[HN Gopher] Dissecting Flock Safety: The Cameras Tracking You Ar...
___________________________________________________________________
Dissecting Flock Safety: The Cameras Tracking You Are a Security
Nightmare [video]
Author : emsign
Score : 139 points
Date : 2025-11-16 15:50 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| echelon wrote:
| These cameras are showing up everywhere in my state. It's creepy.
| I had no idea what they were, and now suddenly they're at every
| intersection, gas station, you name it.
|
| I don't like that the government is tracking everyone's movements
| so openly. I knew they were doing this with cell phone data, but
| that wasn't so brazen.
| extropic-engine wrote:
| did you know that flock has a data sharing contract with ring
| cameras? amazon's panopticon is much larger. i believe it is on
| by default and users have to manually opt out, but i don't have
| a ring camera to verify.
| garrettlangley wrote:
| That's inaccurate. It's opt-in, police request footage in a
| geofence, and as a Ring user, you can select to share or not.
| The police are only notified if you chose to share.
| vanc_cefepime wrote:
| Feel free to place a disclosure that you are a cofounder of
| Flock.
| CharlesW wrote:
| Only sharing specific clips is opt-in1, but the program and
| its notifications are on by default. Maybe not
| surprisingly, consumers aren't asked if they want to
| participate, and the option is buried enough that most
| people will never see it.
|
| 1 I'm being generous here. Police can still obtain Ring
| footage via warrants or "emergency" requests that don't
| involve the user choosing to share anything.
| lysace wrote:
| So your concern here is spam of unsolicited requests from
| LE to consider sharing data related to some local event?
| spaceguillotine wrote:
| hey, while I have you here Mr CEO, why are you comfortable
| allowing abusive cops the tech to stalk and harass former
| partners, I've met women that had ex husbands in the FBI
| that kept chasing them across country to continue the abuse
| and your camera systems help enable those acts.
|
| I hope you lose sleep like those women do.
| diogenes_atx wrote:
| Here in Austin, the city council no longer allows Flock ALPR's
| (automated license plate readers) on city streets, but Home
| Depot and other businesses still use them in their parking
| lots, and they scan your vehicle license plate every time you
| enter and exit the premises. Flock sells its data to ICE and
| law enforcement.
| wldcordeiro wrote:
| Plus they'll position them close to an intersection in the
| parking lot of a business so they can get around something
| like the restriction Austin put in.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _they 'll position them close to an intersection_
|
| Does Flock control where the cameras are positioned?
| garrettlangley wrote:
| That's inaccurate. We do not sell data.
| CharlesW wrote:
| Correct. Flock _sells_ cameras and platform access, but
| _gives_ data from their shared, nationwide surveillance
| utility to ICE and law enforcement.
|
| https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-
| massachus...
|
| https://www.404media.co/ice-taps-into-nationwide-ai-
| enabled-...
|
| https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/surveillance-
| com...
| tptacek wrote:
| I don't like that this is the case, but you understand
| that a pretty huge fraction of the country doesn't share
| your set of political premises that providing data for
| immigration enforcement is unethical, right? (I do, but
| that shouldn't matter for the analysis.)
|
| It seems weird to me to hyperfocus on Flock's role here
| rather than the role your own local municipalities play
| in deciding how to configure these things. Not sharing
| with ICE is apparently quite doable? At least to the
| point of requiring a court order to get access to the
| data, which is a vulnerability all online cameras share.
|
| _Later_
|
| s/company/country, thanks for the correction!
| akerl_ wrote:
| Did you mean country?
| potato3732842 wrote:
| >but gives data from their shared, nationwide
| surveillance utility to ICE and law enforcement
|
| I don't think anyone with a network like that can not
| "give" the contents to the feds for very long without
| drawing ire.
| notrealyme123 wrote:
| that's an odly specific answer.
| loeg wrote:
| Seems like a broad dismissal of the claim made upthread
| ("Flock sells its data to ICE and law enforcement"). Why
| do you think it is excessively specific?
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| As the CEO of Flock, don't you feel you have more
| information to offer this community outside of the "we do
| not sell data" statement you've made over and over? The
| fact that you do not engage here in the ethical aspects of
| your product doesn't look good for you and only deepens
| suspicion that something darker is going on behind your
| doors.
| garrettlangley wrote:
| Consistent because it's the truth. We do not and have
| never been in the business of monetizing data.
|
| Our customers place cameras and have total control over
| where and how that information is shared with law
| enforcement.
|
| There is no conspiracy theory here or "dark activity"
| behind doors.
|
| We are trying to help people stay safe.
|
| Welcome feedback or new ideas to make our communities
| safe.
