[HN Gopher] US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance techno...
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US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology
Author : giuliomagnifico
Score : 591 points
Date : 2026-04-08 12:26 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnet.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnet.com)
| lenerdenator wrote:
| It really is amazing how they managed to fit so much copper into
| those devices.
| therobots927 wrote:
| Would be a shame if it became common knowledge.
| Dezvous wrote:
| It's quite ironic to get an amazon ring video ad while viewing
| this article.
| therobots927 wrote:
| Ring is just as bad. Arguably worse because it comes with a
| convenience / personal security factor.
| elphinstone wrote:
| An obnoxious, autoplay-at-full-volume ad that took the page an
| extra 30 seconds to load and somehow bypassed firefox
| adblockers...
| radiorental wrote:
| Firefox 149 + ublock origin did not display ads for me
| Dezvous wrote:
| I'm also on firefox 149 with ublock origin. Probably just
| need to enable some more filters.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| Funny that. Not everyone wants to live in an open air prison.
| jmuguy wrote:
| I'm surprised Garrett Langley still has a job, he seems wildly
| out of touch. For instance he really believes that his Panopticon
| as a service is the reason crime is down in cities, conveniently
| ignoring crime rates prior to COVID.
| therobots927 wrote:
| He won't for long. The backlash is just getting started. Left
| or right, no one wants their whereabouts subject to constant
| surveillance.
|
| His only advantage is that the cops are on his side and won't
| let go of these cameras without a fight.
| mlinhares wrote:
| Nah, he's just missing a good PR campaign, there's a 30% of
| the population that will eat whatever their supreme leaders
| say they should, I'm sure they can sanewash these cameras as
| well.
| therobots927 wrote:
| America is pretty polarized around privacy as demonstrated
| by reactions to the Snowden leaks. So I think that's a fair
| point.
| hrimfaxi wrote:
| That was over a decade ago. I wonder if it has gotten
| better or worse since.
| zulux wrote:
| It's gotten worse: I'm so tired of rampant crime that I'm
| up for a little surveillance. And I _used_ to donate to
| the ACLU before they went crazy.
| estebank wrote:
| > And I used to donate to the ACLU before they went
| crazy.
|
| _When_ was that? Because in 1977 they defended Nazi 's
| free speech to demonstrate in a town that had jewish
| people as half its population so it tried to block them,
| and I don't recall them doing anything nearly that
| controversial since.
|
| https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/the-skokie-case-
| how-i-...
| selectodude wrote:
| Yeah that's when they actually defended free speech. They
| now take sides on what speech should be allowed. That's
| crazy.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > They now take sides on what speech should be allowed.
|
| Alternative framing: Given limited resources and lots of
| things to care about, they pick the specific cases that
| best improve the freedoms they're interested in
| protecting.
|
| In the case of the Second Amendment, they decided to let
| the NRA handle it, as that seems to be working just fine.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| A disingenuous take. The ACLU has actively published
| anti-2A literature in the past, arguing (as all such
| arguments must) that only the police, government, and
| military forces should have access to effective weapons.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I mean, the ACLU is allowed to say they don't interpret
| the Second the individualist way you do. That's their
| First Amendment right, yes?
|
| The Second is probably the amendment least in need of
| defending by the ACLU. It's well covered, and pretty much
| a third rail of American politics.
| selectodude wrote:
| I mean defending horrible shitty people who are
| exercising their 1st amendment rights.
|
| The ACLU should defend people who suck ass and another
| group should defend the heroes who beat their ass for
| saying awful shit.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Sure. But there's 100 shitty people and you have to pick
| one or two.
|
| So maybe you pick the anti-ICE protester instead of the
| Nazi to help out. Both got shot with pepper balls, both
| had their rights infringed upon. Why not pick the one who
| isn't a complete ass to establish the same precedent
| with?
| selectodude wrote:
| I agree 100%, I'd rather the ACLU picked their battles
| and if there's a choice, not pick a Nazi. But I'm not a
| huge fan about how they've explicitly said they won't
| defend hate speech. It's a betrayal of their original
| cause.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > But I'm not a huge fan about how they've explicitly
| said they won't defend hate speech.
|
| They've explicitly said the opposite.
|
| https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/defending-
| speech-w...
|
| 2023: "We joined Young Americans for Freedom, the Cato
| Institute, and other unlikely partners in filing an
| amicus brief on behalf of the Foundation for Individual
| Rights and Expression in its challenge to New York's new
| law regulating 'hateful conduct' in social media."
| whimsicalism wrote:
| the difference is that they would not do this today
| BryantD wrote:
| 2017: the ACLU defends Milo Yiannopoulos' right to
| advertise his new book. They file an amicus brief in the
| Supreme Court supporting a Tea Party supporter
| challenging a ban on wearing political insignia at
| polling places.
|
| 2018: the ACLU supports the NRA's First Amendment
| challenge to Governor Cuomo's attempt to convince NY
| financial institutions not to do business with the NRA.
|
| 2019: they defended a conservative student magazine which
| was denied funding by UCSD.
|
| 2020: they filed a brief supporting antisemitic
| protestors picketing a synagogue on the Sabbath. They
| also supported a Catholic school's religious right to
| make religious-based choices in hiring and firing
| teachers.
|
| I'm just quoting the fruits of five minutes of research
| here, so I won't go on (but there's more). Is it possible
| that you're reacting to the radical conservative
| stereotyping of the ACLU rather than the actual actions
| of the organization?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| It's very possible that I'm misinformed, but if so it was
| mostly from reading 'radical conservatives' like the NYT
| and other related reporting, along with ex-ACLU lawyers.
| [0]
|
| 0: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-
| speech.html
|
| I think this is particularly noted as a post-2022 shift
| mothballed wrote:
| Ha ha ha, you think it'll be used to help _you_? A hit
| and run drived totaled my car at an intersection with
| cameras, the cops would not even show up even though it
| was all on camera. When I called insurance they didn 't
| bat an eye, the claims person pretty obviously was used
| to this happening all the time and didn't even question
| why I wasn't able to get a police report.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Happened with my step daughter. Traffic light at
| intersection. She said she had a green light, so did the
| other driver.
|
| Cops -did- show up. "Did you have a green light" "I did."
| Less than 30 seconds of questions. Goes to the other
| driver, same, is back in under a minute. "Well, he said
| he's absolutely sure he had a green light, so I'm citing
| you for failing to obey a traffic signal".
|
| There were no cameras in the area, no witnesses, just the
| two drivers. But the other driver was a 50 something
| male, and my step daughter was 17 and upset because it
| was our car. So the cop took his word and cited her.
|
| Hmm, vehicle black box? If that showed that she had come
| to and been at a stop, and then accelerated, that would
| at least imply she had been at a red light, and gone when
| it turned green, as she said.
|
| No, no interest there. Even the insurer (fine, whatever),
| said "unless we're facing a six digit payout, we're not
| pulling the black box".
|
| Don't even start me on the fact that after our insurance
| denied liability, the other driver sued her in small
| claims court for $10,000 for a car that had a KBB of
| $1,450. And the small claims judge noted that he
| technically couldn't sue a minor in small claims, but
| required us to go to mandatory arbitration, where the
| arbitrator said, quote, "I don't understand why, as a
| decent human being, if insurance will pay out, you don't
| just accept the claim." (Yeahhhh, filed a complaint about
| that, too. And here I stop, because I feel my blood
| pressure rising lol).
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| So the system worked exactly as intended?
|
| It's not just auto insurance. Every government,
| government adjacent and highly regulated process is just
| like that.
|
| It's not about right and wrong or fairness or making the
| responsible party pay or saving the children or
| protecting the environment or preventing sub-prime loans
| or enforcing building code or or whatever the alleged
| pretext is. It's about having an efficient process turn
| the subjective into the quantifiable and/or assign
| financial responsibility and do so in a manner that's not
| flagrantly wrong so often that a "large enough to be a
| problem" amount of people seek recourse outside the
| system (like smoking the CEO on the sidewalk or armoring
| a bulldozer or whatever).
|
| But of course, marketing the system as though it's about
| right and wrong or fairness or whatever is what they do
| as a means toward what the point actually is so it's easy
| to understand why you think it failed instead of worked
| perfectly.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| Yup. Some "teens" can riding down my street with a pellet
| gun shooting at the cars. They ended up breaking 3 to 5
| windows. It probably cost us collectively $3000++.
|
| The only problem with the license plate readers is that
| the "teens" drive cars with fake tags. They deliberately
| copy the plate numbers from some granny with the same
| model. Makes it fun when the SWAT team knocks on Granny's
| door.
| text0404 wrote:
| So you're saying that a technology:
|
| - is trivially defeated by teenagers
|
| - is used by police departments as evidence to legally
| justify violent raids for property damage
|
| - whose data is mishandled by law enforcement agencies
| who don't do due diligence
|
| ... should have _more_ widespread adoption and support?
| georgemcbay wrote:
| I am also tired of rampant crime in this country, but
| unfortunately they aren't installing these cameras in
| boardrooms or the meeting rooms of politicians, so I
| don't think they are going to do much to deter the real
| crimes that are hurting our society.
| ses1984 wrote:
| No one wants their whereabouts subject to constant
| surveillance, except everyone who carries a "normal" cell
| phone, in other words not a burner.
| therobots927 wrote:
| Yes but you can always leave your phone behind if you want
| to drop off the map. Flock makes that borderline
| impossible.
| deadbabe wrote:
| You can remove your license plate, you will get pretty
| far before it actually gets you pulled over.
| Corrado wrote:
| Actually, that won't work. The flock cameras don't only
| rely on license plate information. They use "AI" to
| determine the make model and color of your car as well as
| any outstanding features, such as bumper stickers or roof
| racks.
| deadbabe wrote:
| It works if you just add a magnet sticker somewhere when
| you remove your plate.
| sophacles wrote:
| Leaving a cellphone behind is legal still. Removing a
| license plate is breaking the law.
|
| Drawing an equivalence is foolish.
| hrimfaxi wrote:
| Do people who carry normal cell phones do so with the
| active desire to have their whereabouts subject to constant
| surveillance?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I'm very in favor of speed & redlight cameras and don't have
| a particular problem with license plate trackers. I think we
| partisan-ize far too many things nowadays, unfortunately.
| snsr wrote:
| Maybe you're also in favor of some light reading
| https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-4/
| whimsicalism wrote:
| you think speed cameras violate the 4th amendment?
| mothballed wrote:
| No but license plate requirements pretty clearly violate
| the 4th and/or 1st amendment, IMO. And without being
| required to have your license plate searched
| (registration 'papers' forced to be displayed) at all
| times without even an officer presenting RAS or PC of a
| crime, these cameras become a lot less useful.
|
| I don't see how removing the cameras is compatible with
| the first amendment, but if you have the right of
| "speech" to record me in public chasing every place I go
| in a manner that is the envy of any stalker, I ought to
| have the right of "speech" not to "say anything"
| (compelled speech of showing my plate).
| nemomarx wrote:
| It really doesn't seem like the courts agree that you
| have a right to travel via car without a visible plate.
