wouldn't want to disagree with the government would you?
There's very little of those things in most places.
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.
One person’s graffiti and vandalism is another persons freedom of artistic expression. Like how music magically turns into “noise” when someone buys an apartment next to a lively gig venue.
There probably was very little street crime, graffiti, and vandalism in the German Democratic Republic and in the USSR. And there very likely is little street crime in North Korea.
If the benefits can be had at too high a price, that doesn't make the price worth paying.
It's counter-culture and I'm here for it. I had a fun convo with my daughter about why rail cars are so frequently tagged. More fascinating are the hidden pieces in tunnels and the like, where only few people will ever see it.
Not really, graffiti artists often think that taggers are annoying (they are low effort and frequently tag over murals). Those who see it as art try to distinguish graffiti from vandalism.
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.
What are you protesting? Why are you targeting an individual's residence rather than a corporation's property? What is the artist merit of your graffiti? How does damaging someone's house help your cause? Is the gain from damaging someone's house sufficient to justify the cost to them?
In other words, you are trying to make things much more simplistic than they actually are.
When I put the two sides on the scale - the things being protested and the damage done by protesters - typically it's very easy for me to write off a couple burned cars or broken windows, even if I'm not a fan of broken windows or burned cars. Because typically these protests in the US are over things like reckless killings.
Also a country with regular human rights violations, virtually no political, ideological, press, assembly, worker or economical freedom, heavy censorship, etc.
>China, which is a country with very little street crime, grafitti, vandalism etc
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.
> 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.
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 is a huge difference between the feds having it out for a specific person and the feds having it out for a whole class of people.
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.
>> and the feds having it out for a whole class of people
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)
They don't need to go after everyone. They just need to make an example of a few, ie 40 years in prison for "moving evidence".
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
A bunch of CCTV is one thing. If the police have to come and knock on each business owner's door to ask "hey, you got some footage from 2 days ago, someone was shot in the area", that's fine with me.
But what's not fine is that capability in a fully automated, fully remotely accessible way, because that openly invites abuse of all kinds.
Point is, CC as for closed circuit, is no longer the key here - the circuit is very much open and in the hands of providers, governments and tech providers.
I was surprised to learn that many countries have what amounts to a flock equivalent. UK for instance has a National ANPR Service w 12k fixed cameras and 90-100m plates read a day. They also store it much longer.
Never understood why the outrage of flock in particular is so big online.
The UK has been a surveillance state for decades. Heck you can’t even watch television without going on a register and inspectors coming to your door verifying your TV paperwork is in order. Imagine trying that in the US!
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.
I never thought of UK as a police state. How about Netherlands w a similar program? Non watchlist plates are kept for 28 days compared to most flock implementations that keep for 7
Uk has been widely know as a budding police state for years. V for Vendetta was written in the 80s partially as a commentary on the British states turn towards a police state.
The funny thing is that countries commonly called “police states” aren’t, while countries not thought of as such are.
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.
By “police state” people generally mean one where day to day behavior, speech, and thought are tightly controlled by the government. Not so much police per capita or building codes.
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 at all true of your average Chinese. Remember, the Great Leap Forward and it's enormous famine and death and violent social upheaval is all within living memory. A few small pockets of the country had only minimal starving thanks to local authorities that quietly disobeyed Mao's directives and managed to 'fly under the radar' so to speak, but outside of those areas virtually everyone was touched in one way or another. Most of them are also extremely aware and very effected by the modern day rural/urban birth location apartheid, where if you're born outside of certain areas you can move to others -- but your kids will get 2nd-rate (if any) education, you won't get health care, etc.
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.
Western countries are richer per capita, they can afford more government per capita.
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.
Because Flock is privately owned while ANPR seems to my cursory research to be government owned.
And we all know what private corporations do to peoples data.
I'm not sure about your exp w government agencies, but in my experience, I much prefer private companies. Much easier to hold to account.
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
What big-tech companies have been _actually_ held accountable for data misuse, as in, 'consequences that actually mattered'?
Being able to absorb fines just turns them into a cost-of-doing-business tax.
Billions in fines is at least an incentive to invest in measures to prevent data leaks or misuse.
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?
Does the city have exclusive jurisdiction over those projects? Honest question, not familiar with NYC government housing. Some places have county, state, or federal preemption.
The US isn't the UK or China and different cultures deem different things as acceptable. The UK for example is also a monarchy, which would rial up people in the US if proposed there.
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.
No, it arrests several thousands of people every year for breaches of the communications act(s) - this could be for online harassment, stalking or trying to defraud people over Facebook messenger.
In the UK overall, 64% of the population support police use of facial recognition technology to some degree and only 11% were opposed to its use [1]. The survey also looks at support for different szenarios, but overall many generally did not oppose it, while in the US 47% oppose the use of flock cameras [2].
The Flock stat is interesting because 46% of Americans believe widespread use of facial recognition would be a good thing (27% unsure).
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
Flock became a controversy when it was being used for ICE raids and tracking people who got abortions rather than its original stated purpose of finding stolen cars.
Yes, but in that very link it explains how they work with the public to establish some trust?
"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..."
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?
Apples to oranges. Sure, there are ANPR systems in other countries, but they have to operate under very different regulations, and cannot collect information haphazardly like Flock.
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.
That's funny because ANPR systems are much looser in other countries including much longer retention. It helps that you don't have national newspapers printing negative articles around the technology every day!
Putting aside how disproportionately noisy some activist types are, it probably has to do with Americans having practically no trust in one another, corporations in particular, and their government by extension. At the same time, Americans tend to value some positive forms of liberty - like the ability to say and do what you want in one moment - far more than other forms of liberty - like the ability for all people to feel safe enough to be able to do the things they want.
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…
In the US flock is routinely used by law enforcement personnel to stalk exes and for other abuses. Are police in those other countries equally untrustworthy?
It makes me feel so much better than someone can be one-shotted into a political belief with a poem. I was worried they would rely too much on reasoning and evidence.
> Never understood why the outrage of flock in particular is so big online.
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.
It could also help foreign adversaries. I have 0 confidence that Flock hasn’t already been compromised given the current security environment and the value of the data that they have.
It’s a tradeoff between privacy/freedom from government overreach and solving these crimes. This is fine as long as you and the government agree on exactly what constitutes bad behavior. Does the current regime in the US give you hope that those two will stay aligned for long? Any technology you introduce that can be abused will be abused.
This is a hot take, the problem is that powerful tools like surveillance are easily (and inevitably by humans) abused to suppress what shouldn't be crimes, including expressions; and even when they don't, the potential to (including retroactively going through stored logs in the future) causes a "chilling effect" that increases anti-social behavior.
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).
Great let’s install a bunch of cameras in and around your house and live stream it on the web 24/7. You can be a great first case study. You have nothing to hide right, so you should have no issues with this.
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
1. There is a huge difference between my neighbors accidentally seeing me leaving my place, vs an anonymous person 7 months later, being able to statistically analyze when I leave my place in the morning, and when I return in the evening, even getting a list of the places I stayed over night on the days where I did not return in the evening.
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)
I cannot reply to everyone but still want to defend the above post (apart from a patronising tone so apologises for that)
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.
Why create an instrument that has a limited upside, but a downside that can lead into totalitarianism, in the first place? If it does not exist, I don't need to trust anyone, hence there won't be a problem.