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| The comment adjacent to mine links to several findings,
| including from the EFF, demonstrating doubt on your
| assertions here. Specifically the case of Texas using
| Flock data outside of their jurisdiction (on a national
| level even) to use against abortion seekers. You have no
| substantial comments to make on those or any of the other
| active discussions that have spawned on this platform
| over the past year? You're obviously reading them, yet
| you only remain "consistent" on a technicality.
|
| What steps is Flock taking to address the privacy
| overreach? Do you have data sharing agreements with
| Palantir? If so, do they respect the same geofencing
| properties that your clients supposedly have full control
| over?
| tptacek wrote:
| He's not arguing that the data isn't shared. He's saying
| that they don't sell it. Local PDs generally _want_ to
| share their data with other law enforcement agencies.
| jacquesm wrote:
| This is totally disingenuous.
|
| You are selling tools that have zero upside and a lot of
| downsides and that are used for structural violation of
| the privacy of citizens. Don't hide behind that you're
| trying to help people stay safe, that is not what you are
| doing and if you believe that you can take credit for the
| upsides then you _really_ should take responsibility for
| the downsides.
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| Zero upside? LOL, no.
|
| I'm looking for convincing decoy ALPR cameras because I
| don't think my HOA will go for a real setup, and I've got
| concerns over the product's security. I want the
| appearance of surveillance if I can't get the real thing.
| Being on a Flock/ALPR tracking app/site would be a huge
| win.
|
| There is no benefit to signaling one's virtue in this
| scenario. It's like having a sign in your yard that says
| "Proudly Gun-Free Household".
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| The problem isn't zero upside, as other commenters have
| pointed out. The cameras have legitimate, lawful, and
| useful purposes. You will not gain any traction with the
| public or with lawmakers as long as your arguments ignore
| that reality.
|
| The problem is that the downside is _unbounded_.
|
| We clearly don't have the control over our governments,
| in either direction or degree, that would be needed to
| ensure that the unbounded downside of ubiquitous
| networked cameras won't manifest itself.
| chillingeffect wrote:
| >Welcome feedback or new ideas to make our communities
| safe.
|
| Nuture not control.
|
| Living wage.
|
| Access to day care.
| projektfu wrote:
| From the ACLU article above:
|
| Every community in the nation that is home to Flock
| cameras should look at the user agreement between their
| police department (or other Flock customers) and the
| company, to see whether it contains a clause stating that
| the customer "hereby grants Flock" a "worldwide,
| perpetual, royalty-free free right and license" to
| "disclose the Agency Data... for investigative purposes."
| This is the language that will govern in a community
| unless a department demands changes to the standard user
| agreement that Flock offers. That is something we
| absolutely urge any agencies doing business with Flock to
| do -- and, the ACLU of Massachusetts found, is exactly
| what the Boston police department did.
|
| ---
|
| What assurance does any member of the public have that
| your company does not and will not ever share data to
| which you claim a "worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free
| free right and license" to? Are you saying that the
| "customer" has the ability to choose a "do not share"
| flag or something? What happens when they flip that flag
| at some point in the future? What redress does a victim
| have if you share data you did not, at that point in
| time, have permission to share?
| ncr100 wrote:
| Royal we.
|
| This is part of the problem with Flock, IMO. Lack of
| adherence to or support of norms. Psychopathy actualized as
| a corporation.
|
| The societal impact of disruption of trust, of personal
| privacy, is under-appreciated by the corporation. It's
| concerned with winning profit.
|
| (Meta) It's an inspecific argument I'm lazily laying out,
| yes, however the problem is ridiculously obvious.
|
| We should not have to ask to be respected, and here we are.
|
| Democratic decline (both the systems and participation in),
| truth, self respect/understanding of one's own rights ...
| those qualities are dying at the relentless toxic,
| ethically under-explored capitalization of our laws and
| resources. (Especially USA, compare to corporate social
| responsibility countries, I suspect)
|
| Tech disruption is amazing to watch, and participate in,
| like a fire consuming the forest. "But what about the
| children?"
| projektfu wrote:
| Here was the CEO back in 2017:
|
| "Alexro, there are clear and large signs about the cameras at
| the entrance to our neighborhoods.
|
| "Our neighborhoods are not large public roads, they are
| typically 100-400 home communities. You would never have to
| enter the community."
|
| Now, it's clear that the cameras are not always obviously
| marked, they are not always in small communities, and they are
| often now on public thoroughfares. i go past at least one every
| day and it is not within a subdivision, rather it's on a main
| thoroughfare. It is marked, but a sign that is readable at 5
| MPH is not necessarily readable at 35 MPH. It doesn't help to
| mark it "Flock" because I don't know who it is for.
