They're also getting banned fast. The city level should be the most accessible government for change.
There's been over 70[1] documented wins.
Don't feel like this is a lost cause, it clearly isn't. If everyone who was going to comment on this thread instead or additionally got involved by going to a city council meeting and explaining the problems to friends/family, many more cities could reject them.
They're not getting banned fast, and regulation isn't a lost cause. Flock, in particular, is getting contracts cancelled primarily in ultra-liberal municipalities, and that's in large part because of their public relationship with the current federal administration. But ALPRs are going up everywhere; they're a commodity technology. We canceled our Flock contract (I wasn't psyched about that) and we're ringed by munis that use ALPRs from vendors that haven't made themselves political flashpoints.
I'm fond of pointing out on HN that the muni I live in is likely one of the 10 most progressive-leaning in the country (it's the most progressive-leaning municipality in Chicagoland). Even here, Flock had an ardent cheering section, of normal people who think expediting the interdiction of stolen vehicles (which are vectors of violent crime) is a perfectly reasonable thing for a city to invest in.
The thing that Flock does that's alarming is that it provides operators with a search engine for arbitrary vehicle descriptions which include but are not limited to license plates, with history stretching back; misuse scenarios are obvious, the search histories allow you to track the movements of specific people with fine granularity.
The thing that Flock does that is actually immediately problematic is that it operationalizes BOLO/hotlist databases that weren't intended to be used in real-time. Our deployment of Flock curbed more innocent vehicles than actual stolen cars, because Illinois LEADS isn't reliably updated, and so pings on vehicles that were reported stolen (whether or not they actually turned out to have been stolen as opposed to borrowed by a family member or something) weeks ago and recovered.
My car was reported stolen mistakenly, long story but was cleared up within a few hours (an officer came out to confirm vehicle was in my possession). Then a few days later Flock identified my vehicle driving and notified the cops. It was me driving my normal commute and I was pulled over at gunpoint. When I finally explained the story, they were like “oh yeah, we see that in the system but sometimes there’s a lag between databases.” Really? Wtf guys
If I had to guess, it's like when an expensive medical test gets more accessible and they have to update their model.
If the cost to get an MRI means everyone that gets one has a combination of symptoms and risk factors raising the pre-test probability, then it makes sense to treat MRI findings aggressively. If they become cheaper and start using them as screenings, they need to update their approach.
Similarly, if license plates are scanned when cops are already pulling someone over for moving violations (or the car is accumulating a ton of parking tickets, having been dumped), it might be ok if their status isn't updated that frequently, and it still might make sense for cops to approach the car with the idea that it might be stolen (something a drivers license check against registration can quickly clear up, which shouldn't matter too much if they were getting pulled over anyway).
If the system is being used to justify pulling people over in the first place, it needs different parameters.
This list isn't exactly describing "bans," this is a city contract rejection list - otherwise known as a "just deploy in commercial parking lots abutting major thoroughfares" restriction.
Trying to push back on this in my local community, two things I have found, below. Hopefully helpful to others.
1) I tried posting on Craigslist's "Community" section, in a simple attempt to reach out and connect with others who may be concerned. The posts were automatically blocked before even being published on the site. I tried multiple versions of this (i.e. with links and without, with pictures and without, etc.), from multiple accounts. Same result every time; the posted did not go through.
Obviously the word "Flock" would be easy to filter on, but if memory serves, even my very pared-down attempts that only used "surveillance" or "cameras" were blocked.
Why would Craigslist stop Flock-related posts from going through? The only answer I can think of is something along the lines of a National Security Letter. Certainly others here are much better informed about this realm than I am. Any other possibilities or perspectives, I'd be interested in hearinng.
I would also be interested in seeing what results other people get when they attempt to post on this issue to Craigslist.
2) So far my initial efforts to reach locally out via online contact channels to the City Council for more information have not been fruitful, and seem to be getting stonewalled (I'm not giving up yet though). In the meantime, I was able to do find the Flock contract, initial proposal, and other related documents using the City Council's agenda and minutes search tools. These search tools seem to vary by city, but may be worth looking into in your area.
I don't know where you live, but if you lived in Chicagoland the advice for how to engage on this would be easy: there are 1-4 (depending on your muni) Facebook groups where all the meaningful policy discussion happens. Hold your nose and log into Facebook and look.
> Why would Craigslist stop Flock-related posts from going through? The only answer I can think of is something along the lines of a National Security Letter.
That's because you lack imagination. 99 percent chance they are blocking you because they don't want "divisive political rhetoric" on the platform. Allowing a surveillance state is "apolitical" as long as it doesn't involve rocking any boats or making any noise.
... and NSLs don't do that. It would really be nice if people actually understood what NSLs were before blaming everything on them. Trust me, they are bad enough without inventing stuff.
Nothing is blocking them to spread their tech on other brands and vendors, making ghost data operator companies and aggregating it on complex layers that only produces information without the whole data.
The law that regulates it and all the validation process is flawed and they know it.
We had success in our county and town canceling contracts, but that doesn't mean they are banned from private land.
I'm not totally sure, but it may even be the stupidest of all possible outcomes: they still exist, the cops can't access them, and their only value is selling private information.
Police cannot access privately-owned Flock cameras unless the owners authorize them to do so, or a court orders it (in the same sense that a court can order access to any information on any device).
Yes that is what I said. Most private owners opt in to this data sharing arrangement. Keep in mind some of the largest deployments are with big box stores and retail property owners.
Hmm when I was in discussion with a couple different flock deployments that’s not how the arrangement works. The customer (not the police), the entity paying for the camera can opt in to sharing the data with local police. Under that arrangement the police did not pay for anything. Now certainly cities and police agencies may have their own deployment but the camera is the product the feature benefit is the data share. Maybe it’s change since I last was looking at it.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of these things. If they were just ALPRs, I could probably give them a bit of slack -if they tightened up their security-, but all the other stuff they do, makes them pretty much untenable.
However:
> This makes AI powered cameras like Flock's distinct from traditional surveillance or traffic cams, which require someone to manually look over footage in order to find a specific vehicle or individual.
Is a bit misleading. These days, anyone can give an LLM footage from any source, and get this kind of information.
What LLM can I get and feed hundreds of hours of video into that will give me the position of a specific vehicle alongside when that happened?
An LLM isn’t going to help you here, but basic Computer Vision and a SQL database has been a solution _if you have the cameras_. I wrote a license plate reader as a university project using OpenCV almost 20 years ago.
If you were able to write one 20 years ago, I dare say an LLM could whip one up super-fast. Or just search the internet and tell you where to find one.
One of the risks of LLMs is that a lot of tasks go from "an expert could do this easily given a few weeks" to "anyone who thinks to ask an LLM can do this easily and get results the same day"
> One of the risks of LLMs is that a lot of tasks go from "an expert could do this easily given a few weeks" to "anyone who thinks to ask an LLM can do this easily and get results the same day"
By that logic, all problems are solved with LLMs, though.
