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).
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).
> 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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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)
>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”
> 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.
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).
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.
"
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Not an American, what made Flock special compared to other surveillance cameras?
Informationized or intelligentized surveillances cameras arent a new thing.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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'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".
> 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.
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.
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.
Also a country with regular human rights violations, virtually no political, ideological, press, assembly, worker or economical freedom, heavy censorship, etc.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 .
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
> 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).
> 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.
> 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.
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
Checks. I didn’t believe it at first, because I’ve always considered YC, in spite of its flaws, to be politically astute.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why would a YC company like Flock do that /s
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.
The quickest way to get dragnet surveillance banned would be for citizens to collaborate and create a massive publicly-available surveillance network.
Yes. Once the application of force happens outside the state's monopoly, they'll shut that shit down so fast.
... of politicians. Because they are the ones who could write the laws to ban privacy invasive solutions.
already happening and it seems it is legal https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/citizens-are-tracki...
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.
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
>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.
> 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.
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. Things in public can be recorded without consent
This is _not_ universal. Many jurisdictions take a different view on this.
"
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
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
America's supreme court's consistency will not protect anyone from this problem, no matter how much history says so.
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.
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?
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.
>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.
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.
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.
It’s the whole game.
You’re still naive after that!
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?
Not an American, what made Flock special compared to other surveillance cameras? Informationized or intelligentized surveillances cameras arent a new thing.
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 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
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
Including investor data since they are a YC company?
No, no compromises.
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.
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.
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.
Someone with high rep post a Tell HN that Flock is YC
https://archive.ph/vLfJz
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.
Never trust HN articles or high karma accounts.
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".
> 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.
"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?
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.
Were you very pleased to know Flock is a YC company and HN helps them lie
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.
This is basically a version of rage bait that I find most productive trying to stay away from reading
Already a reality in mainland China, which is a country with very little street crime, grafitti, vandalism etc.
Also a country with regular human rights violations, virtually no political, ideological, press, assembly, worker or economical freedom, heavy censorship, 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.
Graffiti is amazing. It is protest.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes but can you voice your displeasure against the government if they target you? I prefer crime, grafitti and vandalism
>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.
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.
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.
Wait till you hear about the UK.
mainland China is very big, what's the coverage like
or are you just making things up
The Already and The Whatabout, the two pillars of the Temple of Incrementalists.
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.
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
> 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”
Florida already banned them from the state entirely.
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.
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.
Flock is YC.
HN mods are complicit!
Paul Graham should be ashamed of himself
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.
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 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 .
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
I always thought of the UK and London especially as most tightly monitored city on the planet. By far.
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...
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?
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.
Yes, people pretend to not understand the difference.
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?
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-...
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-...
Most of the outraged people live in the US where we have Flock. Presumably people in other countries are outraged about their local equivalent.
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
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?
> 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.
> 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
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.
You do realize that humans use art to communicate difficult or emotional ideas including political beliefs, right?
> 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.
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.
> 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.