|
| Presumably, someone who has permission to the data can use it
| for legitimate investigations. Or they can use it for illicit
| investigations. Or share it with others for their own
| investigations. Or exchange it for other data they care about.
| And since we're not the "customer", what can we do about it?
| We're the target.
| walterbell wrote:
| _" Find Nearby Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR)"_ (70
| comments), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487452
|
| Adversarial computer vision and DIY OSS $250 RPi Hailo ALPR (2M
| views), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ
|
| _" Tire Pressure Sensor IDs: Why, Where and When (2015)"_ (30
| comments), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45490202
| baby_souffle wrote:
| Ooof. When I heard "android things" I knew they had a problem. It
| was a google project that had little adoption and was killed only
| a few years after it was announced (so, better than average for
| google, then?).
|
| I wonder what they estimate the "replace with newer" cost to be
| versus the "figure out how to deploy $modernAndroid fleet wide"
| costs. Bonus points if you express it as a percentage of CEO's
| compensation / company wide revenue.
| conradev wrote:
| The camera companies always end up having a lot in common:
|
| https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/2123068verkadac...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| ...what's the commonality?
| spaceguillotine wrote:
| lack of security it looks like
| conradev wrote:
| Should've included a bit more but the title does a good job:
| The Cameras Tracking You Are a Security Nightmare
|
| It's pretty consistent across camera tracking companies.
| Facial recognition more broadly, like Clearview AI as well. I
| don't have a unifying theory other than it's a _very_ obvious
| business model that naturally accrues _power_ as well. Not
| unlike... selling drugs.
|
| The model is not entirely unhelpful: selling better drugs
| might be one of the few practical solutions here. If cameras
| have undeniably visible benefits for private companies and
| public safety (I think they ultimately will), then the
| question is how to build them in a way that avoids accrual of
| centralized power while providing the benefits. You can
| attack that problem from a lot of angles, but at the moment
| it is undeniably hard to build video sensing in a way that
| doesn't rely on centralized (computing) power.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| Not all of them. At my workplace (the parent company,
| actually), security and privacy are among the highest
| priorities.
|
| Competing with companies that don't share these values is a
| "slow path."
|
| For instance, one of the most common requests is integrating
| our VMS with Chinese cameras, because of cost. While we've done
| it in the past, using a hardware device to prevent unexpected
| protocol communication, our CEO concluded that it was ethically
| questionable given our principles.
|
| TLDR: The feature was dropped, and you can imagine that this
| decision had a significant impact on sales.
|
| Pretty bold move, honestly.
|
| Because of things like that, that's why I stay.
| rpcope1 wrote:
| It's not just Flock anymore. Another Y Combinator startup,
| Blissway has been putting cameras in a lot of places in Colorado,
| and you can't tell me it's not going to be used for exactly the
| same shit.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Would the local laws banning Flock also apply to Blissway?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Could someone who's been successful at getting these banned at
| the local level speak to how they did it?
|
| (We've recently had some high-profile political fundraisers in my
| town. Our state's FOIA is halfway powerful, and a few of us were
| considering publishing maps of the routes they and they security
| details took, to illustrate how these products compromise our
| safety. But that strikes me as more of a fun publicity stunt than
| anything that would force the county.)
| spaceguillotine wrote:
| request every shot taken outside of police depts and compile a
| list of private plate numbers for all the cops, watch shit
| change hella fast
| tptacek wrote:
| Why do you think this would work? First, even where Flock
| data is FOIA-able, raw camera feed data probably isn't
| ("probably" because I don't know the law in your state, just
| Illinois). Second, what do you think you'd find?
| sbuttgereit wrote:
| This is the most serious effort I've seen:
|
| https://ij.org/press-release/judge-rules-lawsuit-challenging...
|
| Not exactly trying to get new legislation passed but working
| within the courts to set some boundaries.
| cfraenkel wrote:
| This article might point to a way:
| https://neuburger.substack.com/p/cities-panic-over-having-to...
| thaumaturgy wrote:
| I have been able to get them deactivated in two cities. They
| have not yet been physically removed but that is looking like a
| likely near-term outcome.
|
| Flock has been a "side project" that's been eating about as
| many hours as a part-time job since late June. I have spoken at
| city council meetings in two cities, met individually with city
| councilors, met with a chief of police, presented to city
| councilors in Portland, am in almost daily conversations with
| ACLU Oregon, have received legal advice from EFF, done numerous
| media interviews, and I have an upcoming presentation to the
| state Senate Judiciary Committee. I may also be one of the
| reasons that Ron Wyden's office investigated Flock more
| carefully over the Summer and recently released a letter
| suggesting that cities terminate their relationship with the
| company.