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.
> 3. The benefits of a mass surveilled world are enormous
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.
Profoundly patronizing tone here, telling folks that they need help thinking about why something as personal as the human right to privacy ought to be written off.
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).
> At some basic level treat it like HIPPA or medical data
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.
I agree this is double plus good fellow citizen. Only bad persons who want to do bad things and Eastasia supporters would not want to have their activities tracked at all times, why would anyone want to allow bad things to happen when we could all be under the watchful care of big brother at all times. After all these measures are necessary to defeat Eurasia!
> The benefits of a mass surveilled world are enormous - epidemiology is gonna rock in 20 years.
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.
It's pretty clear to be that governments shouldn't be able to 'subcontract' their way out of the limits placed on them via the constitution.
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).
> It's pretty clear to be that governments shouldn't be able to 'subcontract' their way out of the limits placed on them via the constitution
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. Privacy laws, for the most part, protect what people do in private.
The other thing that's going on is that Flock is essentially an always-on "dragnet."
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.
Recently was driving in the middle of nowhere in Texas.. And I saw a few flock cameras watching both ways in highways there too. So it is not just cities, states are implicated too.
Probably selling data to CBP/DEA. I went through a combined military and police checkpoint a bit north of Rio Hondo last August and it was surreal.
It's for a good cause! This has enabled the DEA to keep all dangerous drugs out of the country and avoid any sort of drug abuse epidemics! Think of the children!
I'm guessing this was /s sarcasm given the "think of the children" reference. Just saying so in case others didn't get the reference and thought you were being sincere...
Uh, the rest of the comment is obviously false and sarcastic as well. Dangerous drugs are at an all time high and the epidemic is immediately apparent in downtown streets
Poe's law.
Surreal in what way?
In what way is going through a military/police checkpoint while driving ordinary?
Surreal in the way that your constitutional rights are being casually violated?
FISA basically authorises dragnet on demand - it's how XKeyscore operates.
"It's not a search unless we found something."
- FISA courts, re: 4th Amendment
No. It is not and to claim otherwise is hyperbole. The key difference is police stopping and/or questioning people en masse without reasonable suspicion is in fact illegal unless under extreme circumstances. Simply noting everyone’s license plate is wholly legal, and more importantly for this conversation, is drastically less intrusive and qualitatively different from a so-called dragnet. You don’t get to just conflate the two scenarios to better fit your personal preferences of what is or is not legal.
> users have a private relationship with Google where they elect to let Google track them and retain their information
Elect to is a bit strong here. Acquiesce to, maybe, or perhaps suffer to.
You elect to buy an Android and not an Apple I suppose.
While I'd generally agree that Apple is the better of the two on the privacy side it's still a false choice because you pretty much have to pick one as a regular person as things currently stand.
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).
I agree but it's clear why you could argue it should be elect from a legal standpoint.
GrapheneOS for the win, here.
The fact that most people in the western world have two terrible companies to choose between in order to have normal life conveniences is outrageous. (Here in Europe we actually have no choices that operate under our laws!)
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).
This style of argument is nonsense because deciding between Android and Apple has about a hundred unrelated but equally important consequences. There is no choice that aligns with all of your wishes (and rights).
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.
Well, nowadays, Google location history is stored on-device. Google Maps sends your position to their servers, both for geocoding and to power their traffic estimation. Even when location history was in the cloud, you could turn it off. It even asked when you opened Maps for the first time. Most people chose the default blue button to leave it on. You could also just turn off location on your phone entirely when you didn't want Google to know where you were.
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.
I think there's a reason that they've pushed to get these things up all over the country in a very short amount of time. I feel like the more entrenched they are the less likely the Supreme Court is really going to find against them and tear up the business model, regardless of whether it would be logically consistent or not.
Flock is YC.
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
Do not know about their competitors (and other countries/regulations), but Id guess this going to be a critical product for governments in the future?
Checks. I didn’t believe it at first, because I’ve always considered YC, in spite of its flaws, to be politically astute.
In their defense, Flock didn't start off quite this way. They were initially offering a product geared to HOAs and private entities to help with simple violations and things like that. At some point they stumbled on this loophole of allowing LEO's to sidestep restrictions on collecting and storing this kind of data, and then it took off. They were well past the YC investment at that point.
(and just to be clear, at this point I think that Flock has turned into an anti-Constitutional threat to US Citizens and should be wholesale banned and put out of business).
> I didn’t believe it at first, because I’ve always considered YC, in spite of its flaws, to be politically astute.
YC's current CEO is Garry Tan, who has a lot of ties to effective accelerationism and the dark enlightenment movement (The Curtis Yarvin/network state/cuckoo for cocoa puffs far-right tech broligarch movement that wants to end all democratic oversight of tech companies).
So, yeah, not only is Flock a YC company, but YC's current CEO produces a lot of propaganda for them. For example, this:
https://garryslist.org/posts/flock-found-more-stolen-cars-th...
...which is perhaps the most obviously Claude-generated AI slop content I have seen (and since the internet is becoming a firehose of this shit, I've seen quite a lot). Like somehow every fucking sentence in it is peak claude-slop.
Flock will be a big curriculum that tarnishes YC. Already under YC videos, comments are related to the Flock scandal. Denizen will want to make it a pain for YC until they fix their ethical problem.
All that karma farmed with paywall bypass posts. Kinda greasy.
There is not generally an expectation of privacy in public. Things in public can be recorded without consent. Filming a car on a street and giving that video to the government is not the same as me giving private information to a third party, and then them giving it to the government such as Carpenter v United states covers.
Edit: Note that this is not an endorsement, rather stating that recent supreme court cases may not be applicable.
Private citizens filming in public and police forces setting up arrays of surveillance cameras in public somehow don’t seem equivalent. I’m not a lawyer so I can’t properly articulate what the legal difference is. And if there isn’t one then the law needs change. Clearly the majority of citizens agree with me.
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.
> 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?
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).
> There's absolutely nothing illegal about monitoring the location and activity of police
In theory, sure. In practice? Good luck.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2025/10/03/apple-t...
> Private citizens filming in public and police forces setting up arrays of surveillance cameras in public somehow don’t seem equivalent.
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.
The quickest way to get dragnet surveillance banned would be for citizens to collaborate and create a massive publicly-available surveillance network.
It's legal to film publically - what's not necessarily legal is what you then do with that.
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...
It's legal for ICE to kill you in the street, lie about what you were doing, and nothing will happen to them.
> it's not necessarily legal to use information to dox if that can be construed as harassment.
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.
Yes. Once the application of force happens outside the state's monopoly, they'll shut that shit down so fast.
I guess I'm more cynical at this point. This isn't the 1970s when a congressman freaked out that his video rental history might leak and passed a law making them private for everyone as cover. They've evolved beyond that. They'll pass a law banning it for individuals but leaving a loophole for themselves. Like how Chat Control always contains a provision so that officials messages aren't a part of the dragnet.
I loathe surveillance networks. As much as I loathe them, I'm sadly forced to concede that probably citizens setting up a trivially join-able, anonymous, open source surveillance network is probably the only way to get the powerful to think about what they're doing.
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.
Good luck getting permits to install your citizen flock in public areas.
Enough private businesses abut major thoroughfares that this is a non-issue.
... of politicians. Because they are the ones who could write the laws to ban privacy invasive solutions.