Honestly, there's plenty of experts worried about exactly that. But if you'd prefer, feel free to mentally scope my claim to the domain of "things we already know LLMS can do, like copying previously solved software problems"
Any competent llm would write a script using opencv to extract the license plates.
I did this with Gemini 3, mostly for fun and to test it's capabilities. Teslausb records all dash cam videos and auto syncs it to my nas when in wifi range. Yolo and opencv extracts and does ocr on any defected license plate, and puts it all on a map, along with trip information. Not particularly useful or interesting, and not something I would have done pre-llms, but the difficulty was basically writing a one paragraph prompt and using some free tokens
There's a very important difference between "anyone could walk through my door and steal my stuff" and "this person walked in my door and stole my stuff".
But not so much between "this person walked in my door and stole my stuff" and "I left the door to my house open and then I put my stuff in the doorway."
That's interesting, because the ALPR part of Flock is what caused all the problems here; the rest of it, of characterizing vehicles with attributes beyond just plates, wasn't really problematic at all.
Characterizing vehicles based on stickers (which easily can indicate political leanings) is absolutely problematic. It's just not considered problematic by conservatives, given police in the US are overwhelmingly conservative.
Look, I agree that's problematic conceptually, but it's absolutely not what's happening. ALPRs don't select cars on spec, like, "this car looks out of place here". Nobody has time for that. They're matching specific descriptions of cars to incidents, like, "this vehicle has been present at the site of 5 previous package thefts".
Here's another way to look at this. Municipalities are the primary operators of ALPR cameras. Any municipality that would scan bumper stickers looking for Trump opponents is not going to be receptive to any appeals for regulation.
One problem with this whole debate is that people are coming to it with movie plot concerns rather than understanding what's actually happening with them. That wouldn't be a big deal if this was a slam dunk public policy case, but it isn't: there is broad bipartisan support for these devices.
There are deeply problematic things happening just with license plate pings!
They're matching specific descriptions of cars to incidents, like, "this vehicle has been present at the site of 5 previous package thefts".
You're hand-waving a hell of a lot of things away and you expect that everyone knows what you're talking about. Please stop doing that.
- Who is "They"?
- Why do you say "nobody has time for that"? What is "that"?
- Why are you dismissing genuine concerns through unhelpful language like, "coming to it with movie plot concerns".
- Why wouldn't "that" be a big deal? What is "that"?!
- What are the deeply problematic things?
- "They're matching specific descriptions of cars to incidents" -- no they're not. Just looking at Bloomingdale's audit logs, there are 13k examples of searches done for the simple reason, "suspicious".
- Why does municipalities being the primary operators matter?
Asking from a place of genuine confusion by how you think about these things.
"They" are public bodies operating ALPR devices; in the main, municipal police forces, though obviously other public bodies (like the Illinois State Police) operate them as well.
The antecedent of the first "that" was "the use of cameras to detect cars with politically disfavored bumper stickers".
I am, yes, dismissing the concern that ALPRs are being used to detect cars with politically unfavorable bumper stickers. I think that if advocates for ending our Flock contract had come to the board table with that concern, rather than the quality of Illinois LEADS, we'd still have the cameras up.
The antecedent of the second "that" is "organizing around easily dismissible movie-plot concerns, like that municipal police are going to dragnet for people with anti-police bumper stickers". Unwinding the sentence, the "big deal" is, as I just said, that centering implausible risks takes real risks out of focus, and gives ammunition for advocates of the cameras --- of which there are a great many --- to push back on efforts to get the cameras down.
I spelled the "deeply problematic" things out elsewhere on the thread.
Feel free to tell me more about what Bloomingdale was doing with their cameras. With no detail, I'm inclined to believe the force simply didn't give a shit about the description field in the search request, because no serious, rigorous effort was made to regulate ALPRs in Bloomingdale, and so there isn't much signal in the logs.
What makes Flock bizarre is that it's a private business, and this is precisely how police departments are getting around a lot of traditional gates and checks on this sort of thing.
Police setting up a 1984 monitoring system throughout your city, tracking every car, person, activity -- yields lots of questions, oversight, concerns, debate, challenges, etc.
Some private business doing the same, and then letting the same police use it at will as a paying customer -- yay, all of the invasive monitoring with none of the oversight.
And of course, it's compounded by being pooled. Like RealPage, ALPR services like Flock, Axon Fleet Hub, and Motorola Vigilant VehicleManager offer data laundering so that organizations that shouldn't be talking can communicate.
The real joke is that the 1984 system was already in place long before flock. We all carry phones. Either from tower records ot google advert tags, private industry already tracked our every movement. Licence plate readers? Why bother when every car now has bluetooth enabled and so is constantly prodcasting its LAP id. (Some cities have tracked cars this way for over a decade, mostly for traffic management.)
That's actually the one thing that does make sense: police has always wanted to be able to do this, but they legally can't. But they can reward a private company willing to do it for them, so that they can "ask for the data" without ever breaking the law.
The police can, in fact, operate cameras in public spaces and they have done so for decades. ALPRs have been widely deployed since the 1990s.
I'm frequent surprised by how many people think that privacy laws block the police from recording their activities in public. For whatever reason, Flock is getting a lot of press, but this is hardly a new field.
ANPR has not been widely deployed since the 1990's in the US and the US court system has consistently held that the degree to which a technology automates monitoring, searching, etc is very relevant to whether it violates people's reasonable expectations of privacy for very obvious reasons.
> However, ANPR did not become widely used until new developments in cheaper and easier to use software were pioneered during the 1990s. The collection of ANPR data for future use (i.e., in solving then-unidentified crimes) was documented in the early 2000s.
Nah. Fascism only tolerates one power, that being itself. It can emerge from either the state or corporate side, and necessarily subsumes or destroys the other, just as it subsumes or destroys unions, families, friend networks, communications, and anything else that can establish power. That doesn't mean the merger of two of them is the defining feature.
No. Power can be delegated. I'd say capitalism puts ultimate power on the government who delegates power to holders of capital. (If that stops, it's not capitalism any more)
Corporations generally tend to only tolerate the state to the extent that guns or courts mandate that they must. How many billions of corporate dollars have gone to fund campaigns to deregulate, to skirt authority, to do whatever is necessary to make sure profits go up?
Personally I don’t mind having Flock cameras or other surveillance to make it easier to stop crime. Right now in many cities there is simply no consequence for various crimes - especially property crimes. But I want these tools to be protected - requiring imminent danger or warrants for access. I don’t think the answer is to get rid of them entirely.
Can anybody find trustworthy stats that these actually reduce crime? All I see are occasional anecdotes about how they were used to find one person one time.
Skeptical me seriously doubts this is an effective solution for crime. But maybe that's because this country has a history of being willing to do a million expensive and privacy violating things, and only if it's a punitive measure.
I'm not sure about reducing crime but most American police departments have difficulty finding staff. Generally boring job in most places and not really liked in other places (status loss). Speeding things up is one of the ways to deal with it.
I don't have stats, but most police have made it pretty clear that they're used for investigations that would otherwise have very little to go on.
I don't think anyone other than the manufacturers have made claims of cameras reducing crime. You can put all the AI bells and whistles on them, but they're still just cameras.