|
| All of which is to say I've been in it for a while now and have
| had some wins.
|
| Good and bad news: it's a lot easier to fight it now than it
| was in June, but it's still going to take more effort than you
| probably imagine.
|
| You'll need a team. I'm one member of a community working
| group. We have a core group of about a half-dozen active
| organizers. We have filed (and paid thousands in fees for) tons
| of public records requests, done a lot of community organizing
| and outreach, built partnerships with adjacent activist
| organizations, and done original technical research.
|
| There are a couple of different strategies to pursue that can
| kick these things out of a community. My recommendation is to
| find the one that you like best, and find other people that
| like other ones, and pursue them in parallel.
|
| Depending on your local police department, you may find them to
| be surprisingly cooperative, or you may find that they dig in
| and start putting in an equal amount of effort to block yours.
| I've had both. Odds are that your city councilors are not aware
| at all of what Flock is or how it works, so your first step is
| to raise awareness. I _strongly_ recommend starting with an
| approach that makes you seem like a reasonable, honest, and
| reliable member of your community.
|
| I realize this comment isn't super helpful by itself. I'm a bit
| distracted at the moment and I don't think I could figure out
| how to write a helpful, comprehensive, and yet concise comment
| here on this. I need to put together an info packet for people
| that want to get efforts like this one started in their own
| community. In the meanwhile, you should be able to email
| contact@eyesoffeugene.org and I'm happy to provide advice and
| assistance to anyone that wants to take this up in their city.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Would you be open to consulting for a group that's trying to
| do the same in west Wyoming?
|
| > _There are a couple of different strategies to pursue that
| can kick these things out of a community_
|
| Would love to hear more about these, even if it's just a wall
| of links or brief thoughts.
| thaumaturgy wrote:
| > _Would you be open to consulting for a group that 's
| trying to do the same in west Wyoming?_
|
| Absolutely!
|
| Re: Strategies
|
| - Public records requests (aka FOIAs, though FOIA is
| technically for federal stuff): this has been a big one for
| us. File a request for the contract, a request for the
| locations, a request for communications, requests for the
| network audit, and more. PRRs take practice, but I can put
| you in touch with someone that's become an expert at them.
| Some requests may come with price tags attached and in some
| cases they can be expensive. Usually that means either the
| agency is fighting you or something in the request needs to
| be reworded.
|
| - Comms: set up a site (go with something quick and easy
| for multiple people to use), we've had good luck setting up
| a community chat on Signal (now with almost 100
| participants). I've spent a pile of hours just assembling
| different slide decks that digest lots of Flock info into
| smaller bits for people learning about it for the first
| time.
|
| - Show up: things got rolling here when a couple of people
| used the public comment period at local city council
| meetings. Local media often monitor city council meetings,
| and if you're a new face and you're saying something
| interesting, there may be a brief interview afterward.
|
| - Gather intelligence: we've gotten to know our local
| politicians pretty well. You'll want to keep some notes on
| where everyone stands on it, who can be moved, who prefers
| individual meetings, talking points they may be responsive
| to.
|
| - Engage with other local activist groups. Flock s a
| problem that affects people with lots of different
| political opinions.
|
| - Try meeting with your local police department chief and
| just initiate a conversation about it. They may not be as
| pro-Flock as you'd expect. You at least want to figure out
| where they stand on it and let them see you as not a direct
| opponent from the get-go.
|
| - Make contact with your local chapter of the ACLU. In our
| case, they've filed a lawsuit on our behalf over a public
| records request that the city refused to fulfill and the
| county DA denied on appeal.
|
| - Write lots of emails to local officials, offer to meet
| them for coffee. They can be hard to reach initially, but
| once you get that initial meeting, if it goes well, they
| know who you are and they'll answer your texts. We are now
| having frequent text chats with city councilors and police
| commissioners and even state legislators.
|
| This is all just off the top of my head real quick, I am
| probably forgetting at least one important strategy. But
| each of these can take a lot of time and each benefits from
| different skill sets, so that's where having a small group
| of people is really helpful.
|
| Rather than trying to set up a hierarchical, official
| organization, we decided early on to just run as an ad-hoc
| informal "working group", and each of us would just pick up
| whatever tasks we were most interested in. That has worked
| out _really_ well.
| tptacek wrote:
| I've written about how we did it in Oak Park, IL:
|
| * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40227280
|
| * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41927777
|
| * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45506690
|
| Cards on the table that I was not a full-throated supporter of
| cancelling our Flock contract, for complicated reasons, but
| past that I'll take a fair bit of credit for the harm-reduction
| work we did, which ultimately created the procedural tracks we
| used to kill the contract.
