I can see some nuance to this one. Flock is intended to be searchable by law enforcement, not Joe Average. Tracking cops and then publishing that information is not exactly the same as turning Flock back on the Flockers.
I think the best solution is to just say nobody can do this, including the government. Or that if we allow things like Flock to exist, then we'd need actual legislation that tightens considerably how available the data is to be searched, and what approvals are necessary to access it.
The obvious next step, otherwise, is for someone to start OpenALPRMap and we all get to suffer together.
> Flock is intended to be searchable by law enforcement, not Joe Average.
Isn't Flock's alleged legality predicated on the principle that there is no "reasonable expectation of privacy" in public? I don't see why that would change depending on whether it's "Joe Average" or a police officer at the controls---IIUC I'm allowed to capture images, video, etc. of people in public just as much as cops are.
Agreed that these systems simply need to be banned.
This is exactly what the YouTuber was trying to illustrate - the whole legal justification of Flock cameras is that it's equated to someone sitting down in the location and writing down license plate numbers.
There's a sometimes fine distinction between "reasonable expectation of privacy" and stalking or harassment. Not that it's applicable in this case because courts have generally made the bar against police officers very high.
In the US, photographing and recording police are first amendment-protected activities.
Likewise, the fourth amendement doesn't forbid a police officer from recording someone in public, because there's no expectation of privacy when out in public.
The courts have found that legally, one officer recording one person is no different from a large-scale, automated surveillance system recording everyone.
Well, that argument goes both ways. If the scale and automation don't make a difference, they don't make a difference.
That's trying to unbake the cake. This technology will not go away. The powerful will use it in secret; and sometimes the less powerful too.
I'd rather see surveillance first pointed towards government leaders, and then once the government is highly surveilled, then maybe we can trust the government to surveil everyone else.
I don't know. My idea here isn't very realistic. It's not going to happen (though we should still try), so maybe just outlawing all of it would be more realistic.
It doesn't seem all that different. Cops use these cameras to stalk ex-girlfriends, target political foes, and perv on the public at large. The public watching them hardly seems worse.
I do agree that we just shouldn't have this kind of mass-surveillance in general, and I think that's kind of the point of this particular endeavor.
> I can see some nuance to this one. Flock is intended to be searchable by law enforcement, not Joe Average.
I feel that's like saying there's "nuance" when the police choose to pull someone over because--unlike the other car--they didn't have a "I Donated To Cops" license plate.
Yes, it's technically a difference, but if it matters then the police are abusing their power to play favorites.
Cops usually are worse than average Joe on many negative statistics (domestic abuse, etc), and that's not even factoring in how numbers are skewed by the well established thin blue line.
It's safer to give your info to average joe population than cops.
I would feel better if only cops didn't have access to see me on flock cameras and cops had to request footage through a public reddit or something.
This is all a bit of a joke sure, but less than police access to flock cams is.
This was in Canada so I don't know if the same laws apply. In the US the justification for this tracking without a warrant is that you are in public. That same justification allows for filming police in the public.
The intent of Flock in the US at least was just to use technology to get around the 4th amendment.
The police shouldn't be allowed to use automated tools like this without a warrant.
What nuance though? Did everyone give the state permission to sniff after them? Because I did not. And I am almost certain a majority would not be ok with it either. There is a reason people hate flock sniffers.
When the people turn it around and sniff on cops, why is that then any different suddenly?
> we'd need actual legislation
Can the people do legislation? It's always some judges and politicians who form a clique at the end of the day.
So the cops visited and talked to him, but didn't pursue any charges or issue any warnings. He was free to pursue his project (so far).
>“One of [the officers] took the time to specifically mention how scary it would be for them, because people would be able to find out where they lived, when they got on their shift and what they were doing throughout the day, and that that type of powerful information could put them personally at risk [from] any bad apples that might want to track them down.”
I know we're supposed to distill everything down to a "them vs us" mentality. But cops have been tracked down and killed by people using apps like Waze so it's not a completely unwarranted fear.