They're a fallback option, not a dragnet. The police are generally reactive to reports of crime, not proactively trying to piece together the details of everyone's lives and nail them the moment their dog poops on the sidewalk. No AI can even do that anyway and it would be a waste of money.
There are two vocal camps of people on these threads that are eroding HN: fearmongerers and grifters. I don't understand how it got this bad, but that's the real crisis here.
You are absolutely correct but you won't get anywhere here.
I have relatives who are cops and lawyers and city councilmen. No cop is sitting in a back room somewhere tracking all the cars on every street trying to do, uh, whatever it is people here are claiming they are going to do to them.
An obsessive stalker police officer that's angry at their ex girlfriend moving on and finding a new partner will probably not be interested in EVERY car, just the one she drives and the one her new boyfriend drives.
I won't speculate as to what your law enforcement family members may or may not be capable of when it comes to this technology, but I will speculate on what they will likely do if they found out about an obsessive stalker police officer that's watching their ex-girlfriend and her new partner using this tech: they will likely assist in hiding it so as to ensure that the optics of the justice system are not marred.
The reason I suspect they will behave in this way is not because they're bad people - but because they're likely normal people who are subject to normal influences and incentives. There will be no personal benefit, and significant personal risk associated with whistleblowing on this hypothetical officer, and so they will find rationalizations for why they shouldn't. Why it's fine to let this "one bad apple" go for the greater good of the optics of the justice system.
I also wonder what makes people think the cops are going to trust AI any more than anyone else. A mistake on bad information is even more dangerous for them and often makes national news.
Bingo. Value is the operative word here. Money and privacy are valuable too, and I'm assuming that there must be some pitch deck somewhere that is presumably good and selling city councils on this. Where is it? What is the value we're supposed to get from this?
These horrific things are multiplying exponentially in my (rural GA) environs. There are a dozen of them along every conceivable cycling route I could take, and far more if I drive somewhere. If you think this is a city thing meant to deter urban crime, the explosive proliferation of Flock cameras in quite rural and suburban areas may shock you. I find them in the darndest of places, near but not on county lines, adjacent to minor bridges, etc. And next time I go through there, there are more. They seem to be procreating.
As others have pointed out, they're not just ALPRs or traffic cameras, and their use-cases, official and unofficial, are extremely dynamic and expanding fast. They are not the only thing of their kind, but they justly earned the lightning rod status for their conspicuous cooperation with the administration's immigration thuggery and the douchy--but highly consequential--pronouncements of their CEO. Moreover, there's a ticker tape of daily news about police misuse of Flock's database, mainly for stalking exes and things like that.
This _is_ a stop on the way to a Chinese-style surveillance state, and there's nothing inevitable about it. But it will happen if we allow it to happen.
Ben Johnson's video on the security vulnerabilities, linked in the article, always deserves an explicit shout-out. It's likely to intrigue the tinkerers here:
These things proliferate where people trust the government or see the government as a means to the end of getting one over on whoever is bad for them.
So the Nth generation group of townies that run any given rural shithole will happily slap them up, the government represents them as far as they're concerned.
And meanwhile in some snooty inner ring Chicago suburb that fancies themselves "progressive" (but in what direction?) they slap up the same damn cameras because they see it as a means to make more efficient the enforcement of the myriad of rules on which their enclave depends and they are wealthy and well represented so they have no fear of it being used against them.
Rural Georgia probably has a little of column A, little of column B going on.
Because most of the American public is not as reflexively anti-Flock as HN would lead you to believe. People acting like cameras recording their activities in public is some sort of grave privacy violation are not the norm.
Cameras recording tour activity in malls, and on public roads has been the case since the 90s. Flock became a lightning rod of attention due to ICE, but they don't actually represent any change from the status quo.
> they don't actually represent any change from the status quo.
Only in the sense that the frog has been boiled gradually. The mere presence of cameras in public spaces is not the inconsistency that you seem to think it is. A nationwide centralized aggregator is not even remotely the same thing as a privately owned corner store having a purely private video feed of the front door.
How do you think ALPR cameras worked during the 90s? Do you think a technician had to go through each camera individually looking for license plates? The data was aggregated and indexed even during the 90s. Some of those databases were national. The same criticisms being levied at flock would also apply to the status quo 20+ years ago.
A camera in 2026 is not the camera of 1996. Cameras today are connected to active and passive monitoring systems which are much more invasive to privacy. What will a camera be able to do in 2036?
Are you willing to potentially be prosecuted to make a point that will ultimately come down to, "The cameras you destroyed are replaced with newly purchased units"?
The way to beat this isn't vandalism, it's getting them banned from every municipality and county in the country, while fighting at state levels for more bans.
It's also silly talk from kids online, just like "Don't vote, burn your local Wal-Mart" is only meant to impress other online children. The rest of us know that you'll neither vote, nor burn down the Wal-Mart.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I suspect most terminally ill people want to spend time with the people they love, not breaking cameras and working their way through the legal system.
Both flck and pltr uses a loophole on the law that if no one holds data no one is doing anything wrong.
This needs to be fixed.
Holding information about people should have a maximum time limit and should be treated respectfully.
Given it is impossible to make them stop, it should be easy to see what's on you and anything else is illegally obtained.
Holding information about people should be a massive liability. It should actively cost them money to know even a single bit of information about us. They should be scrambling to forget all about us the second the transaction's completed.
The police where I live are generally good, and I imagine that's the case many places. Treating police as the enemy, or a punching bag, is unfair and counterproductive.
(I can't speak to any places that might have a lot of corruption or ill intent.)
Places that aren't too corrupt, you'd be better off encouraging a partnership among citizens, police, lawmakers, and other officials. Which is how it's supposed to be. Everyone in the government has their respective duties, and they operate within a framework that's ultimately decided by the people.
If, for example, police propose certain surveillance, to help keep everyone safe, within their scope, then sometimes someone with different or larger scope might need to say, yes, but there's also these other considerations. Eventually a decision is made by the public or their elected representatives, and everyone nods with respect, and aligns, and continues their respective duties within the frameworks.
How backwards. Parent poster is talking about treating cops closer to how regular people are being treated.
If you're really committed to fairness, you'll take away the off-duty/unofficial privileges and immunities that they have which are not shared with "people too."
I used to hate the cops until I needed one, and then they were horrible to me and didn't solve my problem and actually started a reverse investigation against me for the thing I reported someone else doing, so now I hate the cops even when I need one.
typically the state finds it has to pay out millions to those wrongly imprisoned. These cameras are not quite as good as flipping a coin in accuracy, so the tax payers are already on the hook
>there has been widespread public backlash to cameras that track everyone, whether or not they've been suspected of a crime.
Well, duh. It doesn't know your plate from anyone elses so your plate gets recorded along with everyone else. If you go about a normal person's business then there is no harm and nothing happens.
I'm sure someone will decide harm is being done even when nothing happens.
And people that don't run red lights and suffer selective enforcement and are used for arbitrary surveillance and so on and so on. Don't let your naive view of what you want these things and their handlers to do distract you from reality, regardless of the brand or intent of widely deployed cameras.