| mothballed wrote:
| The courts have been wrong about many things, sometimes
| for centuries before they've fixed it. Some things they
| think they've interpreted correctly now that they'll turn
| around and interpret some other way later.
|
| Trying to interpret _viewing and recording_ the plate as
| speech but not _displaying_ it as speech is trying to
| have your cake and eat it too. If the camera can stalk my
| car everywhere and record it under auspices of 'speech',
| it's only logical I can hide it as 'speech.'
| nemomarx wrote:
| Is the law obligated to be logical like that? As you note
| it already doesn't have to be consistent over time,
| there's no particular reason it must be consistent in who
| it applies to.
|
| You shouldn't pin your ideals on anything as flawed as
| the Constitution of the US. It was barely a workable
| system to begin with, and who knows how long it can last
| now.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Driving a motor vehicle on public roads is a privilege
| that many of the morons I share the road with seem to
| take for granted. If they are allowed to drive then I
| want their plate identifiable on video from my dash cam.
|
| Automated mass surveillance of license plates should also
| be illegal.
| mothballed wrote:
| Ah yes, the _muh public roads_ false representation.
|
| Guess what, all the roads around me are private
| easements, all privately owned, and they are that way 90%
| to town. A good portion of my trips _never touch a
| publicly owned road_ yet I 'm still required to display
| my plate on them. We don't even have public, tax
| maintained roads where I live (I literally have to bring
| out a tractor and fix them myself when they wear down).
| Yet the compelled 'speech' of displaying the license
| plate is required _even_ then while driving your car on
| your privately owned non-gated road.
| iamnothere wrote:
| You should check on that. AFAIK you don't have to display
| a plate unless the property owner (or HOA) requires it or
| it's a state chartered private road like some turnpikes.
| Police may still hassle you over it but they shouldn't.
|
| Many farmers have plateless farm trucks, people who live
| in the woods have plateless UTVs that they drive on
| private dirt and gravel roads, etc.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Courts are currently wrestling with this.
|
| https://www.oyez.org/cases/2017/16-402
|
| > The government's warrantless acquisition of Carpenter's
| cell-site records violated his Fourth Amendment right
| against unreasonable searches and seizures. Chief Justice
| John Roberts authored the opinion for the 5-4 majority.
| The majority first acknowledged that the Fourth Amendment
| protects not only property interests, but also reasonable
| expectations of privacy. Expectations of privacy in this
| age of digital data do not fit neatly into existing
| precedents, but tracking person's movements and location
| through extensive cell-site records is far more intrusive
| than the precedents might have anticipated.
|
| Or in United States v. Jones (cited in
| https://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinions/201495A.P.pdf):
|
| > Although the case was ultimately decided on trespass
| principles, five Justices agreed that "longer term GPS
| monitoring . . . impinges on expectations of privacy."
| See id. at 430 (Alito, J., concurring); id. at 415
| (Sotomayor, J., concurring). Based on "[t]raditional
| surveillance" capacity "[i]n the precomputer age," the
| Justices reasoned that "society's expectation" was that
| police would not "secretly monitor and catalogue every
| single movement of an individual's car for a very long
| period."
|
| It seems clear these cameras _can_ hit some kind of
| threshold where they 're common enough and interlinked
| enough to amount to unconstitutional surveilance. We
| don't know exactly where that threshold is yet.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| The courts made polygraphs submittable legal evidence
| used to convict people, and still use them on people
| under supervision (because lesser standards apply).
|
| Precedent is often crap and wrong until someone can find
| a good case paired with good lawyers to rectify.
|
| Edit: Throttled so editing to reply
|
| Precedent is randomly set by whoever gets there first
| often with a random case and a defendant with zero funds
| desperate to minimize their situation (for example
| without the funds to challenge the legality of
| polygraph/flock versus polygraph/flocks paid 'experts').
| Although now political people are trying to game the
| system and shop very thought out cases to specific
| friendly courts to help put their finger on establishing
| precedent. After building enough such cases in lower
| courts, moneyed interests then shop it to the next level.
| Then with enough at the next level, to the Supremes.
|
| It's a pretty awful, unintentional by design and fairly
| random 'legal system' with a huge bias towards those with
| more money and or the huge disparity in power of the
| Federal government, it's prosecutors, trial tax and the
| ridiculousness of 'if you exercise your constitutional
| rights you risk an additional 20-50 years in prison'
| versus someone broke, whose life has already been ruined
| by time in jail (and their fight beaten out of them),
| just wanting to go home as soon as possible.
|
| And when those disempowered have the courage to risk the
| trial tax and do happen to stumble upon a win you get the
| strategic use of either pleas bargains or dropping the
| case by prosecutors to prevent precedent, or the abuse by
| judges of 'as applied' rulings in order to again prevent
| precedent from being set even when the case was won.
|
| One side has all the power. One side has huge threats (in
| the form of trial tax). One side literally holds in you
| prison and has 100% control over every aspect of your
| life as you try to fight them and uses things like diesel
| therapy or the many other ways the have to apply to break
| you down for 'being difficult'. One side has the power to
| just drop cases it if risks precedent they don't like.
| And one side has the power to label a case 'as applied'
| to prevent precedent they don't like. It's a pretty crap
| system if you want fair unmanipulated precedents to come
| out of it. It's a great system if you want money/federal
| prosecutors/judges to be able to put their finger on the
| scale and set the outcome.
| pc86 wrote:
| I agree with you generally but taken to the extreme this
| argument very easily goes to "precedents I agree with
| should be venerated because they're precedents and
| precedents I disagree with are wrong" silliness.
|
| "Precedent is often crap" isn't really the basis for any
| cohesive judicial philosophy or legal thought process.
|
| I'm not aware of any precedent anywhere that approaches
| "ALPRs violate 4A" territory, it's when _other stuff_
| happens that 's beyond simply "$lp_id was seen by $camera
| on $datetime" that I've seen courts start to talk about
| reasonableness and privacy.
| pc86 wrote:
| Cameras like Flock which fingerprint the driver and non-
| registration vehicle information (e.g. light brightness,
| damage, driving style, etc.) to generate a best-guess as
| to the driver of the car absolutely does.
| oooyay wrote:
| Both of these camera systems also usually come with a
| kangaroo civil court of sorts. Last time I looked at red
| light camera distribution in Texas it was also fairly
| obvious that they were only installing them in poorer
| areas.
|
| These systems were largely disliked bipartisanly because of
| those factors.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| They install them where the data show that people are
| running red lights.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Where the data shows people are getting _caught_ running
| red lights.
|
| Which isn't necessarily where the most incidents are.
| loeg wrote:
| If they only installed them based on _collision /injury_
| data, and that data identified mostly poor areas, you
| would be ok with it? Because this is what the data finds
| over and over. The people most _harmed_ by red light
| running are the poor people who live in these
| neighborhoods.
| DANmode wrote:
| > Because this is what the data finds over and over.
|
| So link it.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Maybe!
|
| I might question the benefits of making the poor area
| even poorer via fines they likely can't afford. I might
| wonder if there are confounding factors like poorly
| maintained roads and vehicles at play. I might wonder if
| the yellow lights have the same timing as in the suburbs.
| banannaise wrote:
| Any dataset involving police actions will show high
| concentrations in poor areas because that's where police
| patrol the most and where they're most likely to crack
| down on behaviors that might be allowed to slide
| elsewhere (in part due to the racial demographics of
| those areas).
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Usually allocation decisions are related to actual
| car/pedestrian fatality/injury counts + trial placements
| and measurements. Either way, wouldn't you be in favor of
| measures that remove police from overpoliced poor
| neighborhoods in favor of a technology focusing on
| traffic safety enforcement?
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| The police aren't removed, they're still there, just with
| more technology, more information, and more power now.
| Zigurd wrote:
| They shorten the yellow light interval to gain more
| revenue. It's an irresistible corruption when working on
| a revenue share.
| loeg wrote:
| You're taking something that has happened at least once
| and extrapolating it to every situation; this isn't
| accurate.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Show me one big city PD that isn't corrupt enough that
| this is just a minor corruption snack to them.
| loeg wrote:
| This is a bizarre comment. What level of absence of
| evidence would you accept to prove "not corrupt enough?"
| The "corruption snack" language strongly suggests you
| aren't really interested in changing your mind even if
| such evidence could be provided.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| welcome to hn
| Zigurd wrote:
| If you know of one I would gladly hold it up as a shining
| example and a template for others to follow. And yet...
| piperswe wrote:
| Aren't red light cameras unenforceable in Texas?
| oooyay wrote:
| They are potentially now, but when I lived there (~a
| decade ago) they were not and this was the battle we were
| fighting as neighborhoods and communities. At the height
| of it they couldn't take your drivers license but the
| company could file an injunction preventing you from
| renewing your drivers license over civil penalties.
| alistairSH wrote:
| The value of red light cameras is debatable. I've copied
| the conclusion from a DoT study below (1):
|
| _This statistically defendable study found crash effects
| that were consistent in direction with those found in many
| previous studies, although the positive effects were
| somewhat lower that those reported in many sources. The
| conflicting direction effects for rear end and right-angle
| crashes justified the conduct of the economic effects
| analysis to assess the extent to which the increase in rear
| end crashes negates the benefits for right-angle crashes.
| This analysis, which was based on an aggregation of rear
| end and right-angle crash costs for various severity
| levels, showed that RLC systems do indeed provide a modest
| aggregate crash-cost benefit.
|
| The opposing effects for the two crash types also implied
| that RLC systems would be most beneficial at intersections
| where there are relatively few rear end crashes and many
| right-angle ones. This was verified in a disaggregate
| analysis of the economic effect to try to isolate the
| factors that would favor (or discourage) the installation
| of RLC systems. That analysis revealed that RLC systems
| should be considered for intersections with a high ratio of
| right-angle crashes to rear end crashes, higher proportion
| of entering AADT on the major road, shorter cycle lengths
| and intergreen periods, one or more left turn protected
| phases, and higher entering AADTs. It also revealed the
| presence of warning signs at both RLC intersections and
| city limits and the application of high publicity levels
| will enhance the benefits of RLC systems.
|
| The indications of a spillover effect point to a need for a
| more definitive study of this issue. That more confidence
| could not be placed in this aspect of the analysis reflects
| that this is an observational retrospective study in which
| RLC installations took place over many years and where
| other programs and treatments may have affected crash
| frequencies at the spillover study sites. A prospective
| study with an explicit purpose of addressing this issue
| seems to be required._
|
| tl;dr - it's complicated. There are places RLCs make sense
| and places they don't. Expecting local government to know
| the difference... good luck with that.
|
| 1 - https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/0
| 5049/
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| People like you expressing sentiments like that are exactly
| how we got here. You want them to go hard on some
| particular issue. Save the children, get rid of the drugs,
| arrest the terrorists, save the planet, there's always some
| justification that's hard to argue against in abstract but
| think a few steps ahead "what would happen if everyone did
| it". At the limit tolerating this sort of thing for even a
| fraction of people's pet issues adds up to dystopian 1984
| crap.