This also isn't an apples and oranges situation. A Flock database isn't public - police have access but at least ostensibly have oversight from the legal system. That's a much different set of concerns than the "UNO reverse card" the TikToker is trying to make it to be.
Hundreds of people have been tracked down and killed with flock cameras unnecessarily. The police routinely escalate interactions as a matter of procedure until they end in shootings.
On average over 1000 people are killed by police each year. A police officer is by far the most dangerous person you'll likely interact with on a day to day basis.
>But cops have been tracked down and killed by people using apps like Waze so it's not a completely unwarranted fear.
Sure, but you haven't made the case for why the fear is anyone else's problem. If a person is too scared to be a cop there's an easy fix: stop being a cop. Unfortunately, regular citizens who can't afford to up and move to a country that has civil rights (that is, most of them) don't have the same recourse.
I think your critique of police here is orthogonal to the privacy discussion, which affects everyone:
Imagine the danger and legitimate fear a stalking victim would face if there was a public real-time tracker for any license plate query you can imagine.
Police cars are painted differently to make them visible. They are public information. Police stations are visible. Cops addresses are not made public.
Police visiting a home is form of intimidation. That's not something to brush off.
> cops have been tracked down and killed by people using apps like Waze
Do you have a source for that? I can only find 2 examples vaguely similar but neither are really what that statement claims. Specifically one of them was just cops making stuff up about wayze which was factually incorrect.
> police have access but at least ostensibly have oversight from the legal system
We've already seen plenty of examples of cops tracking ex-wives and such similar abuses with no real accountability - nobody's lost their job over it
Cops know exactly what they do when they show up like this, it's meant to intimidate, there are also plenty of cases where cops have repeatedly crossed the line harassing citizens breaking no laws, it's disgusting
I think it's fair, however I probably should've said something like "the vast majority of misuses are not being checked, and the vast majority of cops abusing the system havent and wont be disciplined accordingly"
What a BS take. Do a cursory google search and you'll find many abuses of the Flock cameras. There is no oversight. How incredibly ironic:
>One of [the officers] took the time to specifically mention how scary it would be for them, because people would be able to find out where they lived, when they got on their shift and what they were doing throughout the day, and that that type of powerful information could put them personally at risk [from] any bad apples that might want to track them down.
This is the exact reason Flock cameras shouldn't exist. Hell even you know how there is no oversight otherwise you wouldn't have used the word "ostensibly" with italics.
BTW did you just gloss over how they came to his home to intimidate him? Cops SHOULD be tracked because American cops are simply the worst bullies on the planet.
In Georgia, a police chief was found to have tracked his ex-girlfriend and her teenage daughter approximately 600 times.
In Texas, a sheriff's deputy utilized Flock ALPRs to locate a woman at the behest of her abusive partner.
Marin County Sheriff’s Office was sharing the sensitive location data of millions of drivers with out-of-state agencies and federal authorities, explicitly including ICE and CBP, circumventing California law.
So, yes, it's messed up that cops' fears are warranted, in your eyes, but not private citizens'.
> He was free to pursue his project
No, being intimidated by uniformed officers is not being "free".
I feel like this isn’t the best way to draw attention to the problem. Presumably having the police visit is what the YouTuber wanted? I’m not really sure of the lesson here but drama’s presumably the point as opposed to a side effect so it’s hard to take seriously.
Flock, at the core, isn't a public entity. They aren't a government. So they're a private entity, just like an individual, tracking who they want, when they want.
This person is doing the exact same thing as Flock, and suddenly it is a problem? Seems like a double-standard.
I'm not familiar with privacy and filming laws on canada, but if the cops just came there and chatted with him without any arrests, warnings, citations, detainment, etc, then it isn't really different from any other random citizen knocking on your door and asking about your security camera.
Well I mean the state does have the monopoly on violence.
In a functioning state, anyway.
So yeah, of course rules are different for normal people compared with people that have a special role as assigned by the democratically legitimized system.
This is one of those emotionally satisfying stories... if you don't think about it very hard. It's symbolically rich, it fits the simplistic narratives of good vs evil we're all raised with, but this isn't a great example of a 'gotcha' moment.