Thank goodness you found a basic flaw in red light and speed enforcement cameras. It's shame it's taken decades for someone to realize this issue and now we can finally start working on solutions like taking two photos.
The operating theory of all of these cameras is that anything happening in public sight is by its nature not private. The federal government is dumping millions and millions of dollars into grant programs for municipalities to buy it… It’s a giant federal surveillance program disguised as decisions made by individual police departments.
It’s hilarious and depressing to contrast the HN community reaction to Snowden versus the mostly meh response to flock.
Context matters. At the time cameras were large and bulky. Computers were massive and extremely power hungry. The world's communication networks didn't have the bandwidth to shuttle video around in bulk.
Good, because nothing “problematic” about an individual matters one bit when presented with nefarious government activities. It’s obvious distraction technique 101.
There may be no expectation of privacy in the sense someone may see you and take your picture.
There is an expectation you are not constantly tracked everywhere you go by a nationwide surveillance apparatus, that your location is not constantly monitored, indexed and shared. Unless you expect to live in an Orwellian distopia.
Both of those two above cases involve tracking people both in public and in private. Furthermore the former involved compelling a company to fork over private information.
Traffic cameras, by comparison, only record people's in public. A police officer isn't violating privacy laws by standing at an intersection and writing down the plates of cars passing by is he? Flock is just automating that task.
The whole reason why we have license plates is to facilitate monitoring cars. If we really think that people have a right to keep their vehicular activities private, then surely the bigger privacy violation is the fact that we require cars to display unique identifiers in a prominent manner?
You can take notice of beautiful women in public. You cannot take upskirt photos.
You can eavesdrop on a conversation at the park. You cannot put mics under all the benches.
Privacy is a situational continuum of invasiveness. Just because there is no expectation of privacy from the state in using public roads does not mean we should tolerate corporations building profiles analyzing the comings and goings of citizens.
There was an implicit expectation that, although people could take your picture, there weren't a million people roaming around taking everyone's pictures all the time because it takes a few seconds to take someone's picture.
Imagine representatives who did what voters actually wanted. There's probably a name for that. Representative democracy or something. As opposed to corporate representation.
This is why gerrymandering should be unconstitutional, and why corporations should have their rights explicitly curtailed: they're not citizens or the people.
I'm really unconvinced gerrymandering is the issue here.
It's not like Red cities have flock cameras and Blue cities don't.
It's really just that the Fairness Doctrine [1] needed to apply to more than radio. If you can constantly just repeat your point and then deny an opposition time then of course you'll get your point through.
Although maybe if super-pacs got outlawed then the Equal-time rule [2] would suffice.
Races are virtually uncompetitive; it means politicians only need to pander to the 40% bloc of the 10–20% of voters that show up in the primary. Once elected, the chance of losing their office is nearly 0. Gerrymandering absolutely reduces effective voting power. That's the whole point.
I misread "corporate democratism" and I like that - democratism is to democracy what scientism is to science - democratism is something that has the superficial appearance of democracy but isn't democracy because it doesn't achieve outcomes based on a consensus of voters.
Imagine what I really meant was that in those areas people largely approve of these cameras and it’s the minority that don’t.
Now of course your narrative is rude and more entertaining but sadly far from the mark. Saying “that’s not what I paid for” is all fine and dandy but it’s cuts both ways.
Alright, but in those areas did the politicians run on having those cameras installed everywhere? Were the voters given a proposition to approve?
Data centers seem to be widely unpopular on both the left and right, so I'm wonder where the representative democracy comes into play. More often than not local politicians approve these projects despite there being majority opposition from the public.
Got these installed all over local parking lots for wallmart, home depot, ross, every exit solar panel and camera. Was wondering if there is some sort of quickly blinking infrared light or something that would make it visible to a naked eye of a cop, but not to a recording camera. I bet you would sell millions of those license plate holders in a heartbeat.
If a certain group of people think that it should be their right to take others rights away and turn society into a dystopia for perceived security, then for the same reason it should be other individuals rights to assert that their rights should be protected by taking the first group's rights away to install or do whatever they think they can do for convenience/security's sake.
This includes "ancestry tests", security cameras with AI in them, upload IDs to "verify", and even social media where you are allowed to upload pictures with others in them.
And since we "supposedly" live in a democracy, we should be allowed to have a vote to decide on this, the group that wins is the majority, right? I don't understand why we're allowing our rights to erode before we have an informed election about this, in democracies.
What right is being taken away? Nobody ever had the right to not be recorded in public.
Furthermore surveillance isn't just an all or nothing thing. For example, the government can record your activities in public without a warrant, but they can't subpoena your phone calls without a warrant. That degree of surveillance has more checks and balances.
How you somehow try to go from recording people in public to "ancestry tests" is a pretty nonsensical argument.
> And since we "supposedly" live in a democracy, we should be allowed to have a vote to decide on this, the group that wins is the majority, right?
No, you'd have to win much more than the majority to change the constitution, which defines a lot of privacy rights. But if you have enough votes, then sure you could change the constitution.
Your language is far too kind for the invasion of privacy and our human expectations of what ought to be permissible. It's not just about being "recorded" in public. It's about having all public excursions recorded, cataloged, and analyzed. What this panopticon of private surveillance is, is way more similar to "stalking" than "recording".
Fundamentally the right to privacy is focused around what people do in private, not things that are publicly visible. If we really think that it's an invasion of privacy to track people's vehicles, the focus should be on abolishing license plates. After all, isn't the bigger problem the fact that cars are all required to display an identifier?
I kind of want to be able to see a Flock (YC S17)-related thread on HN without feeling obligated to participate, but, alas. Just for background: I was one of the ringleaders of a community effort that successfully kicked Flock out of Eugene and Springfield, Oregon, assisted a few other community efforts, went on to help draft some of the first state legislation for ALPRs in the country (Oregon SB1516, which passed, though I have some reservations about the resulting bill), and I am still working with other groups across the country.
During the development of the legislation, my opponents included Flock Safety (YC S17) and Axon, and, later, others. I had a rather contentious meeting at one point with a legislator and several Flock (YC S17) C-levels.
This has been eating a big part of my life for over a year now, so it's deeply, deeply disappointing to see some of the same talking points repeated on HN all this time later.
1. We've known for a year now that Flock (YC S17) captures more than just license plates. We decompiled some of their code on a legally-obtained device. That code very clearly included categories of interest for their onboard object detection software, and included, "cat", "dog", "person", "bicycle", among other vehicle-related things.
2. We also obtained, through public records requests, training materials from a local police department, and training materials from other police departments, that together showed that not only did the Flock (YC S17) interface provide search options for bicycles, but that police departments were sharing tactics for finding non-automobile objects in images.