|
| And the real root problem isn't you or what you believe.
| The problem is that you don't feel responsible for the side
| effects that would happen if you got your way any more than
| a lone piece of litter feels responsible for ruining the
| park. Nor does society hold you responsible, "it's nobody's
| fault". So you and everyone else are free to peddle bad
| solutions to small problems without consequence.
|
| Edit: Perhaps this is just part of a longer arc of societal
| progress. We used to categorize bad people worthy of being
| ignored based on group membership they mostly couldn't
| control, religions, races, stuff like that. As society got
| better at measurement we realized this was wrong and
| somewhat stopped doing it. Now we struggle holding groups
| accountable. All sorts of evil can be done without
| consequence as long as the responsibility is diluted
| enough. Maybe something in the future will solve this.
| delecti wrote:
| > no one wants their whereabouts subject to constant
| surveillance
|
| But sadly lots of people want everyone else subject to it,
| and some are willing to submit to it themselves to get it.
| It's not a foregone conclusion.
| Corrado wrote:
| I was recently at a "town hall" meeting in my community and
| spoke with a older woman about Flock cameras. Initially she
| was not concerned about it and was generally in favor of
| the idea.
|
| I agreed that there could be benefits but that the downside
| is that they know when and where you go to church, or the
| grocery, or where you get your hair done, or even when you
| go on vacation. Her eyes lit up and I she replied that she
| would have to think about that a bit.
|
| I'm not saying that I changed her mind, but that bringing
| the consequences down to something she could understand was
| much better than yelling from the rooftops. Mentioning
| church is especially impactful with a lot of older folks.
| jkestner wrote:
| In talking with many of the older people in my community
| about Flock, they initially defer to what our police
| department says it needs. A few things made them
| reconsider: - This is not about our police. This is about
| all the outside organizations that can watch us. -
| Focusing on Flock specifically. Once the cameras are
| given a name, people can start to form a better opinion
| fueled by the readily available bad press Flock is
| producing. - With the focus on Flock, the YouTube videos
| elsewhere in this topic do a great job of explaining how
| crappy their security is and how they're lying to their
| customers about it. Which brings it back to, this isn't
| about our local police -- it's about the company that's
| an unworthy partner.
|
| Good job talking to your community. The first step is
| that people are aware of the cameras - for my neighbors,
| most did not know about them, and immediately found it
| creepy.
| anthonypasq wrote:
| i think politicians have seriously underestimated how much
| people don't like crime, and most people would take constant
| surveillance if it could actually improve feelings of safety
| in urban environments.
| energy123 wrote:
| Enforcing public safety effectively is one of the most pro-
| democracy things you can do. Otherwise people use democracy
| to elect public safety authoritarians like the wildly
| popular Bukele and Duterte.
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| So we should 1984 the crap out of ourselves because if we
| don't we'll elect an authoritarian who'll 1984 the crap
| out of us?
|
| Reminds me of this classic: https://static.poder360.com.b
| r/2020/11/2020-11-07-22.31.49.j...
|
| Yeah, I'm all for public safety in theory but seems like
| these days that's just a dog whistle for "go hard on
| whatever sort of petty deviance I don't like" and so I'm
| unwilling to support things like that in the default
| case. It's all just so tiresome.
| krastanov wrote:
| I read OP differently. I thought they said "we should
| invest in non-dystopian public safety[1] to avoid
| dystopian populist creating a 1984 version of public
| safety".
|
| [1]: I imagine this includes things like mental heath
| help, housing, and other related social safety nets.
| eitally wrote:
| I think it's also true that many people are wildly out of
| touch when they think about how "safe" their local
| municipality is.
|
| The Bay Area is objectively safe, for example, yet I
| constantly run into neighbors in affluent neighborhoods who
| are afraid of venturing various places, letting their kids
| play outside or bike to school, or just generally exploring
| around.
|
| I was at a BayFC match last weekend, for example, and ran
| into the family of an acquaintance from my elementary
| daughter's school. They have an 8th grader and are trying
| to get an intra-district transfer approved for high school
| so she doesn't have to go to the neighborhood school where
| a student brought a ghost gun on campus 3 years ago (he was
| arrested and successfully prosecuted, and no one was
| hurt)... and instead go to the local school where a handful
| of kids arranged their bodies in a swastika pattern on the
| football field (and photographed it!) several months ago.
| My point isn't that either of these crimes is acceptable,
| but that people tend to be irrational and ignorant of
| statistical analysis. Both of these are good schools with
| better than average student outcomes, but families
| consistently bring their own prejudices into analysis and
| it creates mild chaos & havoc across the system overall.
| ryandrake wrote:
| The US media has completely fooled the public into
| thinking their town is a violent hellhole, and that a
| trip to the grocery store is endangering their lives.
| Fact is, violent crime has been plummeting for decades,
| and unless you live in one of a handful of very small
| hotspots, Americans live in one of the safest times in
| the country's history. Yet, people's perception of crime
| as a problem has been going up and up.
| yabutlivnWoods wrote:
| Often what we criminalize is stupid.
|
| Giving away food to homeless is a crime in many places. Bad
| capitalism.
|
| Feelings of insecurity are manufactured relative to the
| danger posed:
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-
| die...
| Nasrudith wrote:
| It is antithetical to capitalism as well. The whole basis
| of capitalism is property rights, and it generally
| encourages the public doing things themselves instead as
| private individuals instead of relying upon a bureaucrat
| or public agency to do everything unless there is a major
| reason not to.
|
| And here they are telling you that you cannot use your
| own property to help alleviate issues in your community.
| That sounds more like an exaggeration of Communist
| attempts at division of labor and to 'organize' a
| civilization.
| StackRanker3000 wrote:
| > Giving away food to homeless is a crime in many places.
| Bad capitalism.
|
| How is this due to capitalism?
|
| I mean, I can _maybe_ see how you can tie it to NIMBYism,
| and from there to capitalism through the desire to
| maintain or increase property values. But that 's a
| stretch, and only one mechanism
|
| There are many drivers for this type of regulation, some
| more well-meaning than others. Most of them would not go
| away simply because we ceased private ownership of the
| means of production
| chermi wrote:
| It's been both normalized and suppressed. I'm old enough to
| remember not being to able to point out SF crime problems
| without being called a fascist. It's denial, it's perverse.
| Noah smith claims that our(USA) "solution" to it, besides
| just ignoring it, was basically giving up on cities and
| moving to suburbs.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| Does he really believe it or is it his job to say he really
| believes it?
| everdrive wrote:
| Could he tell the difference?
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Anyone can tell whether they believe what they're saying.
| If you pay me enough to lie, I'll lie, but of course I
| won't believe it.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| As an ex-employee of Flock, if he doesn't really believe it
| he is an _amazing_ actor. He talks of a very Minority Report-
| esque future, where there is _literally_ zero crime, and it
| 's because of Flock.
|
| Flock's stats are very misleading too. If there was a Flock
| query in the course of investigating a crime, even if it
| leads nowhere or isn't relevant to the arrest or conviction,
| still, Flock was queried, so "Flock solved a crime".
|
| It was sad. I had significant ethical questions when I
| joined, but all through recruitment and week one, everything
| was all about controls and restraints and auditing and
| ethics. After that, nope, a free for all. Selling our
| products in states that don't allow the use of certain
| functionality? Not our problem. We're not disabling it.
| That's up to you to decide whether you're using it or not.
| Zigurd wrote:
| "Garrett Langley" sounds like what they renamed the villain in
| Le Mis for an American audience.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Another POV is, they didn't invent cameras or drones, they
| aren't philosophers / employ any great or influential thinkers,
| nobody at Flock has won an election, all they really have done
| is sell some stuff that is easily defeated by a guy with a
| hammer or spray paint. I'm not sure he has another chance at a
| big Pay Day in his life, so in such desperate circumstances it
| will take something really criminal (or souring with VCs) to
| end this appearance in public life.
| jdross wrote:
| I realize how unpopular flock is, and I will first say that I
| have literally never personally looked into the privacy concerns.
| But one city you don't see named here is SF, which has cited
| Flock as a primary driver of its 10x reduction in car break-ins,
| and 30% reduction in burglaries. Those were a quality of life
| plague while I lived there
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Crime's been descending from the COVID blip for a while,
| everywhere, Flock or otherwise. My city saw zero murders in Q1;
| 2021 saw ~15 by now.
|
| In other words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSVqLHghLpw
| whimsicalism wrote:
| it's clearly not a covid effect
| https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/sf-car-breakins/
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The spike in your link's chart clearly starts in early
| 2020.
|
| And "While our data extends only to 2018" is... important,
| yeah?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| i encourage other people reading to look at the chart so
| they can assess the veracity of ^ comment
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Here it is.
|
| https://imgur.com/a/FK3sfna
|
| There's an enormous drop in _edit: late_ 2019, and the
| second drop starts in 2023.
|
| https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/your-
| sfpd/policies/depart...
|
| > Starting _on March 19, 2024, Flock Safety began
| installing ALPR cameras in various strategic locations
| across San Francisco_. This rollout is expected to take
| place over the next 90 days. Per 19B ALPR policy, the
| administration of the Flock ALPR system is the
| responsibility of the Investigations Bureau.
|
| How did the Flock cameras cause two crime drops _before
| their installation_?
|
| The article's note about 2018 is talking about extending
| _backwards_ , not forwards. It's entirely accurate, and a
| direct quote from your link.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| that drop is obviously in early 2020, not 2019 and there
| is no way you can look at that chart and describe car
| breaks ins as a "COVID blip"
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Look at the X axis labels again.
|
| The chart is trending down by January 2020, changes
| directions (upwards) right around the March 2020 spot,
| and again around (down) the July 2023 spot.
|
| The fact that they only have data going back to 2018
| means it's hard to say if the pre-COVID stuff was the
| norm or unusual.
|
| To be super-clear, here's the chart annotated to show
| that 90 day window (black rectangle) in which the cameras
| were installed. https://imgur.com/a/i00Gna0
|
| "that drop is obviously in early 2020", to reemphasize,
| is _several years_ before the cameras got installed.
| conductr wrote:
| I read this as 2020 was Covid related drop, it then
| returned to normal for 2 years, then began dropping again
| in late 2023. The covid blip is explained by what was
| going on at the time, nothing since 2023 has any
| explanation and could be flock
| ceejayoz wrote:
| COVID makes it spike up (after a months long downward
| trend long before the cameras), not down. Nation-wide,
| incidentally.
|
| The cameras were added where the black rectangle is here:
| https://imgur.com/a/i00Gna0
| arjie wrote:
| The data is open, and so we don't have to do the visual
| reasoning off an imperfect graph. SF Chronicle has done a
| pretty rare (but I think good journalistic practice) of
| specifying the source of the data:
| https://data.sfgov.org/Public-Safety/Police-Department-
| Incid...
|
| First to match the graph you make sure you pick 'Larceny -
| From Vehicle' only (there are some others one might argue
| matter) and ensure you're only counting incidents once
| (many rows reference the same incident). That lets us
| recreate the original graph.