Do I like Flock cameras? No. Do I like mass surveillance? No. Do I see a difference between an agent of the state doing something involving law enforcement or surveillance activities, and a private individual doing the same? Yes. You can't run around in uniform handcuffing people either.
I don't want HN'ers setting up surveillance networks anymore than I want them strapping a pistol to their hip and fighting crime. It's an asymmetry by design because the alternative is an unworkable nightmare, whereas the sad reality is that if people keep voting for people who openly spy on us, they're going to keep doing it.
Your “private individual” wording is carrying a lot of weight here. I wonder if Google knows where all the cops with Androids are? Or if Meta lets you bid for ad impressions from users “interested in law enforcement”
What if I wanted to record the cops to schedule my lemonade stand?
Basically, the answer to “Who gets to surveil?” is: Everyone but you
Start a site or a place where you can collect metrics and hand out cookies. Boom you're in the surveillance game. You can buy ad data, you can read census data, if you have the money it's all out there on the market. Hell if you don't have a conscience you can buy black market info.
You have to ask if you want more of that until we reach parity with Google and THE POLICE, or if you're reacting out of a sense of fairness that's taught to children.
Incredibly sometimes things are different because of different circumstances and the laws we've all taken part in constructing (when we bother to organize and vote of course).
You're an unregulated, unsupervised, and frankly unknown factor with no real accountability through any realistic chain of command to the results of the democratic process. However far from your imagined ideal, cops are.
They're just most probable tokens. Either most probable to exist after the previous set of tokens, or most probable to get a specific outcome.
I am being sarcastic of course, as HN has still to some degree managed to avoid this, but even HN is struggling. The rest of "social media" operates exactly like that.
Shocked? No; he's not shocked. If anything, this was for shock value and the lulz (aka ad revenue).
But; he does help others, who may be far less aware of the irony in all of this, that local, state/province, and federal/national governments need to be SIGNIFICANTLY pressured into not funding these sorts of mass surveillance efforts.
While Flock is getting flack for this, currently, it's ultimately the governments who utilize Flock's services that are ultimately at fault for not only allowing the technology to exist, but deploying at scale.
Eventually, the Flock backlash will die down and some other far less obvious company will take its place in the market and the citizenry needs to be vigilant in not allowing this to occur.
Flock isn't "the government". This is an interesting conversation because often Flock is a circumvention to the police not being able to do these things.
Why deal with annoying oversight and restrictive governance and audits and usage monitoring when you can just offload it to a private company and stalk women without restraint?
Technically, it is home users volunteering data to a cloud provider, that then mines the disclosed data as a service for any creep.
It would be a constitutional matter, and the city would lose in court given precedent lawsuits... if police used direct surveillance to follow people around even on public property where there was no expectation of privacy. Sue, and remember to vote. =3
I can see some nuance to this one. Flock is intended to be searchable by law enforcement, not Joe Average. Tracking cops and then publishing that information is not exactly the same as turning Flock back on the Flockers.
I think the best solution is to just say nobody can do this, including the government. Or that if we allow things like Flock to exist, then we'd need actual legislation that tightens considerably how available the data is to be searched, and what approvals are necessary to access it.
The obvious next step, otherwise, is for someone to start OpenALPRMap and we all get to suffer together.
> Flock is intended to be searchable by law enforcement, not Joe Average.
Isn't Flock's alleged legality predicated on the principle that there is no "reasonable expectation of privacy" in public? I don't see why that would change depending on whether it's "Joe Average" or a police officer at the controls---IIUC I'm allowed to capture images, video, etc. of people in public just as much as cops are.
Agreed that these systems simply need to be banned.
This is exactly what the YouTuber was trying to illustrate - the whole legal justification of Flock cameras is that it's equated to someone sitting down in the location and writing down license plate numbers.
There's a sometimes fine distinction between "reasonable expectation of privacy" and stalking or harassment. Not that it's applicable in this case because courts have generally made the bar against police officers very high.
The recording may be allowed but later use of that data may not be. For example if it was being used to aid criminals to commit crimes.
Is Flock equally liable for criminal use of its data by law enforcement officers?