3. Flock's (YC S17) own marketing materials have been advertising their ability to find "missing people" given a description of an individual's clothing for a long time now. See e.g.: https://www.flocksafety.com/products/flock-freeform
5. These systems were immediately abused by police departments across the country for non-law enforcement purposes, or for purposes contrary to local or state laws. Proponents of surveillance keep trying to steer the conversation towards "but think of all the crime we can prevent!" while pointedly avoiding all of the plethora of abuses of this system. Flock (YC S17) could have anticipated this or, by now, put controls in place to at least appear to want to reduce these forms of abuse, but they have never cooperated with any of that. There is no other way to view this at this point than that Flock tacitly approves of abuse of their system and any efforts they do undertake only ever result in less public oversight.
6. It is very much not a lost cause to fight against this. You don't have to accept a venture-capital-funded, rapid-growth, your-data-is-our-value tech company rolling out surveillance in your community because they convinced a gullible and poorly-informed police department that it's in everyone's best interest. There are many headwinds against these fights, but they are being won, and the fact that they're happening in larger population centers (which tend to be a bit more liberal) is purely a consequence of the effort required to win.
But, I've talked directly with a lot of community members across the country, and opposition to these systems cuts across political lines. Working to shut these down in your community is good work, and moreover, can help connect you to some other very decent people in your community.
And also FWIW I've had an ongoing dialogue with a local police chief on how to do a better job of balancing public safety against other concerns. There is a spectrum of opinions on these systems within the law enforcement community as well.
Flock (YC S17) has no place in a healthy society. "Hackers", of all people, should understand that in a way that the average member of the public wouldn't be expected to.
We need some way to address the low level crime in the US. If you look at cities in east Asia, they're both much larger than typical US cities and much safer. It -is- possible to have safe large cities. The fact that we don't is a choice.
What's even more amazing is that they had these safe cities without [Flock, Motorola, Axon]. I guess we will never know how they did it, but at least we get the Chinese surveillance state.
My experience in major East Asian cities (predominantly Tokyo and Taipei) is that they have extensive networks of surveillance cameras operated by or accessible to the police.
Japanese police are very rarely willing to even ask to look at any of the disorganized hodgepodge of private cameras for property crimes or even minor physical altercations. They are far more likely to rely on personal accounts. TV dramas not withstanding.
Although Tokyo does have a system of traffic cameras which log traffic movement and license plates, that's most all that it does. Except in cases of murder or kidnapping (or political influence), it's quite rare to request the recordings of many private cameras. Outside of big cities, it's even more rare.
The largest connected system of cameras I'm aware of are for the subway camera systems (Shinjuku, Shinagawa, etc). Although independent systems, together they can do facial recognition to track individuals. Not a lot of AI yet, though.
In Tokyo, it is not uncommon to see bikes parked on residential streets with keys left overnight in their wheel locks (as if there aren't even mischievous 12 year olds?!). Oh, and outside of the cities, crime is even more rare. It is common in youth hostels for there to be open cubbies where personal items are stored in the front near the door. Nothing is taken. Most common thefts are: umbrellas (considered a fungible public good?), unlocked bikes (in high traffic business areas), women's underwear (off of outdoor drying racks).
I should mention that the list of thefts (other than an umbrella which I promptly replaced with its neighbor) are not ones that I have personally experienced, nor do I suspect that it is statistically accurate to those reported to police (conbini shoplifting and transit fare skipping must be larger). However, it is accurate to the top 3 "thefts" I've heard Tokyo residents complain about. If a native cares to correct me, I'd retract it.
Yes, there are cultural reasons crime is lower in East Asia too, but I haven't been to a major city there that doesn't have an extensive surveillance system.
Exactly. More people die from cars every month in the US than in 9/11. We value our freedom with cars, we should value our privacy to an even greater extent.
It’s the culture. Every Japanese person is always aware that they are “a part of society.”
Even the Yakuza participate in society. When they have big disasters, the local mobsters are usually helping people out, before the authorities can get going.
East Asia built a uni-culture by being extremely racist against outsiders. I don't think you can get away with that anywhere else.
A friend of mine (white guy) married a Chinese woman and when they visited China they were subject to slurs and dirty looks in public.
There's a whole category of videos on social media of Japanese furiously angry at Westerners acting like fools on their subways. They're not happy about it.
I’m an Indian with a Taiwanese-American wife. I’ve never experienced even the mildest amount of racism in Taiwan. Everyone was kind and friendly to me. And Taiwan is very safe.
I’m not going to pretend that an anecdote fully captures a problem but considering I spent over a month there just living a normal life I imagine that if the problem were widespread I’d have many chances to experience it.
My elderly parents were there for two weeks too and they have nothing but positive things to say.
And finally, my wife’s cousin married a White man from Ireland and he has loved the place for the many years he’s lived there.
I don’t know if I would consider a month long vacation as evidence. Taiwan is pretty famous for have lower labor classes that they import from places like the Philippines and while people are friendly, they are still generally looked down upon. Not dissimilar to places like Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore. So I think racism is a pretty loaded and broad word and people typically think about it in purely an American context, it’s more common around the world than people think in all kinds of shades.
Ultimately I do agree with the original thesis around monocultures.
Well, certainly my experience on the ground is far more meaningful than someone’s statements without evidence. Just googling around it seems that American policing is generally considered fairly racially discriminatory so performing racism on its own is not getting us less crime. Taiwan doesn’t seem to have that problem as extensively.
And I’m an Indian who grew up in and spent the majority of my life in India as did my parents. I’ve lived in a few countries for years and stayed in many for months. My frame of reference is unlikely to be the American context for racism.
I don’t think anyone is arguing that Taiwan or Japan are uniquely or universally racist. The point is that many highly cohesive societies have clear social hierarchies and stronger in-group preferences than Americans (or other groups) often recognize.
Taiwan’s treatment of many Southeast Asian migrant workers is a commonly discussed example. People can be welcoming to tourists and expatriates while still having structural biases toward certain groups. Those aren’t contradictory observations.
Likewise, we wouldn’t dismiss concerns about women’s safety in India simply because a visitor spent a month there and had a wonderful experience. An individual’s experience matters, but it doesn’t settle broader questions about how different groups experience a society.
My opinion comes from having spent a lot of time around Asia and more than a month of “tourism”.
> I don’t think anyone is arguing that Taiwan or Japan are uniquely or universally racist.
The original comment used this as the explanation for why there's low crime. Here's a reminder of the context we are conversing within.
> > > > East Asia built a uni-culture by being extremely racist against outsiders. I don't think you can get away with that anywhere else.
I think "extreme racism to outsiders" is detectable within a month. I am as outsider as they come - being a brown-skinned South Asian Indian[0]. I also think that "I don't think you can get away with that anywhere else" means "uniquely". I guess we could argue about whether "extreme racism" means "universal racism" if you'd like but I don't think it's interesting as an explanation for safety. And the other statement I'm replying to there is
> > > > A friend of mine (white guy) married a Chinese woman and when they visited China they were subject to slurs and dirty looks in public.
My wife's cousin is married to a White Irish man who has lived there over a decade. This is not his experience anywhere in Taiwan, in particular, as opposed to the GP's China experience.
I think his decades of living there prior to and then after marrying my wife's cousin probably provide some experience. There's a lot of Planet of Hats thinking from Westerners visiting Asia. But different countries there are clearly different, just like France and Switzerland are different.