|
| When looking at many things I like to look at seasonal
| effects just to see, and it doesn't look like they are
| significant here (but you can see the Mar 2020 drop to the
| next year quite easily which I like): https://wiki.roshange
| orge.dev/w/images/2/2e/SFPD_Vehicle_Bre...
|
| I also tried overlaying various line charts but that's
| useless for visually identifying the break.
|
| One thing I thought would be fun is to run a changepoint
| algorithm blindly
| https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/File:SFPD_Vehicle_Break-
| Ins_...
|
| I like PELT because it appeals to my sensibilities (you
| don't say ahead of time how many changepoints you want to
| find - you set an energy/cost param and let it roll) and it
| finds that one changepoint. You can have some fun with the
| other algos and changing the amount of breakpoints or
| changing the PELT cost function. And then you can have even
| more fun by excluding 2020 or excluding Mar 2020 onwards or
| replacing it by estimates from the previous years (quite
| suspect considering what we're trying to do but hey we're
| having fun - a bunch of algos all flag Nov 2023 as some
| moment of truth)
|
| Anyway, anyone curious should download the data. It's
| pretty straightforward to use and if I goofed up with off-
| by-one or whatever, you can go see for yourself.
| BoggleOhYeah wrote:
| Any evidence that the reduction is actually due to the cameras?
| toephu2 wrote:
| Don't people tend to behave if they know the are being
| watched?
| jmye wrote:
| I thought he asked for evidence?
| chaps wrote:
| yes, people tend to act differently. not the people they're
| trying to afect, just random people just minding their
| business. but it is not an effective deterrent to things
| like "violent crime".
|
| * Meta-analyses (studies that average the results of
| multiple studies) in the UK show that video surveillance
| has no statistically significant impact on crime.
|
| * Preliminary studies on video surveillance systems in the
| US show little to no positive impact on crime.
|
| https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/images/asset_uploa
| d...
| MisterTea wrote:
| > which has cited Flock as a primary driver of its 10x
| reduction in car break-ins, and 30% reduction in burglaries
|
| Are there reports or studies released which explains how the
| flock system influenced these reductions?
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| The crime did not happen because of a lack of technological
| capability or resources availability at a given price point. It
| happened because of politics and priorities. The 1984 camera
| dragnet vendor is no more responsible for the change in
| politics and priorities and subsequent crime reduction than
| whatever vendor sold the tires for the cop cars.
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| I could believe that perma-cameraing every inch of public space
| is more akin to chemo than to vitamin gummies, that SF had the
| city equivalent of bone cancer, and that this doesn't mean
| healthy midwestern towns need Flock in any way.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| The byproduct of habitually coddling criminals with zero
| consequences.
| array_key_first wrote:
| It's a much tougher problem then "idk just throw them in
| jail lol" and anyone who claims otherwise is dishonest.
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| Do you have empirical evidence that we "habitually coddle
| criminals"? The united states locks up more of their people
| than pretty much any other nation...
| loeg wrote:
| > Do you have empirical evidence that we "habitually
| coddle criminals"?
|
| In this context, we're talking about SF, not the US at
| large. Yes, SF is well known for coddling criminals. This
| is, obviously, a qualitative characterization -- it
| cannot be proven empirically. But we can point at
| characteristic examples:
|
| https://ktxs.com/news/nation-world/san-francisco-
| ends-5m-alc...
|
| https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/s-f-start-
| allowing-ev...
|
| https://www.denvergazette.com/2024/01/27/california-
| finally-...
|
| https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/yes-its-ok-to-be-mad-about-
| cri...
|
| (There's some hope it's improving very recently or in the
| near future.)
|
| > The united states locks up more of their people than
| pretty much any other nation...
|
| We (the US) have more criminality than many peer nations.
| We either lock them up, or let them be free despite doing
| crimes.
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| > We (the US) have more criminality than many peer
| nations
|
| Do you have any empirical evidence to support this claim?
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| No
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| ALPR does help with some things but stationary burglaries are
| largely not among them.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Unfortunately, Flock really has been doing some shady stuff and
| the alliance of 1) people with legitimate concerns about Flock
| operations, and 2) the much larger population of people who are
| accustomed to getting away with petty crimes is, together,
| politically successful.
|
| It would be easy to create a camera network that is locally
| owned and operated by public agencies, and if any place in
| America could so that it should be SF.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| It's funny, if the company had just sold cameras to cities, they
| probably could have avoided this whole mess. But they just had to
| hit some keywords for Wall Street (like "AI" "cloud" and "SaaS"),
| which had the side-effect of making it appear (true or not) that
| they were part of a Palantir-style surveillance panopticon that
| tracks you everywhere.
| alex43578 wrote:
| A big part of the value is the network: track a stolen a car or
| a suspect in the next town over or across the country.
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| And they will either quietly rebrand and build it or someone
| else will.
|
| Government loves the product. What it doesn't like about
| Flock is that the peasants are aware about it and
| complaining.
| Larrikin wrote:
| Or a woman who got an abortion
| kennywinker wrote:
| A car, a suspect, an ex lover, a union organizer, a
| journalist going to meet a source, an activist headed to a
| rally. All kinds of things, really!
| e2le wrote:
| For those unfamiliar, you can read more about the flock safety
| cameras themselves here:
|
| https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Flock_license_plate_readers
|
| And more about the company behind the cameras:
|
| https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Flock_Safety
| gosub100 wrote:
| Someone in my hometown was arrested for vandalizing them. The
| media chose to say "city owned security camera". It's amazing how
| they will rush to defend private enterprise.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Legacy local news is highly dependent on the police for content
| and access. No surprise.
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| More likely: the local news reporter doesn't know the
| difference, or didn't think there was a difference.
| anthonypasq wrote:
| the alternative is to not punish vandalism? what are you even
| saying?
| hackable_sand wrote:
| It's unfortunate they got caught. It is nice to be reminded
| that every community has people willing to fight for freedom
| though.
| gorgonical wrote:
| Musician-turning-tech anarchist (?) Benn Jordan is making a very
| interesting series of videos about Flock cameras, their poor
| safety, and their gray-area interfacing with local governments:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMIwNiwQewQ
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1-uiUlHTo
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ
|
| I recommend them.
| boriskourt wrote:
| Super worth a watch. Lots of technical tidbits also.
| waNpyt-menrew wrote:
| Someone complaining about local governments having data while
| directing them to YouTube, whose owner does surveillance at a
| scale far exceeding all local governments of all countries
| combined, is ironic.
|
| Why don't these people use Peertube at least. Fact of the
| matter is they'd like to personally profit off the same
| nonsense they complain about. This person has a million
| subscribers, they aren't some random whistleblower. It's a job,
| like all media, generating outrage.
|
| If all of them used peertube maybe we'd have a solid
| competitor.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-
| som...
| puppykito wrote:
| ???
|
| It is very clearly because YouTube has a higher reach than
| any other platform in that space.
| komali2 wrote:
| During the KMT military dictatorship in Taiwan, the KMT used
| the radio to spread its anti-democratic propaganda and
| disparage pro-democracy activists. Activists meanwhile spread
| their messages via pirate radio.
| pc86 wrote:
| Cool, what does that have to do with anything?
| mmcnickle wrote:
| > Fact of the matter is they'd like to personally profit off
| the same nonsense they complain about.
|
| Benn Jordan's YouTube channel is a registered Nonprofit
| https://www.patreon.com/posts/nonprofit-has-82858569
| platevoltage wrote:
| Hasan Piker owns a house. Lets all complain about that too!
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Wow thank you for sharing this I had no idea this guy existed!
|
| There's more of us techno anarchists out there apparently!
| platevoltage wrote:
| Yeah I discovered this guy because a video about Aphex Twin
| appeared on my feed.
| seemaze wrote:
| Those were great to watch, thanks!
|
| Also, I can't help but feel like I'm watching a young Dr.
| Emmett Brown.. Great Scott!!
| devin wrote:
| Benn is the best. His most recent video is about Ring cameras.
| kgwxd wrote:
| And Data center noise pollution before that. It's the only
| channel I subscribe to knowing full well every video is going
| to infuriate me.
| jkestner wrote:
| Benn's videos along with this one from a very chill middle-aged
| engineer/state rep made the difference in swaying our town to
| discontinue its Flock contract:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwbE5ks7dFg
| stronglikedan wrote:
| I'd also recommend Louis Rossman's videos on the topic,
| including how to get involved.
| boc wrote:
| Love the Flashbulb!
| xracy wrote:
| I think his comment about "why dogs might provide actual
| neighborhood safety" is a good reminder that the thing that
| makes communities safe is "knowing your neighbors." You don't
| get safety by building a castle with a moat and a million
| cameras. You get safety by building a community with context
| that can respond without having to just "react" to the 6s
| version of "what happened".
| snerbles wrote:
| I'm reminded of prepper forum discussions. Where some do
| little more than hoard supplies, weapons and gadgets yet
| don't network and build communities. In an actual societal
| breakdown scenario these isolated individuals will become
| loot drops for others who actually band together.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| It's not that they'll be able to call on one another - you
| can't guarantee who else will be around after The Bad Event
| (whatever it is).
|
| It's that they don't have the basic strength of building
| alliances in the first place - something every kid is
| supposed to learn through the joys and pains of playing
| together. Bullies are not generally the popular ones, but
| neither are the loners.
|
| To put it another way: castles can't survive siege forever.
| They are a delaying tactic until outside help can arrive.
|
| "The Dauphin, whom of succors we entreated, Returns us that
| his powers are yet not ready To raise so great a siege.
| Therefore, great king, We yield our town and lives to thy
| soft mercy." -- Henry V, Act 3, scene 3
| Dove wrote:
| I agree that there is a parallel between governments and
| corporations multiplying surveillance and preppers
| impractically multiplying gadgets. I perceive both to be
| responding to some sort of psychological issue relating to
| control or insecurity, not to be practically pursuing
| resilience.
|
| A government with aggressive surveillance ambitions but a
| decaying police department and justice system looks to me
| very much like the guy with a mountain of guns and ammo but
| no parallel investment in something like battlefield
| medicine. Whatever you're telling yourself about the reason
| for what you're doing, it is manifestly not correct, at
| least going by other investments I would expect to see and
| find neglected.
| toofy wrote:
| yeah, it doesn't a lot of thought to realize that societies
| thrived when they were... social. this has been repeated
| throughout history.
|
| the people who go off into the woods as uber survivalists
| or whatever die alone and forgotten from an infected
| toenail or something equally as stupid while the society
| full of people down the mountain thrive and people remember
| each other.
|
| its wild to me how many people are suckered in by the never
| ending fear mongering that prepper businesses push on them
| without ever thinking it through.
| jkestner wrote:
| And the cameras can provide them with solar panels.
|
| I'm lucky to live in a walker-friendly neighborhood where
| most homes aren't walled off by privacy fences. I've found
| our communal strength in talking to neighbors about the
| cameras that feed and feed off our fear in isolation. It's
| a choice.