Isn't that like saying that guns may be legal but later use of those guns may not be?
In the US, photographing and recording police are first amendment-protected activities.
Likewise, the fourth amendement doesn't forbid a police officer from recording someone in public, because there's no expectation of privacy when out in public.
The courts have found that legally, one officer recording one person is no different from a large-scale, automated surveillance system recording everyone.
Well, that argument goes both ways. If the scale and automation don't make a difference, they don't make a difference.
That's trying to unbake the cake. This technology will not go away. The powerful will use it in secret; and sometimes the less powerful too.
I'd rather see surveillance first pointed towards government leaders, and then once the government is highly surveilled, then maybe we can trust the government to surveil everyone else.
I don't know. My idea here isn't very realistic. It's not going to happen (though we should still try), so maybe just outlawing all of it would be more realistic.
It doesn't seem all that different. Cops use these cameras to stalk ex-girlfriends, target political foes, and perv on the public at large. The public watching them hardly seems worse.
I do agree that we just shouldn't have this kind of mass-surveillance in general, and I think that's kind of the point of this particular endeavor.
> I can see some nuance to this one. Flock is intended to be searchable by law enforcement, not Joe Average.
I feel that's like saying there's "nuance" when the police choose to pull someone over because--unlike the other car--they didn't have a "I Donated To Cops" license plate.
Yes, it's technically a difference, but if it matters then the police are abusing their power to play favorites.
> Flock is intended to be searchable by law enforcement, not Joe Average
Then why can Lowes and Home Depot buy their own units, place them across properties that aren't theirs and search them nationwide?
Cops usually are worse than average Joe on many negative statistics (domestic abuse, etc), and that's not even factoring in how numbers are skewed by the well established thin blue line.
It's safer to give your info to average joe population than cops.
I would feel better if only cops didn't have access to see me on flock cameras and cops had to request footage through a public reddit or something.
This is all a bit of a joke sure, but less than police access to flock cams is.
Unfortunately, Joe Average knows a cop willing to sell their Flock credentials on the dark web so Joe can perform nationwide searches of his ex-wife.
You have to assume it’s not just used by sworn law enforcement officers, especially when Flock’s own civilian employees have abused it.
This was in Canada so I don't know if the same laws apply. In the US the justification for this tracking without a warrant is that you are in public. That same justification allows for filming police in the public.
The intent of Flock in the US at least was just to use technology to get around the 4th amendment.
The police shouldn't be allowed to use automated tools like this without a warrant.
Well, actually mostly Average Joes become cops. As a matter of fact those Average Joes stalked on random people with 'LOL' in reason column.
What nuance though? Did everyone give the state permission to sniff after them? Because I did not. And I am almost certain a majority would not be ok with it either. There is a reason people hate flock sniffers.
When the people turn it around and sniff on cops, why is that then any different suddenly?
> we'd need actual legislation
Can the people do legislation? It's always some judges and politicians who form a clique at the end of the day.
So the cops visited and talked to him, but didn't pursue any charges or issue any warnings. He was free to pursue his project (so far).
>“One of [the officers] took the time to specifically mention how scary it would be for them, because people would be able to find out where they lived, when they got on their shift and what they were doing throughout the day, and that that type of powerful information could put them personally at risk [from] any bad apples that might want to track them down.”
I know we're supposed to distill everything down to a "them vs us" mentality. But cops have been tracked down and killed by people using apps like Waze so it's not a completely unwarranted fear.
This also isn't an apples and oranges situation. A Flock database isn't public - police have access but at least ostensibly have oversight from the legal system. That's a much different set of concerns than the "UNO reverse card" the TikToker is trying to make it to be.
Hundreds of people have been tracked down and killed with flock cameras unnecessarily. The police routinely escalate interactions as a matter of procedure until they end in shootings.
On average over 1000 people are killed by police each year. A police officer is by far the most dangerous person you'll likely interact with on a day to day basis.
>But cops have been tracked down and killed by people using apps like Waze so it's not a completely unwarranted fear.