Yes, it's different. It's a legal doctrine called mosaic theory.
https://share.google/f10FzHcf2jPqSzTRM
already happening and it seems it is legal https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/citizens-are-tracki...
Another area that's also existed for quite a while is the crowd-sourcing of the positions of mobile speed traps.
Though bizarrely in the UK that's legal if you do it via Waze, not if you do it via whatsapp.
The language doesn't really cover things correctly.
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.
>Assuming everyone in public is a suspect and continually investigating them, is a big change in how society works.
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]
These systems aren't perfect recognition oracles - there are lots of errors, especially as you scale up the technology. At the end of the day, it's a probabilistic identification correlated to a stream with a mix of of reported or suspected crimes. Your framing completely misses the reality. I'd argue that the OP's language is a much better fit.
> Everyone is tracked, but only certain people are watched.
The "only certain people are watched" hinges on pinky swears, winks, and nods. IMO it's a distinction without a difference.
>There is not generally an expectation of privacy in public.
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.
Likewise being recorded on a cctv camera which sits on a vhs for a few weeks and then is consulted when a crime has occurred is very different to being recorded on a camera and being immediately processed, analysed, and information kept forever, including “person X arrived at time Y accompanied by person Z”
It’s a question of scale and ability.
Rehnquist anticipated but unfortunately did not prevent the abuse of the third party doctrine back in 1983.
“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)
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/460/276
"
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. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
It's like allowing police departments to hire a hitman to avoid the Fifth Amendment.
They are relevant and courts have considered the whole of a persons movements standard in terms of whether querying ALPR data constitutes a search, https://andrewpwheeler.com/2026/08/12/license-plate-reader-s...
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).
> There is not generally an expectation of privacy in public.
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.
> There is not generally an expectation of privacy in public. Things in public can be recorded without consent
This is _not_ universal. Many jurisdictions take a different view on this.
Flock goes far beyond that, they allow the government to retroactively string together a person's history of movement. Prior cases establish that continuous and retrospective tracking like that violates a reasonable expectation of privacy and requires a warrant.
Prompting a system to give a history of a person’s movements (even if they’re movements “in public”) is not something that has any historical analogy. The law has slapped down the “it’s in public” argument in cases like this, see eg Baltimore’s ubiquitous aerial surveillance (they put a wide-angle lense on a surveillance plane and recorded everything, so they could rewind and search anyone’s locations.)
I don't think that's actually true. Follow someone around reading their phone over their shoulder and see how people react.
> There is not generally an expectation of privacy in public.
Surely we can agree the point of this technology is to change the level of privacy one should reasonably expect in public?
Isn't there a difference between getting picked up on someones Tik Tok "broadcast" and a private/public surveillance operation?
Yes, there is an expectation in the history of free society that the government is not proactively observing every person on every block, asking for ID, and following them down the streets, then documenting that and correlating it with other people's activities and making it accessible to law enforcement personnel without a warrant across the country.
I retch when people say there is no expectation of privacy in public as some naive defense of the panopticon.
In human terms, frequency, impact, and scale matter. If my little dog puts a few ounces of pee in some random person's front yard, it's seen as a micro-infraction at best. Vs. Flock's ideal is more like a factory farm just up the hill, with ever-leaking urine retention ponds.
Without any real privacy laws, Americans should not have the expectation of privacy in private spaces either. Your search history, real time location, biometric data, consumer habits etc. are all for sale to anyone who wants it.
Cool we should maybe change those laws then, these definitions of privacy came about in a world where there weren't cameras on everyones face and front porch.
The US government, the 4th reich, cannot be trusted with these tools, especially their law enforcement.
> 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.
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.
But who will enforce those decisions and what is the penalty for noncompliance?
A reasonable regulation, focusing on personal freedom, would just forbid building such a network in the first place.
You just need to reasonably predict the future 20 years ago.
The history of human civilization is quite telling, no?
1984 was written in 1949, that feels like a reasonable prediction of Flock a lot longer than 20 years ago
The EU heavily regulates this specifically in the, here infamous, "AI regulations" .
Though GDPR would also ban this probably.
What's the point, when we have Chat Control 2.0?
How would you specify this regulation?
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.
We can absolutely say that, for instance, taking pictures in public is legal but surveilling is not. We could say that recording public spaces systematically, for the purposes of surveillance, is not permitted. That does not require us to say that individuals cannot record in a public place. We can even say that individuals or companies are not allowed to collude to effectively turn individual recordings into systematic public surveillance (e.g. you can't build a product that searches everyone's personal videos of spaces and turns them into a spotty surveillance network).
> How would you specify this regulation?
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.
I agree, I just wonder how it's enforced. Just a ban on any dragnet style surveillance?
The GDPR is far from perfect, but it does cover this. It talks about acquiring and storing information that can be used to identify people. It doesn't specify what counts, so now that face recognition is pretty, it automatically applies to images.
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.
Ask YC - they funded Flock
YC created Flock 10 years ago.
Created it.
I feel this is assuming that the private ventures will not willingly cooperate and can't be forced to comply other than through warrants.
>It's pretty clear to be that governments shouldn't be able to 'subcontract' their way out of the limits placed on them via the constitution.
Primary example:
U.S. government officials pressuring social-media platforms through intermediaries to suppress constitutionally protected speech.
YC created Flock.
And a lot of other things too. It's kinda the whole point of their existence.
I could probably be convinced that some sort of panopticon license plate reader network could be a net positive for society IF it had the necessary and demonstrably infallible audit and oversight systems - especially with respect to the 4th amendment in the United States (i.e. search warrants).
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:
In an age where your TV is spying on you and your fucking refrigerator is showing you ads, do you really think Flock doesn't already have thousands of ideas on how to monetize commercial surveillance data in the post law enforcement phase?> To me, the far more insidious problem is what happens when Flock needs to keep showing growth?
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.
Smaller companies are far less likely to, as their owner is happy with their profit and actually likes running the company.
One a company goes public though, or has significant external input (VC etc), things start on the slippery slope.
It exists to give an information asymmetry enabling a maximally extractive market at the cost of inefficiency.
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.
>. To me, the far more insidious problem is what happens when Flock needs to keep showing growth?
>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.
Elison and Oracle are a big threat, they have an obsession with holding as much data as possible, for every single US citizen they can get their hands on, and it is no coincidence they not only sell electoral targeting demographic data, but also are trying to install dystopian level servers under the whitehouse.
Why would a YC company like Flock do that /s
But what if a private company does a fourth amendment violation? What if the private company is the governing body seeking control?
America's supreme court's consistency will not protect anyone from this problem, no matter how much history says so.
> Thankfully the supreme court seems to agree here in two ways
I'm sure we're a golden statue or private jet away from the supreme court having a change of heart there.
It’s called a deluxe motor-coach and it’s the most important currency in our democracy, apparently.
You are of course correct, the issue with this reason and legality based arguments ignore the issue and fact that the capability is the real problem, not whether some local deputy can stalk someone. It’s something I’ve argued with several legal advocacy and rights groups, this is not the time to compromise and rely on case law.
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.”
Were pretending we can still have a socratic discussion about this with any consequence.
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.
> The supreme court will acquisence slowly piece by piece to ever more draconian constitutional violations.
It doesn't seem slow to me.
So you want the government to recreate the tech and control that flock provides.