| Morromist wrote:
| Heh, I never thought about that but its so true. If society
| breaks down on the extreme level they anticipate the smart
| thing to do is probably join a super tight-knit community
| with lots of young people - maybe the furries or the Amish.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Many may find it unintuitive, but one of the best things you
| can do for the actual security of a neighborhood is to design
| it for pedestrian and "loitering" friendliness.
| ultrarunner wrote:
| This is extremely salient. Check out Phoenix, AZ sometime
| in street view. It's a brutalist grid of wide roads (even
| in "residential zones") where every property is lined in a
| six-foot block wall. As a result, sight lines are excellent
| for drivers (encouraging high speeds) but terrible for
| homeowners. Kids can't reasonably roam free, neighbors
| rarely meet, and everyone is viewed with suspicion. Most of
| my neighbors are really decent people, but I see them so
| rarely we might as live in different cities.
| caycep wrote:
| this reminds me of this article https://psmag.com/social-
| justice/the-end-of-gangs-los-angele...
|
| I feel like nowadays with all the political FUD about "crime
| and safety" here in LA, this should be required reading
| fakedang wrote:
| Carries over to countries too :)
| baggachipz wrote:
| I drove into a very affluent subdivision this weekend, and like
| most others around here it had a flock camera recording every car
| on the way in. This camera, however, had the gall to advertise
| its presence as a neighborhood security measure. "Flock Safety
| watches this neighborhood" read the sign on the post, or some
| such. Of course the residents there had no choice but to accept
| its installation, as the local police support it. Nefarious
| framing and marketing in the name of "safety".
| bradleyankrom wrote:
| I saw the same thing in a Home Depot parking lot yesterday. I
| guess I'm glad there's some sort of notice about it, even if
| its intent is more, I dunno, branding? It took me a while to
| figure out what all the solar panel + camera on a post
| installations were as they popped up around my town. I even
| pulled over to inspect the hardware for signs of ownership and
| didn't find anything.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| we enforce laws presumably in the name of safety, is this
| really nefarious framing or marketing? seems pretty
| straightforward to me.
| baggachipz wrote:
| It is very clearly advertising on their part. They have been
| paid to put that thing there and added the sign to announce
| the presence. It's like when you get your roof replaced by a
| business and they ask if they can put a sign in your yard.
| They're not doing it to make everybody know that you're
| getting your roof replaced, they're advertising.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > no choice but to accept its installation
|
| You might be shocked to discover there are subdivisions so
| affluent they can afford physical armed security and access
| control structures with far more invasive identification and
| logging procedures.
| baggachipz wrote:
| I am not shocked to know that, but there are Flock cameras
| all over the town. None of the other ones have this
| advertisement on them. This neighborhood is not gated.
| However, Flock decided to do announce its presence only here.
| alex43578 wrote:
| Why is this such a surprise? It's just like those "ADT
| Monitoring" signs in someone's yard, scaled to the
| community.
| baggachipz wrote:
| Because as far as I've seen until now, Flock cameras were
| stealthily installed and unannounced by the local
| government. When somebody contracts a company like ADT,
| they pay money and put that sign up voluntarily.
| HoldOnAMinute wrote:
| Monte Sereno or Saratoga?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Most of the houses probably have little yard signs advertising
| some security service, and stickers on the doors advertising an
| alarm company too.
| baggachipz wrote:
| Ok? They paid for those.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| It's all just part of the scenery in neighborhoods like
| that. Like "Beware of dog" signs in poorer neighborhoods or
| "This property protected by Smith & Wesson" in rural areas.
| ggreer wrote:
| It's probably the neighborhood HOA that pays for it. My HOA got
| Flock cameras after a string of thefts, and has similar signs
| up. The HOA encourages homeowners to submit their car license
| plate info so that if a crime is reported, it's easier to
| identify cars that don't belong to homeowners.
|
| Soon after the cameras were installed, some thieves stole a
| gift my brother had sent me. Thanks to license plate data and
| images of their faces, Vancouver PD had little trouble catching
| the perpetrators. It turned out that in addition to stealing
| Amazon/UPS/Fedex packages, they were stealing USPS mail and
| using it to commit identity theft. IIRC they ended up getting a
| decade in federal prison.
|
| It seems like only a few people are responsible for the
| majority of thefts, so catching them and locking them up
| drastically improves quality of life for everyone else.
| Obviously this technology could be abused, but that's also true
| for things like fingerprinting, DNA evidence, and ID
| requirements. Similarly to those technologies, we could have
| laws restricting certain uses, allowing us to reduce crime
| while preventing abuses. But if a private community wants to
| install cameras and allow law enforcement to access the data
| they record, I don't see any constitutional issues.
| baggachipz wrote:
| Fair point and I hadn't considered that. I just assumed that
| no place would voluntarily use Flock. Thanks for the info and
| perspective.
| AlBugdy wrote:
| Non-US citizens - what's the situation with cameras in public
| spaces where you live? In my town every 2nd hour or building
| entrance has a private camera pointed at the street. It's very
| depressing because the cops don't care - I've asked 2 in a patrol
| car when there was a mild case of vandalism I witnessed.
| Technically it's illegal, but nothing happens. The public cameras
| are on intersection and some bus stops. Too much, if you ask me,
| but the private cameras are everywhere.
| buzer wrote:
| Private cameras pointing to street can be lawful under GDPR,
| but in that case they are GDPR controller. That then requires
| them fulfill bunch of obligations which they probably aren't,
| e.g. giving proper Article 13 notice.
|
| I don't know if it's criminal in any EU country, but it would
| be something that you could complain to DPA about. Or initiate
| civil lawsuit against the controller.
|
| Worth noting is that in some cases the camera vendor might also
| be (joint) controller as they can determine means & purposes of
| the processing. If they are simply storing the video then it's
| unlikely, but if they for example use it for AI training that
| would likely bring them controller territory.
| boelboel wrote:
| In London cameras are everywhere, mostly private and they have
| been for years. Don't think I've seen anything like it in any
| European city I've visited.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Japan is exporting it's AI-enhanced crime prediction platform
| across LatAm after successfully deploying it in Tokyo [0].
| Japan is doing similar work to analyze financial transactions
| [1]. South Korea has also deployed a similar surveillance
| platform called Dejaview [2]. Even Finland has been deploying
| surveillance camera fusion centers [3]
|
| The brutal reality is everyone is doing this and there's
| nothing you can do about it. National Security trumps all other
| concerns (even the GDPR exempts governments who argue their
| data collection is done for National Security reasons),
| especially in a world as unstable as today.
|
| [0] - https://www.japan.go.jp/kizuna/2024/06/japans_ai-
| based_crime...
|
| [1] - https://www.tc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/ai1ec_event/10769/
|
| [2] - https://m.blog.naver.com/mtnews_net/223775186368
|
| [3] - https://poliisi.fi/en/camera-surveillance-system
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| > world as unstable as today
|
| The world is the most stable and peaceful it's been in
| decades if not longer. What is your evidence that the world
| is unstable?
| AlBugdy wrote:
| > The brutal reality is everyone is doing this and there's
| nothing you can do about it.
|
| Maybe not me personally, but society can.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Depending on the society.
|
| Societies that are strongly collectivist in nature tend to
| align closer with expanded state powers and don't view it
| as an affront.
|
| The techno-individualist subculture that is common on HN
| and Reddit is that - a subculture.
|
| Techno-individualism cannot coexist with collectivist
| culture where the primacy of the state is held as
| sacrosanct and supreme.
|
| And now that countries like Russia [0], Iran [1], and China
| [2] have been expanding hybrid warfare capabilities across
| the West - especially now that Europe is now expeiencing
| the largest conventional war since WW2 - we need to
| recognize that we are no long in a state of peace.
|
| [0] - https://www.ft.com/content/2084e87d-d491-4852-8449-f9
| 0b73d47...
|
| [1] - https://www.ft.com/content/adc3e954-5928-471b-b7f2-e4
| 385bbca...
|
| [2] - https://www.ft.com/content/63720831-8805-497d-8145-17
| 13e450a...
| mothballed wrote:
| Our city voted them out for awhile. So the feds just put them on
| every bit of federal property near roads, which ended up doing
| the exact same thing.
| loteck wrote:
| Where is this?
| jcstryker wrote:
| And moving to the next vendor that hopefully does a better job of
| staying out of the public eye...
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| And switches to Axon - https://denverite.com/2026/02/24/denver-
| ends-flock-contract-...
|
| I have not done any research if that's out of the frying pan and
| into the fire or an improvement
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Practically, axon cameras aren't nearly as ubiquitous as
| flock's, thus reducing the leo's dragnet capability. I'm sure
| the feds will successfully try to get access to this footage as
| well.
| chaps wrote:
| Kind of. Motorola (axon) effectively acts as an integration
| system for flock and about 20 other services. Motorola's
| stuff is IMO the bigger problem because it _includes_ access
| to flock.
| citruscomputing wrote:
| In Denver, they'll be expanding once they have budget. Also
| as soon as Axon finishes developing their integrations with
| civilian cameras into their Fusus product. They've also got
| natural-language queries in the pipeline ("find red trucks
| near here"), and they already have integration with the
| hundreds of existing non-ALPR LEO cameras. It's not better.
| gosub100 wrote:
| I don't know if axon does it, but the future is going to be
| mobile ALPRs. Uber drivers going around scanning every plate,
| selling to police, and helping predatory auto lenders repo
| cars. The latter is already being done, so it's just a matter
| of time.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| Interesting point. Autonomous cars themselves could sell all
| the data they collect (like license plates, but also street
| maps, live traffic data, pot hole counts and locations etc)
| iamnothere wrote:
| You don't even need autonomous cars for this, many modern
| cars have cameras and always-on internet. It's not like the
| manufacturers care about privacy.
| citruscomputing wrote:
| It's different. The primary harms of flock come from their
| horizontal integration into a nationwide surveillance network,
| working with ICE etc. Axon (formerly Taser) has strong vertical
| integration, which is new and we haven't thought through as
| much yet. (This is the position of city councilmember Sarah
| Parady, who's been part of a working group to research+draft
| ordinances about surveillance technology, and whose speech at
| the meeting voting on the contract I really respected. I think
| it's available online.)
|
| The Axon contract is smaller than the Flock one, 50 cameras
| instead of >100, but that's because it's all they could get
| budget for, and they want to expand. DPD owns the data and is
| theoretically not supposed to share it with federal agencies,
| but there are lots of legal ways to make them comply. They're
| setting a 21-day retention period for data that's not part of
| an ongoing investigation, but I think that's missing the point,
| and it's not codified into law. The Axon cameras can be
| switched into a mode where DPD can view live feeds. Most of the
| contract provisions that the mayor's office added because of
| significant public outcry I would call "token." They're not
| addressing the real issues, and it's still contributing heavily
| to the development of the surveillance state.
|
| Overall, it's an improvement, in the sense that breaking your
| leg is better than breaking both your legs. But don't get me
| wrong, they're coming for the other one as soon as they can.