Sure, but you haven't made the case for why the fear is anyone else's problem. If a person is too scared to be a cop there's an easy fix: stop being a cop. Unfortunately, regular citizens who can't afford to up and move to a country that has civil rights (that is, most of them) don't have the same recourse.
I think your critique of police here is orthogonal to the privacy discussion, which affects everyone:
Imagine the danger and legitimate fear a stalking victim would face if there was a public real-time tracker for any license plate query you can imagine.
Imagine the danger and legitimate fear a stalking victim would face if their stalker is a police officer with access to Flock.
So, like, cops are currently doing?
Police cars are painted differently to make them visible. They are public information. Police stations are visible. Cops addresses are not made public.
Police visiting a home is form of intimidation. That's not something to brush off.
> cops have been tracked down and killed by people using apps like Waze
Do you have a source for that? I can only find 2 examples vaguely similar but neither are really what that statement claims. Specifically one of them was just cops making stuff up about wayze which was factually incorrect.
> police have access but at least ostensibly have oversight from the legal system
We've already seen plenty of examples of cops tracking ex-wives and such similar abuses with no real accountability - nobody's lost their job over it
Cops know exactly what they do when they show up like this, it's meant to intimidate, there are also plenty of cases where cops have repeatedly crossed the line harassing citizens breaking no laws, it's disgusting
Actually... Several have. One such story: https://www.wsbtv.com/news/georgia/georgia-deputy-accused-mi...
That's a flock camera misuse story not related
I think it's fair, however I probably should've said something like "the vast majority of misuses are not being checked, and the vast majority of cops abusing the system havent and wont be disciplined accordingly"
What a BS take. Do a cursory google search and you'll find many abuses of the Flock cameras. There is no oversight. How incredibly ironic:
>One of [the officers] took the time to specifically mention how scary it would be for them, because people would be able to find out where they lived, when they got on their shift and what they were doing throughout the day, and that that type of powerful information could put them personally at risk [from] any bad apples that might want to track them down.
This is the exact reason Flock cameras shouldn't exist. Hell even you know how there is no oversight otherwise you wouldn't have used the word "ostensibly" with italics.
BTW did you just gloss over how they came to his home to intimidate him? Cops SHOULD be tracked because American cops are simply the worst bullies on the planet.
> Do a cursory google search and you'll find many abuses of the Flock cameras. There is no oversight.
We know about them because they were caught.
> Cops SHOULD be tracked because American cops are simply the worst bullies on the planet.
Cops are tracked. Part of the reason the above were caught because their searches were logged in Flock and used against them in criminal proceedings.
But I'm not sure where you got that I am against police being tracked?
In Georgia, a police chief was found to have tracked his ex-girlfriend and her teenage daughter approximately 600 times.
In Texas, a sheriff's deputy utilized Flock ALPRs to locate a woman at the behest of her abusive partner.
Marin County Sheriff’s Office was sharing the sensitive location data of millions of drivers with out-of-state agencies and federal authorities, explicitly including ICE and CBP, circumventing California law.
So, yes, it's messed up that cops' fears are warranted, in your eyes, but not private citizens'.
> He was free to pursue his project
No, being intimidated by uniformed officers is not being "free".
I feel like this isn’t the best way to draw attention to the problem. Presumably having the police visit is what the YouTuber wanted? I’m not really sure of the lesson here but drama’s presumably the point as opposed to a side effect so it’s hard to take seriously.
Can you explain your thinking?
Flock, at the core, isn't a public entity. They aren't a government. So they're a private entity, just like an individual, tracking who they want, when they want.
This person is doing the exact same thing as Flock, and suddenly it is a problem? Seems like a double-standard.
You feel that greater attention is typically paid online to undramatic things?
risky move to talk to cops at your door without a lawyer present, although i am not sure how different it is in canada
I'm not familiar with privacy and filming laws on canada, but if the cops just came there and chatted with him without any arrests, warnings, citations, detainment, etc, then it isn't really different from any other random citizen knocking on your door and asking about your security camera.
That was in Canada (Peel, Ontario) not in the US just for context and for people not reading the article
Tracking for thee but not for me
Well I mean the state does have the monopoly on violence.
In a functioning state, anyway.