I don't think this is going to work out like you think it will...
Clearly not, but even that would be better than unaccountable corporations having the tech.
Corporations are more accountable than government agencies. A government agency can switch vendors or you can drag their CEOs in front of Congress. Try that with some internal bureaucrat in an agency you've never heard of.
> Try that with some internal bureaucrat in an agency you've never heard of.
https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/hearings/testimony-of-anthony-f...
How many Americans had heard of internal bureaucrat Anthony Fauci and NIAID before 2020?
I doubt the president of the United States would be so quick to grant a full pardon to the Flock CEO for any past (or future) crimes committed.
Thanks for proving my point.
Leaders of departments (i.e. the government equivalent of a CEO) are dragged in front of congress all the time.
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.
Not even remotely true, Idk how you can say this with a straight face after all we have seen in Trump 1 and Trump 2.
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.
Tangential but why do articles about Flock never have (YC S17) in the title like articles about other YC companies?
They are a YCombinator company! TIL.
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.
What is a “bot” account in this case?
People make new accounts all the time to shit talk YC, HN, dang, etc. Anonymity (in some limited form) is a feature.
Welcome to the thunder dome. YC is not our friends, they just host what (was) a niche forum where early tech peeps could have mostly civil conversations. It’s become increasingly hostile in moderation and sharp political opinions, that a lot of the joy here has fumbled out. (sorry mod team..I know you deal with a lot and traffic/spam keeps growing).
Excessive moderation creates spam.
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!
great question, which you will either not receive an answer to, or you will receive a deeply unsatisfying generic response from dang/tomhow.
in either case, it really leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
Surprised but not surprised. That explains a lot.
YC owns hacker news.
To be less cynical, I think it would require editing to original submission. I also see why editing the “bad press” company submissions could have undesirable optics. So, maybe the mods just choose to be a bit more laissez faire than normal and lets the community self moderate the related posts. Probably within some reason in the comment section, but they allow us all to be quite critical in ways that could easily be considered against the HN guidelines and they’re not squashing it either. I think that is perhaps the best stance for them to take honestly.
You know why.
I assume it's because Flock is a YC company, and HN is the YC board, and somebody has instituted a policy of not making the link clear (and it worked on me! I had no idea) due to the negative publicity - but that's so obvious, that you must be thinking of something else.
Perhaps its time that YC mentioned explicitly that if they are going to fund a company which holds specific PII data(i would include precise location history to start with) they would have to guarantee:
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.
Why would they do that? Venture capital isn't there to serve people like us or to protect any kind of common interest. There is only one thing they know - money.
Sure, but YC can enforce it if they want to. VC after all is a private body governed by private individuals, they can make moral choices. VCs could even support this by offering terms to offset the costs. I cannot believe that a company cannot be profitable but at the same time not build for at least some better privacy guarantees.
You can’t even do that with your HN account..you think Flock, with its lucrative gov contracts…would ever?
You can email dang and co and they’ll delete your HN account (maybe even remove your posts? Might be making that up?) they just prefer folks not IIRC.
A bit concerning how some people in this thread will bend over backwards to defend mass surveillance. Not surprising given who owns the board, but still.
I still am opposed to anything capable of mass surveillance because of how easily it is abused. But living in Seattle, my car has been broken into 4 times this summer alone (with nothing taken, because we leave nothing there), thiefs dug up the side of my house to steel copper wires, on my block someone dumped gasoline all over a tree and lit it on fire just because, people went around the neighborhood smashing front flower pots, many of the local businesses have had their windows smashed by robbers twice this year. Last year someone broke into my garage using a lock pick and stole a bunch of tools and my car license plate (and the cops actually caught him because he was driving in the hov lane with my reported-stolen license plate on lol).
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 proper support when they are harassed by crime this much?
A lot of techies have lived in China and seen how that country has stronger social harmony than the West and is gradually outpacing it, so mass surveillance clearly isn't an obstacle to the general prosperity.
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.
> A lot of techies have lived in China and seen how that country has stronger social harmony than the West and is gradually outpacing it, so mass surveillance clearly isn't an obstacle to the general prosperity.
They also have no political freedom and limited human rights in China, which is a tradeoff I'm not willing to make. Especially because America isn't going to get the social harmony even if we do the mass surveillance. Our demographics and history don't allow for the same kinds of solutions they use in China.
> 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.
"The problem with the totalitarian authoritarian surveillance state is that it isn't totalitarian or authoritarian enough" is for fucking sure a take.
> 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.
Yes, the problems are trust and consistency of enforcement. We have neither in the US and I’m not sure how we would ever get there.
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.
Well, this has become one of the most pro-china forums around so it shouldn't be too surprising.
Probably people who don't know history and trust the robberment.
We need to keep our surveillance of the surveillance state broad. There’s a lot of focus on Flock right now (rightfully so), but they are merely a single player in the privatized surveillance state architecture.
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.
At the very least they need to make public accessible all data collected about all employees and owners of Flock, and everyone in government agencies that contract with Flock. This means we can see all photos and videos of these people, every trip they make, etc. All searchable with AI, with no audit trail (just like it is for government agencies).
You seem to be missing a basic fact about how the world works: there are two classes of people, those who make the rules, and those who are expected to follow the rules. These classes are largely disjoint.
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
— Frank Wilhoit
Yet still, every now and then, a king is executed.
aka nobody will watch watchmen, by design.
All others will made to obey, if they don't? they will find things to punish you, literally
PG is that you?
What are you going to do when people grab you out of your house and throw you outside?
Your kids will be in that “other” class you like to talk about and create so much
Including investor data since they are a YC company?
No, no compromises.
I'm generally in favor of mass surveillance, as long as it's in public. I think it can prevent a lot of crime and I don't believe we have a right to "privacy in public". Red light cameras, for example, strike me as unalloyed good.
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.
I generally actually agree with you. The real issue with these cameras is the network effect that allows them to stalk anyone anywhere.
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.
> draft good legislation to curb potential abuses
No such thing. Unless it is mathematically impossible for the government to abuse you, then you will be abused.
That sounds like an argument for anarchism. I am very unimpressed by political philosophies that take arguments to their logical conclusion.
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.
No, it is an argument that the best way not to abuse something is to not have access to it. If you enshrine a ban of total surveillance on a deep and universal level in a country, it'll be a lot more difficult for a future bad actor state to reinstate it. We need the most extreme legal hurdles that can exist. More importantly, if the technology isn't actually physically installed, it becomes even more of an uphill battle for a future corrupt government. Your proposal is for surveilling everyone but making a pinky promise that no one in the chain will ever be corrupt at any point in the future, because all it would take at that point is changing some words on a page, refusing to prosecute an abuse of power, using some loopholes or pushing a software update.
The modern legally bound nation state has done much better at guaranteeing rights and protecting freedoms than any other configurations despite the fact that it's constained largely by "pinky promises" (i.e. laws, courts, etc).
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.
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...
This post is a good example of why I find the anti-surveillance people so tiresome
> 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".
> Red light cameras, for example, strike me as unalloyed good.
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.
Even red light cameras have a substantial potential for abuse. The revenue stream incentivizes messing with the light timing to cause more violations.
Great -- so fix those problems with legislation.
Right, and while we're at it, we can stop theft by having the thieves choose not to steal.