| gegtik wrote:
| Funny they are just trying to get this started in Toronto
| HoldOnAMinute wrote:
| Perhaps this venture would have been more successful as a Public
| Benefit Corporation.
|
| In the USA in 2026, "capitalism", "politics", and "evil" have all
| become synonymous.
|
| Maybe I am naive, and the corruption is too deep and pervasive.
| diogenes_atx wrote:
| It seems like this article buried the best lede of the story on
| paragraph ten, which explains Flock's new business of
| surveillance drones launched in response to 911 calls (and also
| presumably triggered by other alerts configured by police and
| private businesses).
|
| > Flock has recently expanded into other technologies... Most
| concerning are the latest Flock drones equipped with high-powered
| cameras. Flock's "Drone as First Responder" platform automates
| drone operations, including launching them in response to 911
| calls or gunfire. Flock's drones, which reach speeds up to 60
| mph, can follow vehicles or people and provide information to law
| enforcement.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Hunter-Killers not far behind.
| mystraline wrote:
| Nor is the Butlerian Jihad.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| _Code 8_ -style cop drone drops incoming
| jonas21 wrote:
| This is much less concerning to me than mass surveillance. If
| someone calls 911 and you need to send a first responder, why
| not send a drone to get there faster while a person is on their
| way?
| sheiyei wrote:
| As a concept, first responder drones are a good idea. But I
| wouldn't want public services having anything to do with that
| company.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Yeah this doesn't bother me in any way, shape, or form. We
| already have manned aircraft that respond to such things,
| unmanned aircraft are a strictly better solution. It makes
| sense for police and it makes even more sense for fire. An
| aircraft can arrive at the site of a reported fire while
| firemen are still buckling their pants.
| dmbche wrote:
| You get manned aircraft to come and check in before the
| police when you call 911?
| jeffbee wrote:
| Yes, often the first response to some calls is a CHP
| aircraft that continuously loiters in the area.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| In high school in the mid 2000s in Denver, they had a
| chopper in the air on weekend nights from 8 until 2:30 am
| or so.
|
| When our parties got called in, the spotlight would be
| the warning that the cops were a few minutes away and it
| was time to run.
|
| Lots of cities have manned aircraft loitering during busy
| times that will respond to a call before ground units
| platevoltage wrote:
| There is an endless list of infractions to civil liberties
| that would "Make sense for police".
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| And then what? Hover over me as I'm dying?
| tux1968 wrote:
| Yes. If you called from your cell phone while on foot or in
| your car, the drone can find your exact location and hover
| over you until help arrives, quicker than if EMS has to
| search you out themselves.
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| Ok. I live in a small, flat city with few trees. So why
| did my police department buy these?
| tux1968 wrote:
| Obviously I don't know the specifics of your city, but in
| general there are a lot of scenarios where it's valuable
| to get to a scene very quickly (no traffic, etc.) and
| obtain reconnaissance. Especially violent scenes, or it
| could even be a drunk driver who is still on the move, or
| a stolen car where the perpetrators are likely to flee on
| foot if stopped.
|
| I'm sure you can come up with a lot more ideas using your
| imagination.
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| Sounds like a scam
| tadfisher wrote:
| Thanks for the explanation. I will ask my local city
| council to spend the money elsewhere.
| scottyah wrote:
| Can they drive straight to you at 60mph without stopping?
| chaps wrote:
| Got it, a surveillance missile.
| scottyah wrote:
| Common missiles go about 900 mph faster...
| chaps wrote:
| There's more than one definition of missile. Florida
| criminal code's just one place where a drone could be
| considered a "missile".
|
| Florida criminal code: "790.19 Shooting
| into or throwing deadly missiles into dwellings, public
| or private buildings, occupied or not occupied; vessels,
| aircraft, buses, railroad cars, streetcars, or other
| vehicles.--Whoever, wantonly or maliciously, shoots at,
| within, or into, or throws any missile or hurls or
| projects a stone or other hard substance which would
| produce death or great bodily harm, at, within, or in any
| public or private building, occupied or unoccupied, or
| public or private bus or any train, locomotive, railway
| car, caboose, cable railway car, street railway car,
| monorail car, or vehicle of any kind which is being used
| or occupied by any person, or any boat, vessel, ship, or
| barge lying in or plying the waters of this state, or
| aircraft flying through the airspace of this state shall
| be guilty of a felony of the second degree, punishable as
| provided in s. 775.082, s. 775.083, or s. 775.084."
| thebigman433 wrote:
| One of the best reasons is that a very large % of calls
| can be cleared without anyone actually going to the
| scene. Many cities using drones as first responders now
| report that they clear ~30% of calls with just a drone.
| This is great for small cities/towns that struggle to
| recruit officers and have had ballooning labor costs for
| police in order to get people to work there. Its also
| great philosophically if you want police to be involved
| less, because it dramatically lowers the amount of time
| they are going to scenes
| FireBeyond wrote:
| How so? I ask as a paramedic of 14 years, now retired.
|
| If EMS has to "search you out" so does the drone.
|
| At least in my County, we actually get very good
| triangulation info from 911. It was very rare that
| Dispatch told us they only had Level 2(IIRC) location
| info (which might be to several hundred feet).
|
| FAR more common was people who actually told us the
| -wrong- location. Car accidents that were several miles
| up the road from their location. Saying Blah St SE when
| they meant Blah Rd NE, etc.
|
| Drones don't solve for that problem. They're going to the
| wrong location, too.
| tux1968 wrote:
| > If EMS has to "search you out" so does the drone.
|
| The point is that the drone is fast enough to arrive
| first, and do the searching so that you don't have to.
| It's just one of many possible scenarios.
|
| I totally understand the argument that this might not be
| the most effective use of money, but I honestly don't
| understand the lack of appreciation for the number of
| places this could be used effectively.
| markdown wrote:
| I want to see who is in a location. I get a plant to call
| 911, which triggers Flock drones in the general area and
| scans the faces of everyone it can find. I get that info
| from Flock.
| tux1968 wrote:
| There are always security concerns and exploits. Some
| crazy gamers call 911 swat attacks on people; that
| doesn't mean that the police shouldn't have guns, or that
| 911 should be turned off.
|
| Yes, the drones should be secure. Yes there should be
| measures to make sure that they're not abused. But none
| of that takes away from anything i've said, which is ONLY
| to point out the situations where they could be useful.
| And people seem to be having a very negative visceral
| reaction to even considering the possibility.
|
| Also, i'm not recommending or supporting Flock, just the
| concept of drone use in general.
| wiether wrote:
| At least their current cameras are fixed to a single point.
|
| With their drones they now have cameras roaming freely
| everywhere.
| pesus wrote:
| If the drones are "providing information" to the police, it's
| only a matter of time before their AI hallucinates something
| that gets someone killed. We've already seen AI gun detection
| services that report things like Doritos bags as guns.
| scottyah wrote:
| It's a very bleak (and awfully sus) outlook if you think
| providing more information to people who need to make
| decisions that could save or end lives is a bad thing.
| Quinner wrote:
| Those people have proven very untrustworthy and are
| structurally unaccountable.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| You are giving those people the benefit of the doubt.
| It's been proven many many times that police will use
| "more information" to excuse their own decision to use
| violence. A decision that they already made well before
| the incident.
| pesus wrote:
| It's more "sus" that you blindly trust the police,
| politicians, and billionaires that have a history of
| discrimination, violence, and oppression and attempt to
| slander those who don't. Not to mention blindly trusting
| AI systems with someone's life - the only reason one
| would do that is because they either stand to profit from
| it or don't understand how they work. Are you really
| willing and eager to put your life in the hands of a
| piece of software that can't distinguish a gun and a
| Doritos bag?
|
| Remember, oppression and invasion of privacy is still bad
| even if it isn't currently happening to you. If you think
| you can't be a target, you're sorely mistaken.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| If you give me long enough, I can find something to
| charge anyone with.
| grimcompanion wrote:
| OTOH it will provide more surveillance of the police
| themselves. Humans are also bad at gun detection (sometimes
| willfully so) and this provides another check.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Watch for Flock footage to be
| "unavailable"/"deleted"/"corrupt" just as often as
| bodycam footage is.
| gretch wrote:
| That's right. And also just like the missing epstein
| footage.
|
| Because it's a social problem, not a technology problem.
|
| At the same time, just because these instances of
| "missing" tape happen, does not mean that body cams and
| jailhouse CCTV are useless. We would not take those away.
| Likewise for the future drone footage
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Not as often; it creates friction and requires
| cooperation from others (or an officer with unusual skill
| and access, presumably).
|
| It will absolutely happen in corrupt departments, or
| those involving an officer with those skills and access.
| But data that is uploaded is infinitely harder to erase
| than simply turning off the camera in the first place.
| chaps wrote:
| How exactly does this provide more surveillance of the
| police themselves? I've done about ten FOIA lawsuits
| against police departments and it's laughable to think
| that they won't just lock footage away and exempt it from
| the public's eyes. Probably through a trade secret
| exemption because private companies are involved.
| chaps wrote:
| I'm sorry but, in what way is a swarm of surveillance drones
| NOT a mass surveillance system?
| dmbche wrote:
| What's the drone gonna do?
| ThaDood wrote:
| Likely: Scan everyone's home while en-route to the 911 call
| with an infrared camera. Or scan all of the license plates
| and faces of people along the way.
|
| Possible: Perhaps crash into someone? Or worse.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > Scan everyone's home while en-route to the 911 call
| with an infrared camera.
|
| That's unconstitutional. Use a regular camera and it's
| fine for some reason.
| rudhdb773b wrote:
| Because today it will be used as a first responder.
|
| Tomorrow a police officer will suggest that these drones
| (that we are already using successfully) could be very useful
| for checking up on that "dangerous" neighborhood.
| NoSalt wrote:
| Hello, James Cameron and his _Dark Angel_ series:
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=dark+angel+hoverdrone
| citruscomputing wrote:
| Hi, I'm in Denver. They're already doing this over on
| Colfax. It's a significant change vs the existing halo
| cameras, because they use the drones to follow people.
| roughly wrote:
| They do more than that - our local PD gave a presentation on
| what Flock's pitching - ALPRs, fixed pan/tilt cameras, "citizen
| cameras," drones, and a whole "sensor fusion" software suite
| that lets you stitch in everything along with data from
| surrounding precincts which also have Flock (think Palantir for
| local cops). We were pretty shocked at the scale.
| mullingitover wrote:
| In Southern California we have eye-wateringly expensive (and
| _loud_ ) police aircraft flying 24x7.
|
| I'm not a fan of Flock but I would welcome anything that knocks
| out some of the ghetto birds' budget.
| jm4 wrote:
| That's actually really cool and I don't feel like it's
| invasive. It's surveillance in a specific location for a
| specific purpose and in response to certain emergencies. Active
| shooter is probably the first thing that comes to mind, but
| accidents, fires, unexpected disasters, etc. could all be
| situations where this technology helps assess the situation and
| inform response.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| "CITIZEN there has been a report of a shooting in the area,
| please remain motionless as we scan your face for biometrics.