So yeah, of course rules are different for normal people compared with people that have a special role as assigned by the democratically legitimized system.
Rookie mistake. Need to start a religion first, then you can do whatever you want if you call it righteous.
This is one of those emotionally satisfying stories... if you don't think about it very hard. It's symbolically rich, it fits the simplistic narratives of good vs evil we're all raised with, but this isn't a great example of a 'gotcha' moment.
Do I like Flock cameras? No. Do I like mass surveillance? No. Do I see a difference between an agent of the state doing something involving law enforcement or surveillance activities, and a private individual doing the same? Yes. You can't run around in uniform handcuffing people either.
I don't want HN'ers setting up surveillance networks anymore than I want them strapping a pistol to their hip and fighting crime. It's an asymmetry by design because the alternative is an unworkable nightmare, whereas the sad reality is that if people keep voting for people who openly spy on us, they're going to keep doing it.
Your “private individual” wording is carrying a lot of weight here. I wonder if Google knows where all the cops with Androids are? Or if Meta lets you bid for ad impressions from users “interested in law enforcement”
What if I wanted to record the cops to schedule my lemonade stand?
Basically, the answer to “Who gets to surveil?” is: Everyone but you
Start a site or a place where you can collect metrics and hand out cookies. Boom you're in the surveillance game. You can buy ad data, you can read census data, if you have the money it's all out there on the market. Hell if you don't have a conscience you can buy black market info.
You have to ask if you want more of that until we reach parity with Google and THE POLICE, or if you're reacting out of a sense of fairness that's taught to children.
"You have no expectation of privacy in public, citizen."
"Officer, do you have any expectation of privacy in public?"
"That's different."
Incredibly sometimes things are different because of different circumstances and the laws we've all taken part in constructing (when we bother to organize and vote of course).
You're an unregulated, unsupervised, and frankly unknown factor with no real accountability through any realistic chain of command to the results of the democratic process. However far from your imagined ideal, cops are.
So they can watch us - but we can not watch them.
At which point is this called slavery?
Words have meanings
Not in 2026 they don't.
They're just most probable tokens. Either most probable to exist after the previous set of tokens, or most probable to get a specific outcome.
I am being sarcastic of course, as HN has still to some degree managed to avoid this, but even HN is struggling. The rest of "social media" operates exactly like that.
YouTuber is shocked to find out that the government is legally able to do things that you, a private citizen, cannot do.
What he did was not illegal and he was not charged. Four cops came to his house to intimidate him but left when it did not work
Shocked? No; he's not shocked. If anything, this was for shock value and the lulz (aka ad revenue).
But; he does help others, who may be far less aware of the irony in all of this, that local, state/province, and federal/national governments need to be SIGNIFICANTLY pressured into not funding these sorts of mass surveillance efforts.
While Flock is getting flack for this, currently, it's ultimately the governments who utilize Flock's services that are ultimately at fault for not only allowing the technology to exist, but deploying at scale.
Eventually, the Flock backlash will die down and some other far less obvious company will take its place in the market and the citizenry needs to be vigilant in not allowing this to occur.
The YouTuber just forgot that they need more subscribers to unlock those perks.
You gain those at iirc 10 million or so? Even comes with a decorative plate for your wall.
Goverement has monopoly to use violence against own citizens. Legally. Why opposite is illegal?
Flock isn't "the government". This is an interesting conversation because often Flock is a circumvention to the police not being able to do these things.
Why deal with annoying oversight and restrictive governance and audits and usage monitoring when you can just offload it to a private company and stalk women without restraint?
this is not a good summary of the video
Legal gray area is still a legal gray area...
Technically, it is home users volunteering data to a cloud provider, that then mines the disclosed data as a service for any creep.
It would be a constitutional matter, and the city would lose in court given precedent lawsuits... if police used direct surveillance to follow people around even on public property where there was no expectation of privacy. Sue, and remember to vote. =3
Cops, like everyone, have no "reasonable expectation of privacy." Until then, they are in fact treated like everyone else.
What I saw was cops making up laws and trying to intimidate people into following them. Wouldn't be the first time.