|
| Short answer for how we did it: message board nerding.
|
| You're interested in getting the cameras taken down in a
| Wyoming muni. One advantage we had in Oak Park that you might
| not in WY is that our cost function priced bogus stops of Black
| drivers very high. So, if I was strategizing killing cameras in
| a major metro suburb, my strategy would be:
|
| (1) Create procedural rails to collect your own transparency
| data on stops.
|
| (2) Do the analysis to trace "real" stops to crimes meaningful
| to your muni (for us: enforcing failure-to-appear warrants for
| neighboring suburbs was not high-value work for OPPD, so many
| of the "legit" stops had negative value).
|
| (3) You'll be left with some subset of real crimes cameras were
| involved with, and in only a subset of those will the cameras
| have been meaningful.
|
| One thing that complicates Flock deployments in Illinois is
| that they depend on the ISP LEADS database as their hotlist of
| stolen vehicles, and LEADS is not maintained well enough to use
| as a real-time information source (or even a week-by-week
| granular source), so we had a bunch of bogus stops.
|
| _A super important thing I think everybody should know about
| Flock cameras_ :
|
| You do not in fact need to be enrolled in Flock's sharing
| system to get data from neighboring muni cameras. In fact, I
| think Flock even has a product you can buy that just gives you
| access to sharing data without even owning cameras.
|
| Since "we need to share our data to get access to other muni's
| data" is the only reason to have sharing enabled on these
| things, it should be pretty easy, as a political lift, to turn
| sharing off.
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| Why would a stop for an outstanding warrant have negative
| value for your community? If word got out that OPPD will come
| down hard on anyone with warrants, perhaps people with
| warrants would stay away from your community. I'm not sure I
| see the downside; deterrence is a good thing.
|
| Analogy: criminals know Target stores have a policy to
| prosecute all shoplifters, so when there was still a
| shoplifting subreddit that fact would be regularly trotted
| out and criminals were warned by their peers (the best kind
| of testimonial) to stay away. I would love it if my
| neighborhood had that reputation.
| tptacek wrote:
| A failure to appear warrant is generally someone not
| showing up to court to pay a traffic ticket. It's
| essentially municipal debt collection work. I'm not saying
| it's bad to catch people with outstanding warrants; i'm
| saying that OPPD curbing a car and making an arrest has a
| simple logistical cost, and that cost swamps the minuscule
| value of helping a neighboring suburb collect ticket
| revenue.
|
| Our police have real work to do. If we had a special magic
| beepy device in all the police cruisers that lit up when
| someone with an outstanding warrant drove past, we would
| not prioritize that enforcement work to the exclusion of
| the real work. But since OPPD doesn't know that they're
| going to end up burning 5 hours on a failure-to-appear
| warrant when they curb a car on a Flock alert, that's what
| Flock essentially had us doing.
|
| I honestly think this argument is probably pretty portable
| to a lot of different municipalities. It's not a function
| of anything Flock itself deliberately does, but rather a
| simple function of pretextual or preemptive stops on cars:
| you are probably going to end up making a whole bunch of
| failure-to-appear arrests. And I think in pretty much every
| community where killing camera contracts is on the table,
| failure-to-appear enforcement will be perceived as net-
| negative, a distraction from preventing serious crime.
|
| The thing I like about this argument is that it's
| insensitive to people's priors about law enforcement.
| Whether or not you like your PD (I very much like OPPD),
| this argument should have weight!
|
| The key observation here, again, is that any arrest has a
| very high fixed cost.
| gnarlouse wrote:
| Make Classwarfare MAD Again
| woliveirajr wrote:
| I'll just leave this one here
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15075384
| lgleason wrote:
| Assuming that one is in favor of the use of these cameras, the
| security issues seem like they are a big problem. The leaking of
| police officer personal data and locations was pretty egregious.
|
| Would love to hear from one of the founders on what they are
| doing to address that.
| culi wrote:
| This map of Flock cameras[0] is pretty neat. It actually utilizes
| OpenStreetMap data. It was controversial but at some point in the
| last decade OSM decided to allow annotating surveillance cameras.
| You can add all sorts of characteristics including what they're
| mounted to and which direction they're facing. As well as the
| manufacturer which is what that map is based on.
|
| The open-source project Every Door has been a really convenient
| on-the-go tool for contributing these annotations[1]
|
| [0] https://banishbigbrother.com/flock-camera-map/
|
| [1] https://every-door.app/
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-11-16 23:00 UTC)