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 red light cameras are incorrectly calibrated, that seems like something that could be challenged in court and changed.
> 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.
its not a legislation issue
Investors at places like YC funded flock and want this future.
YC is your villain.
Local governments are banning them, and/or cutting deals with investors
At some point Flock will be drones that fly for 30 minutes, get a replacement drone in its place, and the 30 minute one will land, automatically swap batteries and take off again and get into a different zone.
They want to make money. Their buyers want a closely surveilled world with no exits.
Multiple things can be true at the same time... do you think the seller doesn't want a closely surveilled world with no exits?
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.
> do you think the seller doesn't want a closely surveilled world with no exits?
I don't think they care beyond being rich. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower
> Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower
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.
That was a reference to a Bryan Cantril speech, and it's more about the lawnmower's ability to gravely harm your person without having any intent or feeling beyond doing what a lawnmower does.
It's hard to see how you wouldn't at least be okay with that outcome if you were actively making it happen. But maybe this is just explaining why I'll never have that much money.
Flock is YC.
HN mods are complicit and are shaping the narrative here.
PG, Garry Tan, Dan Gackle, Tom Howard, Aaron Epstein, Jared Friedman, and all YC staff are enemies of the people
The sellers are people like YC and other investors
This is the drug-dealer justification -- "if I don't [sell drugs|provide mass surveillance at an unprecedented scale|crush these kittens] someone else will"
It’s not a justification he’s just pointing it out
There are buyers who want drugs for recreational reasons, murders for emotional reasons, or spy cams on hotel rooms for business reasons. But those are simply 3 instances where existent demand doesn't mean we should be allowing any offer to exist.
I'd personally agree to put Flock-levels of civil vigilance in the same bag.
HN and YC are complicit by painting it as “the government” who literally bans the cameras when it’s only the investors who want them for ads.
Fundamentally this is silly because Flock only tracks cars and not individual people. It doesn't do facial recognition surveillance. Society decided a long time ago that driving is a privilege that can be regulated in a variety of ways.
There is a societal consensus that driving is a privilege which can be restricted or revoked, not that you give up your rights by driving. In fact the opposite is true, the courts have found that drivers have fourth amendment rights for instance.
I agree that Flock and other license plate readers should be regulated. Law enforcement should be logged and have rules for how and when they can access these records. What I would strongly disagree with is the idea that flock and license plate readers are unconstitutional and should be banned.
Tracking vehicles lets you strongly infer who's driving them. Individual people have already gotten into trouble over their vehicles being spotted by Flock. If it could not be used to track people, the technology would be almost useless. Just because driving is a privilege (it's more of a requirement in the US, but the US at large doesn't really understand coercion) doesn't let you do anything you can come up with to people possessing that privilege.
It can track devices via their Bluetooth radiation. A lot of devices use randomized MAC addresses though, but probably not all.
Relevant Def Con talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcK-TDmzshc
DEF CON 34 - ESP32 as counter-surveillance platform - Cybertiger, Colonel Panic, The Wrew
https://archive.ph/vLfJz
Briff [1] works with some sites that bother readers with pay/subscribe to read, good to know
Second test, please ignore me
https://briff.site/s/flock-wants-a-closely-surveilled-b8et
I've been very pleased to see the reaction to Flock in the US. I was talking to a younger guy, very normal kid who keeps his nose clean, studying criminal justice in his junior year at college. I jokingly mentioned to him that maybe he could bring some anti-surveillance awareness to whatever law enforcement agency he goes to work for and he said, very seriously, "oh yeah, definitely. I've only gotten two cameras so far but I want to get at least five." It turns out that he and his friends all follow an app that marks the location of Flock cameras and there's a whole youth culture around knocking them down.
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".
Those battles are only ever won over decades. The problem is that technology has vastly outpaced our ability to regulate and respond to it, and the system meant to provide checks and balances has been vastly corrupted.
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 very pleased to see the reaction to Flock in the US.
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.
Are you trying to conflate wildlife tracking and monitoring with this police state dragnet? If so that's a wild take. I'm pretty sure modern wildlife tracking practices are not what's at stake here.
"But this feels different. The fact that there is large support feom the left behind this makes me very cautious."
Why does that make you cautious?
Were you very pleased to know Flock is a YC company and HN helps them lie
Honestly, most the flock cameras are installed on a fence post that is easily vandalized. This movement will be matched by sturdier construction and the resistance will likely sigh, get bored, and move onto something else.
I do like the spirit of it all though.
Well, good luck there and I mean that.
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.
When I drive by a Flock camera, my streaming music in my 2014 Rav starts to get scrambled. These cameras are intercepting bluetooth. It seems Toyota didn't account for that latency :facepalm:
[delayed]
Someone with high rep post a Tell HN that Flock is YC
Click into the article and I'm given a box which reads:
"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.
The solution to this is legislation. Legislation enshrining a right to not be studied, a right to be forgotten, penalties for even creating certain kinds of datasets.
I think the Americans should push for a constitutional amendment that protects one's right to privacy.
Once flick gets its way it's basically game over for democracy.
Unless our judiciary gets serious about what started with 9/11, authoritarianism is inevitable.
This actually is my primary candidate for the great filter.
The real protections are where and how the data is allowed to be used, the state has had the technical capability of breaking into your home, following you, and reading your mail forever. But they aren't allowed to use it in court to prosecute you.
Nothing new about that desire. Only thing different is the technology has caught up with the desire such that some technocrats can make living in that hell a reality.
Not an American, what made Flock special compared to other surveillance cameras? Informationized or intelligentized surveillances cameras arent a new thing.
Mass deployment on public property and the network effect that having them all connected and using things like license plate readers is all pretty new.
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.
The fact that they allow unlimited access to any law enforcement organization, where they can surveil anyone across the entire country. Police have used it to stalk ex-partners, for example. The number of cameras are also an order of magnitude higher. I can't leave my driveway without being tracked.
Those who would ask you to trade your privacy for security don’t have your security in mind.
It's interesting to me that most of the people who are motivated to vandalize Flock cameras seem to balk at vandalizing Ring cameras. Indeed, they may own and operate their own Ring cameras.
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.
Lots of people are opposed to Ring. Sentiments grew much stronger after their Superbowl commercial creeped people out. Many tech minded people moved towards cloudless solutions for their home cameras.
Ring cameras don't record and index every single license plate that it sees and hand that data over directly to law enforcement. There's a huge difference between surveilling your own private property, and a massive network of ALPRs feeding data directly into government systems.
Everyone's talking about flock but what about the IEEE ISAC and the broader 5G/6G projects? They're running laps around flock on surveillance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMox8qeMvlY
The article reads more like a reverse psychology article directed at the public rather than a real criticism of mass surveillance.
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.
The sad truth is that many citizens want a closely surveilled world. Flock delivers the product they want.
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?
The former. Look at cities winding back shotspotter.
Mass surveillance is a crime against humanity. They want us all to live in an open air prison. Garrett Langley should be regarded as a domestic terrorist and be in a real prison.
This is basically a version of rage bait that I find most productive trying to stay away from reading
YC created Flock 10 years ago.
> Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on
- 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."
> "You're thinking Chinese surveillance. US-based surveillance helps victims and prevents more victims" [1]
- Garry Tan
[1] https://xcancel.com/garrytan/status/1963310592615485955
My read is that they're all trying to build a surveillance state for when AI completely upends the fabric of our socioeconomic system.