|
| Scan complete. Please do not move or attempt to leave the
| area until you have been notified via the 'GovernmentForYou'
| app that you are cleared to leave the area.
|
| Because you have been identified in the active area police
| have been granted legal probable cause to search your home.
| Please unlock your homes doors via any smart home app you
| have to prevent the authorities from forcibly removing your
| door onsite
|
| Notification. Citizen because of your scan you have been
| identified as committing a bank fraud case in North Dakota
| and will be detained and transported (the move process takes
| 2-4 weeks). Once in North Dakota your right to a speedy trial
| will start if you are held more than the reasonable 60 day
| administration period.
|
| Have a good day citizen and thank you for your cooperation."
| iwontberude wrote:
| Thank you for finding this nugget, I really only read HN
| comments and rarely the source material. You all have been my
| LLM summary for a decade at least.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| I can anticipate this starting to happen: shoot into the sky,
| wait for flock drone to start coming in, then shoot it! Free
| target practice!
| gnerd00 wrote:
| this kind of headline might have some scholarly name, because,
| no... actually the number of cameras and feeds in the San
| Francisco Bay Area is multiplying rapidly, along with the
| entirety of California with few exceptions.. long ago, San Diego
| county, a military-led area, was the exception and to many pariah
| on the constant increase in tracking of vehicles, people and
| "events".. now, what used to be thought of as harsh and creepy,
| is not only matched in hardware, but exceeded in backend
| capacity, across almost every populated area
| iwontberude wrote:
| Congratulations EFF I know for a fact you've been working hard to
| get these removed.
| schlap wrote:
| These companies build this tech in SF and Seattle, cities with
| some of the gnarliest public safety problems in the country, then
| turn around and sell it to smaller towns where it does more harm
| than good.
|
| Most places in America don't have problems that surveillance
| solves. They have problems they already know about and won't act
| on. Cameras don't fix homelessness or addiction or underfunded
| services. They just make life harder for regular people.
|
| But that's the whole appeal for bureaucrats. Buying a product
| looks like doing something without having to do any of the actual
| work.
| noodlesUK wrote:
| I think this echoes very true in a lot of places, not just in
| the US. Here in the UK I'm pretty sure the police/the state
| more broadly know perfectly well who is doing a lot of the low
| level quality-of-life crime in most areas, but for structural
| reasons either can't or won't bother acting in many instances.
| Investigative work has never been easier: oftentimes there's
| multiple cctv angles of offences being committed, endless
| digital records, etc., but unless something can be done with
| this information in the real world, it's useless and actually
| takes resources away from other areas of public services.
|
| Increasing the quality of the panopticon has all the downsides
| we talk about regularly on HN, and if you can't do anything
| useful for society with the data, it only ends up hurting
| people.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > These companies build this tech in SF and Seattle, cities
| with some of the gnarliest public safety problems in the
| country
|
| I live just outside Seattle. I worked for Flock.
|
| Flock is a company based in Atlanta GA.
| superfrank wrote:
| Axon, on the other hand, does have a decent sized Seattle
| presence.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Also worth pointing out that Seattle and SF - despite their
| portrayal in the media - aren't particularly violent places.
| Their violent crime rates are less than half the leading
| cities.
|
| Both Seattle and SF have lower violent crime rates than Salt
| Lake City.
|
| N.b. property crime is different and is a much less reliable
| metric. Both cities are ranked higher for property crime, but
| still below the famously dangerous Salt Lake City.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| > But that's the whole appeal for bureaucrats.
|
| I don't think it's the bureaucrats. You should hear the Flock
| CEO talk. They have made it very public that their direct
| intent is to influence government policy in sweeping and total
| fashion to enable their service to be the mass surveillance
| tool of the near future. They sincerely believe that people
| will look back on them as the saviours of mankind.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > They just make life harder for regular people.
|
| "Making life harder for people [in the other tribe]" has become
| a core platform for a great many politicians. There's growing
| movement advocating that one of the major purposes of
| government is to grief people you don't like. Looked at through
| that lens, blanketing small towns with these things, with a
| plan to use them against "Those People," makes complete sense.
| vel0city wrote:
| > These companies build this tech in SF and Seattle
|
| Flock's headquarters and largest offices are in Atlanta. They
| also have an office in Boston.
|
| Ring's headquarters were in Santa Monica until post-acquisition
| they moved to Hawthorne, CA.
|
| Arlo's offices are in Carlsbad and San Jose. Ok, finally an
| office in the Bay Area (one of two main offices), but still not
| San Francisco.
| jamiequint wrote:
| "Cameras don't fix homelessness or addiction or underfunded
| services. They just make life harder for regular people."
|
| In what way do cameras make life harder for regular people? If
| anything rampant crime (and progressive legal systems'
| unwillingness to lock up repeat offenders for a long time or at
| all) makes life much harder for regular people than a camera
| just sitting there.
| ggoo wrote:
| Surveillance tech can alter peoples behavior. I know I'm
| personally more stressed when I know I'm being filmed, even
| if I'm doing nothing wrong.
|
| https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2024/1/niae039/7920510?l.
| ..
| jamiequint wrote:
| Untrue at a population level, just compare anxiety
| disorders and self-reported anxiety between USA and China.
| qbit42 wrote:
| There are certainly no other causal factors...
|
| I'm not saying that it couldn't be true, but we have no
| way of concluding that from just comparing such rates.
| There are many differences in daily life and thresholds
| for reporting beyond surveillance levels.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| anxiety in the sense you're talking about is a function
| of private surveillance and in that regard America is
| much worse. State led surveillance in Chinese public
| spaces is real and effective in producing compliance (20
| years ago public theft, pulling people off motorcycles
| was a daily occurrence) but in private China is a
| significantly freer society.
|
| Foucault used to distinguish between models of authority
| that operate on "make die and let live" vs "let die and
| make live". China's the former, the US with its moral
| busybodies both in progressive and religious flavors the
| latter.
|
| The US now is a society of public disorder and personal
| policing, China is a society of public order and largely
| indifference in private life. Of course the former
| creates anxiety. American Beauty, a film about permanent
| surveillance without any state, would make no sense in
| China.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| I think it's a cultural thing. On average, people seem to
| hate cops more in the USA.
|
| Personally I like having little cop boxes in 5 minute
| walking distances in Tokyo. There are people who are very
| against it, bring up bad encounters, but net positive, I
| would say.
| tadfisher wrote:
| "Police used AI facial recognition to arrest a Tennessee
| woman for crimes committed in a state she says she's never
| visited": https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/29/us/angela-lipps-ai-
| facial-rec...
| jamiequint wrote:
| The plural of anecdote is not data
| tadfisher wrote:
| Your question was:
|
| > In what way do cameras make life harder for regular
| people?
|
| I provided an example. Are you only accepting peer-
| reviewed studies?
| jamiequint wrote:
| Single example is worthless. Is there a pattern of this
| happening far more often? Overall, do fewer people get
| incorrectly arrested or detained as a result of this
| technology, or more.
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| so where are your data sources arguing these are helping?
| text0404 wrote:
| Such great questions. Maybe we should answer them before
| building a massive, privately-owned, nationwide
| surveillance apparatus with taxpayer money.
| sigbottle wrote:
| No, we _should_ build the massive, privately-owned,
| nationwide surveillance apparatus with taxpayer money! It
| 's for science, after all! We have no data on whether or
| not cameras covering every square inch of space, hooked
| up to a centralized surveillance database is actually
| good for society. We need to conduct this
| _methodologically_ and _scientifically_. We 'll be able
| to come to an objective conclusion with enough testing!
| xracy wrote:
| You didn't ask for data... You asked: "In what way do
| cameras make life harder for regular people?"
|
| That requires a specific example, which you were provided
| with. This reads to me as a pithy response that doesn't
| want to wrestle with the ways this can be misused.
| jamiequint wrote:
| By this same argument ANY police makes life hard for
| regular people because they sometimes fuck up, so let's
| just get rid of police too. What's the worst that could
| happen.
| text0404 wrote:
| The general sentiment in the thread is that this is too
| powerful a technology in the hands of unqualified law
| enforcement. In the same way that I don't trust federal
| law enforcement in the post-Snowden era, I don't trust
| local law enforcement with mass surveillance tools.
| loeg wrote:
| https://x.com/jeffmklein/status/1430876370175987712
| tadfisher wrote:
| Luckily we don't have to use the poor as a crutch for
| this argument. Public camera networks capture everyone
| sleeping on the sidewalk, regardless of their income
| level.
| array_key_first wrote:
| There's zero proof anywhere that these devices do anything
| about crimes. How could they? A camera can't lock someone up.
| loeg wrote:
| They provide law enforcement timely information about the
| location of wanted (e.g., stolen) vehicles. Law enforcement
| can act on that information. If law enforcement does not
| have that information, it cannot act on it.
| vjsrinivas wrote:
| These systems have provided incorrect data, and law
| enforcement often misuse that data to stalk, attack, and
| wrongfully arrest innocent people. Privacy matters to
| everyone - especially for ones who don't care about
| privacy.
| array_key_first wrote:
| Law enforcement _can_ act on that information, but they
| _can_ do a lot of things. Whether they actually are is a
| different question.
|
| You're also ignoring the risk here. These devices open up
| a whooooole new class of mistakes that can be made. There
| have already been people wrongfully jailed due to
| surveillance technology.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| A few months ago a woman was harassed over a crime she did
| not commit, by a police officer using her vehicle driving in
| a large general area as proof she committed the crime.
| Officer demanded she admit to a crime she did not commit.
|
| Additionally, the surveillance apparatus enables parallel
| reconstruction. When law enforcement gathers evidence via
| illegal means, they can then use the drag net to find cause
| to detain/search unrelated to the original crime, in order to
| have cover to gather evidence they illegally gathered prior,
| aka a loophole for civil rights.
| ikrenji wrote:
| feels somewhat dystopian, no? the big brother is watching
| everywhere you go. no way this can go tits up
| m3047 wrote:
| 1) Surveillance needs to be reviewed. Even if reviewed by AI,
| eventually that reviewed work needs to be reviewed by a human
| if we're going to maintain the fiction / friction of "human
| in the loop". The "hits" will include false positives, unless
| the system is overtuned so that it rarely kicks an event.
|
| 1a) Review will take time / resources which could be spent on
| human policing, harming the community.
|
| 1b) Some jurisdictions may prefer "broken windows as policy",
| the notion that they can construct a "reasonable suspicion",
| given enough garbage (some of it outright garbage, the point
| being there is so much of it nobody cares; don't need to do
| an accurate drug test until trial, right?).
|
| 2) False surveillance hits will make it through human review
| and result in injury to innocent humans.
|
| 3) Police forces already lack the money / manpower to
| investigate potential crimes.
|
| 4) Police forces already "prioritize" other matters than the
| mentally ill setting their houses on fire or releasing
| plagues of rabbits into their neighborhoods (actual things
| that have happened to me!).
| Vrondi wrote:
| By mis-identifying them, leading to 5 months of jail time for
| a person who has done nothing other than be in public.
| https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/30/us/north-dakota-facial-
| re...
| text0404 wrote:
| Biased policing means these systems are used to target
| minorities, activists, and people with "controversial"
| beliefs: https://www.aclu.org/issues/national-
| security/discriminatory...