And in the end, if racism is not unique then it cannot explain difference in crime outcomes. To quote the great sage pj evans: "Cars have windows and can move. Houses have windows and can't move. So it's not the windows that make the car go. It's something else entirely."
And as a little epilogue, we may consider other countries with a foreign-born populace similar to Taiwan's: Poland, Argentina, Uruguay, and South Africa. None of them match Taiwan's broad lack of crime while having a similar degree of foreign-born people.
Which brings us again to whether the windows make the car go or not.
0: website in profile, feel free to take a look at my face
I’m not claiming “Taiwan is extremely racist, therefore low crime.” I’m saying cohesive societies often have stronger in-group preferences and social expectations than Americans tend to recognize, and those coexist with being welcoming to many foreigners.
Your experience and your relative’s experience are perfectly compatible with that. One or two positive anecdotes don’t tell us much about how a society views every minority or lower-status group any more than one bad anecdote proves pervasive racism.
As for crime, I agree it’s obviously not explained by a single variable. That’s a much stronger claim than I was making.
No desire to look at your profile but I hope the point I am trying to argue for is clearer to you.
I understand what you're saying but it seems like a complete non-sequitur given the context of the conversation, which I'll reproduce here in threaded fashion in case it's not visible in your client.
> > > We need some way to address the low level crime in the US. If you look at cities in east Asia, they're both much larger than typical US cities and much safer. It -is- possible to have safe large cities. The fact that we don't is a choice.
> > East Asia built a uni-culture by being extremely racist against outsiders. I don't think you can get away with that anywhere else. A friend of mine (white guy) married a Chinese woman and when they visited China they were subject to slurs and dirty looks in public. There's a whole category of videos on social media of Japanese furiously angry at Westerners acting like fools on their subways. They're not happy about it.
The claim is precisely what you're saying you're not claiming. So you must understand that I am having this conversation in that context. Though I suppose we can both interpose unrelated facts into the conversation and claim contextual irrelevance in the motte and bailey style. Here are a few I present for discussion:
> Though I suppose we can both interpose unrelated facts into the conversation and claim contextual irrelevance in the motte and bailey style. Here are a few I present for discussion:
2 + 2 = 4
The sky is blue
The “motte and bailey” accusation followed immediately by schoolyard sarcasm is an odd combination. If you’re going to accuse someone of rhetorical gamesmanship, it’s probably better not to end with rhetorical flourish instead of argument.
A choice that has tradeoffs. Assuming we're talking about the sorts of places that lean heavily into surveillance I don't want to live there and their views on the role of the government is one of the reasons.
How much of that is addressed by a strong social-safety net? How are addicts and homeless people handled? How about general poverty (a known driver of crime)?
What is the trade off though and are Americans willing to make it? What sort of social conditions lead to more low level crime? This sort of complaint is nothing new btw.
You're getting loads of replies that seem to knee-jerk defend US cities purely to oppose Flock. And let's be real and admit that adding more cameras does little to improve this. My whole neighbourhood has a panopticon of surveillance cameras on every property, yet there have still been home burglaries and several cars stolen.
Many Asian cities are safer -- and they undisputedly are -- for cultural reasons. You can't create culture through surveillance.
US cities are plenty safe. The fact that you think otherwise is propaganda you’ve been successfully served. I live in Nyc and visit other cities often.
You must live in a different New York City than the one I visited. I had the safety calibration of Tallinn, Estonia and Dubai, UAE.
The subway was extremely hostile. People were regularly drugged out of their mind. I saw one guy try to drink a Coca Cola upside down and spilled it all in the bus. Another crazy chased my limited mobility Estonian friend who wanted to visit nyc alongside me when she went alone for groceries.
Could it be that your frame of reference is broken and/or you’re numb to it?
You saw someone try to drink a soda upside down and spill it? We are going to need more than a Flock cam to stop that heinous act, perhaps a Flock robot arm that could grab the criminals arm and turn it right side up, or just restrain them while the authorities are on the way.
I saw a tall man on L train stomping aggressively through the car and yelling bloody murder that he is gonna "stab the next mf I see", while attempting to swing punches at random people. The whole train ended up getting evacuated, and the train line got delayed. That was last winter. Between then and now, I saw people threatening others on the subway multiple times.
The most recent incident was a few weeks ago on Q train, where a seated man was screaming at the woman across from him (who was trying to do her best to ignore him), how he was gonna kill her and "the rest of her people" (whatever that means).
But please tell me how stuff like this never happens.
And I am not even a subway hater overall, I take it daily, and it is my preferred method of transportation. And no, I am not taking subway into deep and shady parts of bronx or brooklyn, as heavy majority of my rides are contained between Dekalb/Jay St Metrotech (aka dt brooklyn) and midtown.
It just sounds like crazy talk to me, when someone claims that the safety cams in subway cars are not, at least, somewhat helpful. At least newer A/C train cars have those cams now, and, I hope, it will lead to prosecution of serial subway harassers.
These are all lies. Small towns have notiriously higher crime rates than Nyc. We should send the National Guard to your small town and place cameras every where. I dont feel safe in your small town. I moved away from middle America that’s swamped in meth, high murder rate, and racism. Sorry someone spilled a coca-cola though. Your pearls must be powder in your hands by now.
There’s possibly a fantasy mindset at play where people need a certain identity to be true. As we’ve witnessed on a national scale, humans have great capacity for fantastical thinking to support what a friend of mine calls their “binkie narrative.”
This is false. Urban areas have the highest rate of crime compared to rural and suburban. For example look at the years 2020 and 2021 from this report:[0]
Table 8
Rate of victimization, by type of crime and location of residence, 2020 and 2021
Location of residence
Total violent crime Violent crime excluding
simple assault Total property crime
2020 2021* 2020 2021* 2020 2021*
Urban 19.0 † 24.5 7.7 9.7 158.9 157.5
Suburban 16.8 16.5 5.6 5.2 90.5 86.8
Rural 13.4 11.1 4.5 4.4 65.6 57.7
You can see clearly that urban has the highest rate of crime, and this has been true for decades.[1]
Also, many crimes are not recorded at all in NYC, which is why many stores have locked down all their items with a key that requires permission from a staff member to access. I haven't seen this in the small towms I've been to.
His small town? Tallinn is comparatively tiny to NYC admittedly but Dubai is a fairly large and urban city. I think that it doesn’t quite fit the appellation.
No, he's describing someone so stoned out of their mind they don't know how to drink a soda. I feel most people would read his comment and understand that.
I live in NYC and I don't think it is safe, so there's one person that disagrees with you. Part of the problem in NYC is when you commit a low-level crime the social-justice warriors let the person back out on the street without charging them. This is why when somebody kills somebody in NYC you often hear that the person had been arrested for various things twelve times earlier. Just covering up the "un-safeness" by saying "it's safe" or citing crime stats doesn't change what people can see with their own eyes.
In your conception, the only reason any drug store is able to stay in business is because deodorant thieves are getting hard time?
If enough people are stealing deodorant to put them out of business, I think there are some big social problems that jail time isn’t going to fix.