They need to be able to track and depose of the rioting hordes without getting their hands dirty.
With an asterisk on citizens, of course, that excludes Ellison.
Do this to him and you'll likely be in deep trouble.
The best part is when he’s talking about them going to the bathroom
”We don’t really turn it off… without a court order”
Never trust HN articles or high karma accounts.
One might say the same of newyorker.com:
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.
These aren't surveillance cameras, but social cameras.
They'll present them like that. Not my idea, but from [0].
0. https://www.novelupdates.com/series/accel-world/
Hey HN ... use your mega brains to make the following kind of thing realistic, effective, and widespread for all:
https://urban-privacy.com/pages/anti-surveillance-clothing
fock flock
I love this but "Follow us on Instagram!" is maybe a little counterproductive.
Also behind Cloudflare's moats.
YC invested in flock
Given that their cameras are being shot, spray-painted, stolen, cut down, and bagged, I'd say that what they want is irrelevant.
Perhaps they could try a different market. The UK seems more amicable to such things.
I hate that this has to be an all or nothing conversation. There is a path where technology can deliver benefits without significant harm to individual privacy.
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.
The best deterrent to crime is to make people not want to commit crime in the first place. Education. Social cohesion. Prosperity. Safety nets.
I don’t disagree, but effective enforcement of the law as it is written has to play a role. There is a kernel of truth behind the broken windows theory of policing. When it’s widely known that the law can’t be reliably enforced, crime escalates, and quality of life deteriorates.
Executed people cannot commit crimes. Educate that theft means repayment or death. The rest follows.
No property on earth is equal to that of a human life. Want to lower property crime? Decrease wealth inequality. It's amazing to me how people who make far more than the average person get so worked up over property crime. I can afford to replace anything of mine that's stolen, it's literally not that big of a deal.
Sure, but that takes generations to change, unfortunately
Depends on how much you trust the government's ability to restrain itself once the capability for mass surveillance is out there and widely deployed.
Florida already banned them from the state entirely.
Flock can go flock itself
Whine about flock on the forum created by their funders. Ironic.
From 0 ("rain on my wedding day") to 10 ("Oedipus fulfilling his prophecy by evading it"), I'd give this a 2
Seems more scandalous to me.
I can’t trust that HN articles or high karma accounts here are anything more than lies and deception
Surprised Pikachu face when the public who carry spying devices in their pockets, purchased HomePods and Echos for their homes, championed American big tech, bought lots of other smart devices by the bucketload, gave away all their data...find out it will eventually then be used against you
Linked cameras everywhere all the time has been coming for a while. Cheap hardware, connectivity, and analysis means who pays is not only not limited to governments and big companies but is barely even relevant. The remaining question is what if any rules there will be.
Flock wants people like you and me in a closely surveilled world. Flock cameras will never catch aristocrats committing aristocrat crimes, only regular people finding money in a parking lot.
As a non american, can someone explain the Flock story from a US perspective (ideally a reasonably centrist one)? .. i keep seeing them in the news here on HN .. apparently ~178 results in the past month . and it seems to get a disproportionate amount of front page coverage
Here's my understanding (please someone correct me if I'm wrong). Flock sells license plate reading cameras. Lots of cities and states bought these and no one noticed.
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.).
thanks a lot for taking the time to explain this man .. really appreciate it.
I'm not centrist, but I think I can give a reasonably fair account. I was among the first to organize against Flock (YC S17).
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...
[3]: https://archive.ph/8wl6n
[4]: https://archive.ph/6KsZP
[5]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNqZ-Yrzh1o
[6]: https://www.404media.co/tag/flock/
I find palantir and flock are more obsessed with rules on data. The seriously insidious companies tend to be international and change names every year or so. The idea that you could get that flock CE to bend the rules for the feds are basically 0. Some random middle eastern country, the issue is trusting them .
Flock is YC.
HN mods are complicit!
Paul Graham should be ashamed of himself
Flock is YC.
HN mods are complicit and are shaping the narrative here.
PG, Garry Tan, Dan Gackle, Tom Howard, Aaron Epstein, Jared Friedman, and all YC staff are enemies of the people.
I agree YC funding Flock is bad but I don't think you're helping. You're making it seem like there is an orchestrated effort to discredit YC rather than articulating this is poor form on their part.
Nah, I showed people that Flock is YC by doing this. Most didn’t know
bro are you retarded??? Seriously???
More people should be doing this.
Give them hell
Spamming a thread with new accounts isn't a good tactic to point that out.
It seems to have worked
Actually it is
Whenever someone says things like this without at least addressing the "who watches the watchers" problem, I know they're being disingenuous. It's such an obvious problem that if you have no answer, the hidden answer must be "I believe that myself and my cronies will be the watchers" or perhaps the naive and delusional "we will find morally incorruptible magic people to be the watchers."
AI isn't an answer because that really means whoever is running, training, and prompting the AI.
I’ll get on board with mass surveillance just as soon as every single elected and unelected leader, business executive, politician, celebrity, oligarch, Capitalist, all board members, all C-Suites, and every single VC has a live, uninterrupted, 24/7 publicly-accessible feed of their lives as they live by example and demonstrate the benefits of such a regime.
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.
Hah. Europe's Chat Control proposal would exclude politicians from being monitored. Because of course it would.
The political left has really decided to go nuclear over Flock, but I'm not understanding the fundamental principle from which this view arises. Libertarian sorts don't like it either -- but that's entirely consistent with their entire existence. Is this a broad-based phenomenon on the left, or are sections perfectly fine with it? Some of the other comments here seem to endorse full on 1984-style surveillance, so perhaps this is just a libertarian-left-leaning Silicon Valley strain of leftism that's in revolt against Flock? While possible I don't traditionally see outfits like New Yorker falling in that category. When the worldview is very permissive of broad state power and often admiring of Europe, which has itself been struggling to fight off legislation weakening encryption, it's hard to make sense of this.
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?
My understanding is that broad state power to the benefit of the people, Scandinavia style, is not the same as broad state power to monitor and/or control the people.
Arguably those two types of power are in conflict in terms of desired outcomes.
Scandinavian state power has been used to increase crime through immigration
In Texas the political right has just canceled some contracts with Flock.
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
It’s almost like the left/right political dichotomy is completely useless!
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.
It's almost as if people can have a variety of opinions, and support institutions and states they don't agree with in every dimension. 'The left' is a wildly broad church, comparing 'the new yorker' with say 'the socialist workers party' adds more heat than light. Similarly 'Europe' is a very big and populous place, as is the subset of it that's in the EU. Most EU citizens very much oppose attacks on encryption, the digital millennium copyright act etc. Those are pieces of legislation pushed by the European Commission - a body that is not democratically elected.
Your line about capitalised 'Antifa' suggest an unserious lack of familiarity with left-wing groups and causes.
Most of the left is libertarian.
How are HN users this stupid?
There is no “government” it’s companies - lobbying exists.
The cameras are for ads.
HN is complicit in this propaganda.
Flock (YC 17)
YC has been working on this for a decade.
Already a reality in mainland China, which is a country with very little street crime, grafitti, vandalism etc.
Thanks, I’ll keep the graffiti and vandalism.