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| Agreed. I live in a city that's top 5% of safest cities in CA
| and these cameras have sprouted up everywhere. I reached out to
| my cities representative about it and he ignored my outreach
| (nice thing about instagram - that "read" indicator!). The most
| blatant is one that just points into the Home Depot parking
| lot. I don't see them at target.
|
| It's gross but I think the cohort of America that watches Fox
| News all day probably loves these things because they've been
| brainwashed with crime reports that are disproportionate from
| reality.
| clickclackk wrote:
| I believe home depot themselves put up these cameras.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| Cringe. I'll try to shop at other hardware stores going
| forward, thanks.
| chermi wrote:
| If you want to hear from the man himself, see link below. It was
| a fairly soft interview. I listened mainly because it was Noah
| and wasn't expecting him to be so pro-surveillance. So, even
| though I don't agree with them, it might be worth listening to
| their reasoning.
|
| https://open.spotify.com/episode/2V5m4J0tjYg1shWXWrOG8k?si=k...
| stronglikedan wrote:
| I'm glad Flock made it as far as they did before the ass-handing
| commences. Even some my normie friends and family are aware of
| the scourge because of their initial success, where they would
| otherwise think we're talking about a group of birds.
| Cipater wrote:
| Y Combinator CEO Gary Tan evangelises this company every chance
| he gets and YC was an early stage seed funder (Summer 2017)
| Cipater wrote:
| Y Combinator CEO Gary Tan evangelises this company and YC was an
| early stage seed funder (Summer 2017)
| kevincloudsec wrote:
| flock says customers own their data and control access. but their
| national lookup tool means 5,000+ agencies can search your city's
| cameras without your city's permission. 'customer-owned data'
| that anyone in the network can query isn't customer-owned in any
| meaningful sense.
| Cider9986 wrote:
| >[1] Would crime go up, down or stay the same if all surveillance
| cameras were removed? The answer to that is the only one that
| matters.
|
| At least 40,990 [2] innocent people died in the US in 2023,
| without significant outcry - that is, on the road, in car
| accidents. People in the US clearly value the freedom of driving
| over the deaths of innocent people. In 2023, there were an
| estimated 19,800 [3] homicides in the US. But even if you assume
| surveillance like Flock could prevent a meaningful fraction of
| those homicides - and there's little evidence it does [4] -
| that's still asking people to give up their most sensitive
| freedom, the right to move without being tracked, for speculative
| gains. People are not willing to sacrifice their freedom to save
| 40,990 people from cars, why should our constant locations be
| monitored?
|
| The abuse isn't speculative. Police have been caught stalking
| exes, tracking abortions, and innocent people [5] have been held
| at gunpoint due to a flock misread. The "safety" these cameras
| provide comes with a surveillance that's already being turned
| against ordinary people.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47690237
|
| [2] https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/2022-traffic-
| deaths-202...
|
| [3] https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/hvus23.pdf
|
| [4] Flock can't even demonstrably reduce car break-ins. The drop
| in San Francisco started months before cameras were installed
| (https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/sf-car-breakins/). If it
| can't prevent car beak-ins, how can we expect it to make a dent
| in homicides.
|
| [5] https://www.businessinsider.com/flock-safety-alpr-cameras-
| mi...
|
| >misreads by Flock's automated license plate readers... resulted
| in people who hadn't committed crimes being stopped at gunpoint,
| sent to jail, or mauled by a police dog, among other outcomes.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| To rich people, the privacy attack isn't an issue. We already
| track their private jets, how is this any different?
| ssl-3 wrote:
| There are rich people who charter private jets instead of own
| them. Their personal whereabouts aren't being tracked in the
| air. (They get to skip the entirety of TSA screening for
| these charters, too.)
|
| But Flock tracks them on the ground when they get in their
| big S Mercedes after arriving at their third vacation home in
| Aspen.
|
| Flock also tracks the wealthy who can't afford charter a jet,
| but who can afford to buy seats on the fanciest side of the
| curtain.
|
| Flock tracks the doing-alright folks in business class.
|
| Flock tracks those aspires to reach these levels: It even
| tracks the temporarily-disadvantaged billionaires who work
| soulless factory jobs and stuggle to keep up on the lease for
| their Black Express RAM 1500 Quad Cab, who rail against
| taxing the people who actually do have money as if that would
| ruin their own lives.
|
| Flock tracks Joey who manages the sandwich shop down the way.
|
| Flock tracks everyone.
|
| By the time we get down to the point of mentioning that
| "everyone" includes the subset of people who are criminals,
| that part almost seems like a bug instead of a feature.
| mellow-lake-day wrote:
| >We already track their private jets
|
| After the Elon Musk and Taylor Swift outcry rich people can
| now exempt themselves from being tracked
|
| https://gizmodo.com/congress-just-made-it-way-harder-to-
| trac...
| thebigman433 wrote:
| > If it can't prevent car beak-ins, how can we expect it to
| make a dent in homicides.
|
| Im not advocating for these cameras at all, but I dont think
| this is a very good line of thinking. The drop started before
| Flock, but that doesnt mean that they arent beneficial and
| currently helping lower the rate even further.
| ribosometronome wrote:
| >People are not willing to sacrifice their freedom
|
| Given that we (societally, rather than like, you, I or I
| imagine most of the people reading this here) seem perfectly
| willing to sacrifice personal freedoms elsewhere (that flock
| was ever deployed, the past few years rollout of age gates on
| websites, etc), how can you conclude that with cars its
| unwillingness to sacrifice personal freedom rather than
| entrenched economic interests driving (lol) the lack of change
| with cars?
| burningChrome wrote:
| FYI when cops arrive at a homicide scene, they don't go looking
| for the FLOCK camera's, they go looking for people who have
| RING cameras and businesses that have security cameras.
| Anything that is within sight of the crime scene is where they
| start.
|
| If you think FLOCK is an issue, you're barking up the wrong
| tree. You can remove all the FLOCK camera's you want and it
| won't change the already overwhelming passive surveillance
| that's already in place.
|
| We crossed the Rubicon decades ago when people gave up their
| ability to move without being tracked for speculative gains
| when they started using smartphones religiously.
|
| Also, the passive surveillance has resulted in several high
| profile killers like LISK and Bryan Kohberger being caught. So
| as much bad as you think it does, there are clear cases where
| its helped crack decades old serial killings and put
| horrifically violent people in jail. I think we can both agree
| we don't want those people out walking freely in our society.
| Krasnol wrote:
| > So as much bad as you think it does, there are clear cases
| where its helped
|
| You can "justify" so much with that sentence, that it becomes
| meaningless.
|
| Also, it won't hide the fact that this surveillance
| infrastructure can cause much much more harm then it
| prevents. We've seen what it might do in repressive states
| and we see today that even those states which represented the
| idea of individual freedom on this planet, you are only one
| election away from madness.
| burningChrome wrote:
| >> "it won't hide the fact that this surveillance
| infrastructure can cause much much more harm then it
| prevents."
|
| " _can_ cause much much more harm. "
|
| Cars kill way more people than guns per year. Where do you
| draw the line on something as subjective as this? It _has
| the capability_ to cause harm but has it to the degree you
| 're talking about? Its debatable.
|
| Also, taking a serial killer who murdered 8 women and
| dismembered several of them off the streets to me outweighs
| quite a bit of harm. But that's just me.
| bnjms wrote:
| I'm for looking for the existing cameras. I'm against a
| panopticon where any "trusted" LEO with an account can query
| and have ring + flock + OnStar + Tesla etc all aggregated to
| follow anyone. Ring has this now. I would guess some cities
| have it for traffic cameras. What I'm really against is
| having it privately owned as an end run around laws
| restricting government surveillance.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> Also, the passive surveillance has resulted in several
| high profile killers like LISK and Bryan Kohberger being
| caught. So as much bad as you think it does, there are clear
| cases where its helped crack decades old serial killings and
| put horrifically violent people in jail._
|
| Isn't that true of almost every restraint on the state's
| power?
|
| A lot of less intelligent people get very emotional about the
| state quartering soldiers in homes against the wishes of the
| homeowner. But if you've got nothing to hide, you've got
| nothing to fear. We may not know who the Zodiac Killer is but
| I can tell you one thing for sure - he didn't have four to
| ten infantrymen in his house, keeping track of his comings
| and goings. Given the obvious security benefits of having
| soldiers in your home, no rational person would object -
| unless they've got a meth lab in their basement. /s
| whyenot wrote:
| > People are not willing to sacrifice their freedom to save
| 40,990 people from cars, why should our constant locations be
| monitored?
|
| We are all different, and I think where we each land on the
| security <--> privacy continuum will depend on who we are.
|
| This is also true of constitutional rights. The US constitution
| was written by a small group of wealthy white men. At the time
| of its drafting, some people were considered property and had
| no freedom. Women didn't have the same rights as men and were
| not allowed to vote. Where the _framers_ landed on the security
| <--> privacy continuum may have been a very different place
| than many US residents would land today. Rape, murder, property
| crimes, etc... even today some groups are much more often
| victims than others. Safety is a much larger concern for some
| groups than others.
|
| I just feel like you are painting with a very broad brush when
| it comes to "people."
| timoth3y wrote:
| > People are not willing to sacrifice their freedom to save
| 40,990 people from cars, why should our constant locations be
| monitored?
|
| It's not binary.
|
| People are absolutely willing to sacrifice some of their
| freedoms to save lives. That's why we have speed limits, seat-
| belt and helmet laws, automobile safety regulations, DWI laws,
| etc.
| tamimio wrote:
| > means the installation of ALPR cameras
|
| That's a big misconception, flock is a car identification system
| not a license plate one. I have seen many videos of some crime
| documentaries where flock was used to ID cars with no license
| plates, and weeks later they still have them in the system to
| track, coupled with phone tracking, they know exactly all the
| details needed.
| ourmandave wrote:
| According to DeFlock.org, my local Lowe's store has 4 of them
| covering every entrance point.
|
| https://deflock.org/map#map=17/41.468996/-90.483817
| taobility wrote:
| Should we remove logs from service running?
| a456463 wrote:
| Axon has similar spyware surveillance tech too
| throwaway85825 wrote:
| Washington just exempted flock data from freedom of information
| requests. Yay democracy.
| a456463 wrote:
| Couple that with age verification at the OS levels.
|
| Devices tracked on the internet Car tracked outside the house
| Wifi 7 to track you in the house
|
| Think of the children, the few deaths. Instead we need better
| policy enforcement. Expire licenses sooner, stricter driving
| tests, penalties on big tech, breaking up of monopolies, better
| social care programs, police that are trained in descalating and
| have empathy towards the community being policed, law makers
| listening to people and not lobbyists.
|
| All of the right solutions require work. So we are left with an
| authoritarian fear driven state
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