Frankly, i’d 100% of the time rather bare the cost of shoplifters thru slightly higher prices than thru paying ~$100,000 year each incarcerating anyone who shoplifts.
There are “low level” crimes that are predictable signs of violent crime. E.g. intimate partner violence. I’d love to see those taken more seriously, even if it’s just for the downstream effects.
Are you sure these people weren't making plea deals or having their cases dismissed because prosecutors can't try every single low level criminal case? I'm not sure where "social-justice warriors" comes in to play. It's the legal system making choices about what crimes are worth prosecuting.
> I'm not sure where "social-justice warriors" comes in to play.
See the DSA candidates in the recent elections including the major - they explicitly state they do not support prison sentences and in many cases do not believe in police.
It’s hard to distil to a single comment but I think it might be a poor example given the NYPD takes about double the budget per capita to be less safe than Toronto.
I think the only objective conclusion we can come to in a comments section is that going by “I visited there” vibes isn’t going to be useful.
What about the high murder rate and meth problems of middle America, lets talk about that more instead of the “oh no homeless people” rhetoric all the time.
This type of "there is no problem and any evidence is propaganda" denial is why social disorder like rampant petty theft, open air drug use, and people shitting in the streets is destroying these cities.
What about the meth heads shitting in the streets of the small town? Rampant assault and murder rates. What about all the drinking and driving killing people in America. No, no, it’s Nyc that’s scary.
But there are approximately zero meth heads shitting in the streets in small towns in the US.
I have never once seen a person shitting in the streets in a small town. I saw it within 24 hours of visiting Portland. I’ve never seen that in NYC either to be clear.
The point re: Paris is that most cities would look better when compared to Paris on safety.
> Only London and NY reach the Alpha++ world city designation.
As someone that's spent the last two decades living in both, it's a little bit of past glory. Miami is more ambitious, Lisbon is where smart international companies go. London still has great universities but they're lessened and capital goes elsewhere.
My wife grew up there, and I worked for a company based there for years, and I can’t really even come up with a good educated guess for that that means.
You could argue that London is past its prime, but you could have made that argument 75 years ago. It still retains its alpha++ designation and it’s the top ranking in the global financial centers index.
But regardless neither Lisbon nor Miami is a peer to NYC right now.
Really? I lived in Greenwich village until last year and I’d have people threaten to kill me for politely declining to give them change. I live in Park Slope now and there’s violent people on the F line all the time. Maybe wealthy neighbourhoods are super dangerous or maybe you’re just not noticing.
> If you look at cities in east Asia, they're... much safer.
ah yes, the famously dependable statistics of east Asia, with their famously free press and citizen auditing communities, and the famously dependable impressions of tourists and expatriates...
They're also getting banned fast. The city level should be the most accessible government for change.
There's been over 70[1] documented wins.
Don't feel like this is a lost cause, it clearly isn't. If everyone who was going to comment on this thread instead or additionally got involved by going to a city council meeting and explaining the problems to friends/family, many more cities could reject them.
[1] https://deflock.org/council/#wins
They're not getting banned fast, and regulation isn't a lost cause. Flock, in particular, is getting contracts cancelled primarily in ultra-liberal municipalities, and that's in large part because of their public relationship with the current federal administration. But ALPRs are going up everywhere; they're a commodity technology. We canceled our Flock contract (I wasn't psyched about that) and we're ringed by munis that use ALPRs from vendors that haven't made themselves political flashpoints.
I'm fond of pointing out on HN that the muni I live in is likely one of the 10 most progressive-leaning in the country (it's the most progressive-leaning municipality in Chicagoland). Even here, Flock had an ardent cheering section, of normal people who think expediting the interdiction of stolen vehicles (which are vectors of violent crime) is a perfectly reasonable thing for a city to invest in.
I got caught by an ALPR 20 years ago. I've been confused about 1) what is Flock's innovation 2) why are people up in arm.
The thing that Flock does that's alarming is that it provides operators with a search engine for arbitrary vehicle descriptions which include but are not limited to license plates, with history stretching back; misuse scenarios are obvious, the search histories allow you to track the movements of specific people with fine granularity.
The thing that Flock does that is actually immediately problematic is that it operationalizes BOLO/hotlist databases that weren't intended to be used in real-time. Our deployment of Flock curbed more innocent vehicles than actual stolen cars, because Illinois LEADS isn't reliably updated, and so pings on vehicles that were reported stolen (whether or not they actually turned out to have been stolen as opposed to borrowed by a family member or something) weeks ago and recovered.
My car was reported stolen mistakenly, long story but was cleared up within a few hours (an officer came out to confirm vehicle was in my possession). Then a few days later Flock identified my vehicle driving and notified the cops. It was me driving my normal commute and I was pulled over at gunpoint. When I finally explained the story, they were like “oh yeah, we see that in the system but sometimes there’s a lag between databases.” Really? Wtf guys
That sounds like a much more foundational and serious issue than any number of ALPR systems?
If Illionis LEADS lacks credibility?
It has plenty of credibility at the task for which it was designed. It wasn't designed as a backend event system for real-time sensors.
Huh?
You just said it “isn't reliably updated, and so pings on vehicles that were reported stolen…” are weeks out of date?
Even if all ALPRs vanished from the Earth tomorrow, that still indicates a lack of credibility in the pings?
If I had to guess, it's like when an expensive medical test gets more accessible and they have to update their model.
If the cost to get an MRI means everyone that gets one has a combination of symptoms and risk factors raising the pre-test probability, then it makes sense to treat MRI findings aggressively. If they become cheaper and start using them as screenings, they need to update their approach.
Similarly, if license plates are scanned when cops are already pulling someone over for moving violations (or the car is accumulating a ton of parking tickets, having been dumped), it might be ok if their status isn't updated that frequently, and it still might make sense for cops to approach the car with the idea that it might be stolen (something a drivers license check against registration can quickly clear up, which shouldn't matter too much if they were getting pulled over anyway).
If the system is being used to justify pulling people over in the first place, it needs different parameters.
Clearly in the real world Illinois, there are multiple systems that are “being used to justify pulling people over in the first place”.
But how does that relate to the credibility of pings?
This list isn't exactly describing "bans," this is a city contract rejection list - otherwise known as a "just deploy in commercial parking lots abutting major thoroughfares" restriction.
Trying to push back on this in my local community, two things I have found, below. Hopefully helpful to others.
1) I tried posting on Craigslist's "Community" section, in a simple attempt to reach out and connect with others who may be concerned. The posts were automatically blocked before even being published on the site. I tried multiple versions of this (i.e. with links and without, with pictures and without, etc.), from multiple accounts. Same result every time; the posted did not go through.
Obviously the word "Flock" would be easy to filter on, but if memory serves, even my very pared-down attempts that only used "surveillance" or "cameras" were blocked.
Why would Craigslist stop Flock-related posts from going through? The only answer I can think of is something along the lines of a National Security Letter. Certainly others here are much better informed about this realm than I am. Any other possibilities or perspectives, I'd be interested in hearinng.