> which is a country with very little street crime, grafitti, vandalism etc.
and a lot of human rights violations
That's only for bad people who don't agree with the right thoughts and the right thinking. Don't worry as long as you don't disagree with the government you'll be fine citizen, after all you wouldn't want to disagree with the government would you?
There's very little of those things in most places.
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.
my first time in Zurich. ton's of graffiti seen while leaving the airport.
if they have it, everyone does.
One person’s graffiti and vandalism is another persons freedom of artistic expression. Like how music magically turns into “noise” when someone buys an apartment next to a lively gig venue.
There probably was very little street crime, graffiti, and vandalism in the German Democratic Republic and in the USSR. And there very likely is little street crime in North Korea.
If the benefits can be had at too high a price, that doesn't make the price worth paying.
Graffiti is amazing. It is protest.
It's counter-culture and I'm here for it. I had a fun convo with my daughter about why rail cars are so frequently tagged. More fascinating are the hidden pieces in tunnels and the like, where only few people will ever see it.
I wish people would stop protesting in the elevator in my apartment building.
No, it's literally tagging territory. They literally call it tagging.
"They" call tags tags, and graffiti, graffiti.
Not really, graffiti artists often think that taggers are annoying (they are low effort and frequently tag over murals). Those who see it as art try to distinguish graffiti from vandalism.
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.
there's a good amount of nuance and a lot of variety so broad claims like this don't really hold up
some of it. most is vandalism.
No way people think graffiti is still fresh and cool in 2026
Could I come and spray paint the front of your house? In protest of course.
What are you protesting? Why are you targeting an individual's residence rather than a corporation's property? What is the artist merit of your graffiti? How does damaging someone's house help your cause? Is the gain from damaging someone's house sufficient to justify the cost to them?
In other words, you are trying to make things much more simplistic than they actually are.
If your name is banksy, because a new banksy appearing in front of my house would increase the value of the entire block.
I mean, if you get consent, it makes the argument irrelevant doesn’t it?
As long as it's a mostly peaceful prostest, you're also allowed to set a few cars on fire and loot local businesses.
As long as you say "I feared for my life", you're apparently also allowed to shoot random civilians if you're a cop.
Which is kinda why people are upset enough to set shit on fire.
I was merely hinting at protests being called peaceful by the media when they clearly weren't. Not saying they weren't justifiably so.
They were overwhelmingly so. Millions protested, across the country and even overseas; dozens committed felonies of the sort you describe.
Martin Luther King Jr. was subject to the same bullshit. https://www.reddit.com/r/agedlikemilk/comments/iia9lq/this_c...
When I put the two sides on the scale - the things being protested and the damage done by protesters - typically it's very easy for me to write off a couple burned cars or broken windows, even if I'm not a fan of broken windows or burned cars. Because typically these protests in the US are over things like reckless killings.
All of the US protests in the last 10 years have been mild. Sure a couple of Waymos get burned up, but they are easy to capture :)
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.
Also a country with regular human rights violations, virtually no political, ideological, press, assembly, worker or economical freedom, heavy censorship, etc.
I'm sure the Uyghers will find this reassuring.
Ya gotta wonder how pervasive facial recognition affects the espionage trade.
>China, which is a country with very little street crime, grafitti, vandalism etc
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.
> 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.
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.
Which is a great argument for Less Surveilance and Overreach.
Big time. The harder the feds have to work to ruin someone's life the better.
The more power granted, the heavier the collar and chain should be.
There is a huge difference between the feds having it out for a specific person and the feds having it out for a whole class of people.
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.
>> and the feds having it out for a whole class of people
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)
They don't need to go after everyone. They just need to make an example of a few, ie 40 years in prison for "moving evidence".
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.
> the way they'd go after a very inconvenient activist
FTFY
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Truly spoken like someone who lives in neither.
I've been to many places in Italy that have scary much CCTV.
A bunch of CCTV is one thing. If the police have to come and knock on each business owner's door to ask "hey, you got some footage from 2 days ago, someone was shot in the area", that's fine with me.
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 put another way, actively tracking your every movement. Analyzing your behaviors to predict possible criminality.
What’s already happening is bad enough. What it enables to happen next is a nightmare.
Let's think about the first two letters of CCTV and what that entails.
Point is, CC as for closed circuit, is no longer the key here - the circuit is very much open and in the hands of providers, governments and tech providers.
Wait till you hear about the UK.
Yes but can you voice your displeasure against the government if they target you? I prefer crime, grafitti and vandalism
The Already and The Whatabout, the two pillars of the Temple of Incrementalists.
mainland China is very big, what's the coverage like
or are you just making things up
Yeah but when our AI overlords rise up soon we don’t want to have this ready to hand over to them.
I think quite a few tech bros would want their own Samaritan. It wouldn't be "theirs" for very long, but I don't think that dampens their desire.
I was surprised to learn that many countries have what amounts to a flock equivalent. UK for instance has a National ANPR Service w 12k fixed cameras and 90-100m plates read a day. They also store it much longer.
Never understood why the outrage of flock in particular is so big online.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-anpr-ser...
The UK has been a surveillance state for decades. Heck you can’t even watch television without going on a register and inspectors coming to your door verifying your TV paperwork is in order. Imagine trying that in the US!
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.
I never thought of UK as a police state. How about Netherlands w a similar program? Non watchlist plates are kept for 28 days compared to most flock implementations that keep for 7
https://www.politie.nl/informatie/waar-staan-anpr-cameras.ht...
I always thought of the UK and London especially as most tightly monitored city on the planet. By far.
Why not? The UK has been a police state for decades. They have a long history of mass surveillance and of cracking down on protests.
Uk has been widely know as a budding police state for years. V for Vendetta was written in the 80s partially as a commentary on the British states turn towards a police state.
This poster is from 2002:
https://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/collections/collections-online/po...
And right after seeing those posters you’d see big ads on the Tube walls that says things like:
>>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
The funny thing is that countries commonly called “police states” aren’t, while countries not thought of as such are.
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.
By “police state” people generally mean one where day to day behavior, speech, and thought are tightly controlled by the government. Not so much police per capita or building codes.
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.
> By “police state” people generally mean one where day to day behavior, speech, and thought are tightly controlled by the government.
That describes most Western countries today.
Not at all true of your average Chinese. Remember, the Great Leap Forward and it's enormous famine and death and violent social upheaval is all within living memory. A few small pockets of the country had only minimal starving thanks to local authorities that quietly disobeyed Mao's directives and managed to 'fly under the radar' so to speak, but outside of those areas virtually everyone was touched in one way or another. Most of them are also extremely aware and very effected by the modern day rural/urban birth location apartheid, where if you're born outside of certain areas you can move to others -- but your kids will get 2nd-rate (if any) education, you won't get health care, etc.
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.
Western countries are richer per capita, they can afford more government per capita.
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.
For the record, the honorable governer of texas, a mr. abbott, pledges his undivided love for the Donald.
And he has publicly denounced Flock cameras and data center development in the past month.
Amazing what polling does to a politician.
Because Flock is privately owned while ANPR seems to my cursory research to be government owned. And we all know what private corporations do to peoples data.
Yes, people pretend to not understand the difference.
I'm not sure about your exp w government agencies, but in my experience, I much prefer private companies. Much easier to hold to account.
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
What big-tech companies have been _actually_ held accountable for data misuse, as in, 'consequences that actually mattered'? Being able to absorb fines just turns them into a cost-of-doing-business tax.
Billions in fines is at least an incentive to invest in measures to prevent data leaks or misuse.
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?
https://dhcf.dc.gov/page/dhcf-data-incident
Does the city have exclusive jurisdiction over those projects? Honest question, not familiar with NYC government housing. Some places have county, state, or federal preemption.
The US isn't the UK or China and different cultures deem different things as acceptable. The UK for example is also a monarchy, which would rial up people in the US if proposed there.
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.
Doesn't UK arrest a few thousand people a year for social media posts? What are you basing this high degree of trust on?
No, it arrests several thousands of people every year for breaches of the communications act(s) - this could be for online harassment, stalking or trying to defraud people over Facebook messenger.
It's the equivalent of 'wire fraud' in the US.
They are arresting them for social media posts. You are lying
In the UK overall, 64% of the population support police use of facial recognition technology to some degree and only 11% were opposed to its use [1]. The survey also looks at support for different szenarios, but overall many generally did not oppose it, while in the US 47% oppose the use of flock cameras [2].
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/public-attitudes-... [2] https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/florida-bans-highwa...
The Flock stat is interesting because 46% of Americans believe widespread use of facial recognition would be a good thing (27% unsure).
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-...
My guess would be that opinions just changed since 2022 AND that support for flock might differ from general support.
Source for “a few thousand”?
> The UK for example is also a monarchy, which would rial up people in the US if proposed there.
I'm not so sure about that: https://www.newsweek.com/white-house-donald-trump-king-time-...
Flock became a controversy when it was being used for ICE raids and tracking people who got abortions rather than its original stated purpose of finding stolen cars.
Or you know, just stalking exs using Flock like most cops charged with wrongdoing have been.
Yes, but in that very link it explains how they work with the public to establish some trust?
"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..."
Oh good, there's a government agency to submit complaints and comments to. I was concerned for a second.
So what's the expectation here?
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?
That fact that in the UK or China you are surveiled non-stop it does not mean Americans want the same to happen to them.
Don't forget Belgium, Netherlands, sweden, Germany, France and many others!
Google national ANPR [country]
Apples to oranges. Sure, there are ANPR systems in other countries, but they have to operate under very different regulations, and cannot collect information haphazardly like Flock.
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.
That's funny because ANPR systems are much looser in other countries including much longer retention. It helps that you don't have national newspapers printing negative articles around the technology every day!
There is a difference between ANPR and what Flock does.
Which is...
I like how you're so nuanced when I'm pretty sure you never heard the acronym ANPR before
You are right.
Most of the outraged people live in the US where we have Flock. Presumably people in other countries are outraged about their local equivalent.
Putting aside how disproportionately noisy some activist types are, it probably has to do with Americans having practically no trust in one another, corporations in particular, and their government by extension. At the same time, Americans tend to value some positive forms of liberty - like the ability to say and do what you want in one moment - far more than other forms of liberty - like the ability for all people to feel safe enough to be able to do the things they want.
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…
In the US flock is routinely used by law enforcement personnel to stalk exes and for other abuses. Are police in those other countries equally untrustworthy?
The UK arrests ~11,000 people a year for wrongthink.
https://archive.is/vaCkJ
> Never understood why the outrage of flock in particular is so big online.
Nobody really cared until they realized that it could be used to more effectively round up our precious illegal immigrants.
We care about the immigrants becaus we know the rest of the fucking poem.
I too base my political beliefs on poetry
You do realize that humans use art to communicate difficult or emotional ideas including political beliefs, right?
It makes me feel so much better than someone can be one-shotted into a political belief with a poem. I was worried they would rely too much on reasoning and evidence.
I'm sure you do. The poem can be taken both as a lesson in why one should defend all humans, as well as a lesson in exclusion from the bottom up.
> UK for instance
It's one of the most dystopian western countries when it comes to that, not sure I'd use it as an example
How are you defining dystopian exactly? The climate is dystopian, all the rest follows naturally from that.
It's not my opinion...
> 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...
> Never understood why the outrage of flock in particular is so big online.
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.
Good. It helps solve crimes, and can even resolve general anti-social behaviour.
I'd rather have the cameras than have family members die to drugged up drivers, or robbers get away with their crimes.
Then put one in your house, chip yourself with a gps and share your passwords with the government
It could also help foreign adversaries. I have 0 confidence that Flock hasn’t already been compromised given the current security environment and the value of the data that they have.
It’s a tradeoff between privacy/freedom from government overreach and solving these crimes. This is fine as long as you and the government agree on exactly what constitutes bad behavior. Does the current regime in the US give you hope that those two will stay aligned for long? Any technology you introduce that can be abused will be abused.
What makes you think flock would prevent those crimes?
Just a few examples:
https://www.wbrc.com/2026/09/04/moody-bessemer-police-credit...
https://www.fox13news.com/news/flock-cameras-help-find-kidna...
Seems to me flock didn't prevent either kidnapping.
It's not clear that it actually does help solve crimes. It might even exacerbate them.
There's been a lot of stalking enabled by Flock cameras.
Too many cops are fat lazy and retarded. Seriously it’s disgusting how fat some of them are. Not even sure how they do their job.
Anyway the fat lazy fucks hate work. And before dragnet surveillance they had to do work to solve crimes.
This is a hot take, the problem is that powerful tools like surveillance are easily (and inevitably by humans) abused to suppress what shouldn't be crimes, including expressions; and even when they don't, the potential to (including retroactively going through stored logs in the future) causes a "chilling effect" that increases anti-social behavior.
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 can even resolve general anti-social behaviour
And who desides what that is? Because right now, in the US, Trump and ICE appear to have strong opinions on that.
Great let’s install a bunch of cameras in and around your house and live stream it on the web 24/7. You can be a great first case study. You have nothing to hide right, so you should have no issues with this.
Some ways to help think about this:
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
1. There is a huge difference between my neighbors accidentally seeing me leaving my place, vs an anonymous person 7 months later, being able to statistically analyze when I leave my place in the morning, and when I return in the evening, even getting a list of the places I stayed over night on the days where I did not return in the evening.
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)
I cannot reply to everyone but still want to defend the above post (apart from a patronising tone so apologises for that)
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.
Why create an instrument that has a limited upside, but a downside that can lead into totalitarianism, in the first place? If it does not exist, I don't need to trust anyone, hence there won't be a problem.
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.
> 3. The benefits of a mass surveilled world are enormous
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.
Profoundly patronizing tone here, telling folks that they need help thinking about why something as personal as the human right to privacy ought to be written off.
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.
1. Ok, so why not keep it that way?
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).
> At some basic level treat it like HIPPA or medical data
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.
There are a lot of stupid things being said on hackernews these days. This one wins today.
I agree this is double plus good fellow citizen. Only bad persons who want to do bad things and Eastasia supporters would not want to have their activities tracked at all times, why would anyone want to allow bad things to happen when we could all be under the watchful care of big brother at all times. After all these measures are necessary to defeat Eurasia!
Stay strong big brother is watching!
I don’t understand how people are reading this comment and saying “yeah, but…”
The benefits of a mass surveilled world are absolutely not enormous. Like, what the actual fuck?
> The benefits of a mass surveilled world are enormous - epidemiology is gonna rock in 20 years.
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.
"Think" is a strong word for all that cope.