I would also be interested in seeing what results other people get when they attempt to post on this issue to Craigslist.
2) So far my initial efforts to reach locally out via online contact channels to the City Council for more information have not been fruitful, and seem to be getting stonewalled (I'm not giving up yet though). In the meantime, I was able to do find the Flock contract, initial proposal, and other related documents using the City Council's agenda and minutes search tools. These search tools seem to vary by city, but may be worth looking into in your area.
I don't know where you live, but if you lived in Chicagoland the advice for how to engage on this would be easy: there are 1-4 (depending on your muni) Facebook groups where all the meaningful policy discussion happens. Hold your nose and log into Facebook and look.
> Why would Craigslist stop Flock-related posts from going through? The only answer I can think of is something along the lines of a National Security Letter.
That's because you lack imagination. 99 percent chance they are blocking you because they don't want "divisive political rhetoric" on the platform. Allowing a surveillance state is "apolitical" as long as it doesn't involve rocking any boats or making any noise.
... and NSLs don't do that. It would really be nice if people actually understood what NSLs were before blaming everything on them. Trust me, they are bad enough without inventing stuff.
Nothing is blocking them to spread their tech on other brands and vendors, making ghost data operator companies and aggregating it on complex layers that only produces information without the whole data.
The law that regulates it and all the validation process is flawed and they know it.
We had success in our county and town canceling contracts, but that doesn't mean they are banned from private land.
I'm not totally sure, but it may even be the stupidest of all possible outcomes: they still exist, the cops can't access them, and their only value is selling private information.
But the cops can access the private land cameras. I would wager most small to conglomerate level business opt-in.
Last I checked the Lowes and Walmarts of the US share this data as its locks down shoplifters quicker.
Police cannot access privately-owned Flock cameras unless the owners authorize them to do so, or a court orders it (in the same sense that a court can order access to any information on any device).
Yes that is what I said. Most private owners opt in to this data sharing arrangement. Keep in mind some of the largest deployments are with big box stores and retail property owners.
> But the cops can access the private land cameras.
Not for free, they can't. Flock isn't a charity. So your local cops can't get the data, but others can.
Hmm when I was in discussion with a couple different flock deployments that’s not how the arrangement works. The customer (not the police), the entity paying for the camera can opt in to sharing the data with local police. Under that arrangement the police did not pay for anything. Now certainly cities and police agencies may have their own deployment but the camera is the product the feature benefit is the data share. Maybe it’s change since I last was looking at it.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of these things. If they were just ALPRs, I could probably give them a bit of slack -if they tightened up their security-, but all the other stuff they do, makes them pretty much untenable.
However:
> This makes AI powered cameras like Flock's distinct from traditional surveillance or traffic cams, which require someone to manually look over footage in order to find a specific vehicle or individual.
Is a bit misleading. These days, anyone can give an LLM footage from any source, and get this kind of information.
What LLM can I get and feed hundreds of hours of video into that will give me the position of a specific vehicle alongside when that happened?
An LLM isn’t going to help you here, but basic Computer Vision and a SQL database has been a solution _if you have the cameras_. I wrote a license plate reader as a university project using OpenCV almost 20 years ago.
If you were able to write one 20 years ago, I dare say an LLM could whip one up super-fast. Or just search the internet and tell you where to find one.
One of the risks of LLMs is that a lot of tasks go from "an expert could do this easily given a few weeks" to "anyone who thinks to ask an LLM can do this easily and get results the same day"
> One of the risks of LLMs is that a lot of tasks go from "an expert could do this easily given a few weeks" to "anyone who thinks to ask an LLM can do this easily and get results the same day"
By that logic, all problems are solved with LLMs, though.
Honestly, there's plenty of experts worried about exactly that. But if you'd prefer, feel free to mentally scope my claim to the domain of "things we already know LLMS can do, like copying previously solved software problems"
Any competent llm would write a script using opencv to extract the license plates.
I did this with Gemini 3, mostly for fun and to test it's capabilities. Teslausb records all dash cam videos and auto syncs it to my nas when in wifi range. Yolo and opencv extracts and does ocr on any defected license plate, and puts it all on a map, along with trip information. Not particularly useful or interesting, and not something I would have done pre-llms, but the difficulty was basically writing a one paragraph prompt and using some free tokens
By that logic, all problems are solved by LLMs. If that was true, then there's no reason for any products to exist for anything anymore.
I think there's a limit to how misleading.
There's a very important difference between "anyone could walk through my door and steal my stuff" and "this person walked in my door and stole my stuff".
But not so much between "this person walked in my door and stole my stuff" and "I left the door to my house open and then I put my stuff in the doorway."
Flock cameras are roughly that secure.
Isn't Flock more like a house sitter in the analogy though?
"I gave the person keys to my house and then I trusted they wouldn't open bathroom doors while somebody was there".
Like law enforcement is being given access to the systems, the door isn't "left open", a key was given to them.
That's interesting, because the ALPR part of Flock is what caused all the problems here; the rest of it, of characterizing vehicles with attributes beyond just plates, wasn't really problematic at all.
Characterizing vehicles based on stickers (which easily can indicate political leanings) is absolutely problematic. It's just not considered problematic by conservatives, given police in the US are overwhelmingly conservative.
Look, I agree that's problematic conceptually, but it's absolutely not what's happening. ALPRs don't select cars on spec, like, "this car looks out of place here". Nobody has time for that. They're matching specific descriptions of cars to incidents, like, "this vehicle has been present at the site of 5 previous package thefts".
Here's another way to look at this. Municipalities are the primary operators of ALPR cameras. Any municipality that would scan bumper stickers looking for Trump opponents is not going to be receptive to any appeals for regulation.
One problem with this whole debate is that people are coming to it with movie plot concerns rather than understanding what's actually happening with them. That wouldn't be a big deal if this was a slam dunk public policy case, but it isn't: there is broad bipartisan support for these devices.
There are deeply problematic things happening just with license plate pings!
- Who is "They"?
- Why do you say "nobody has time for that"? What is "that"?
- Why are you dismissing genuine concerns through unhelpful language like, "coming to it with movie plot concerns".
- Why wouldn't "that" be a big deal? What is "that"?!
- What are the deeply problematic things?
- "They're matching specific descriptions of cars to incidents" -- no they're not. Just looking at Bloomingdale's audit logs, there are 13k examples of searches done for the simple reason, "suspicious".
- Why does municipalities being the primary operators matter?
Asking from a place of genuine confusion by how you think about these things.
Hey, Chaps! Sorry, I write the way I write.
"They" are public bodies operating ALPR devices; in the main, municipal police forces, though obviously other public bodies (like the Illinois State Police) operate them as well.
The antecedent of the first "that" was "the use of cameras to detect cars with politically disfavored bumper stickers".
I am, yes, dismissing the concern that ALPRs are being used to detect cars with politically unfavorable bumper stickers. I think that if advocates for ending our Flock contract had come to the board table with that concern, rather than the quality of Illinois LEADS, we'd still have the cameras up.
The antecedent of the second "that" is "organizing around easily dismissible movie-plot concerns, like that municipal police are going to dragnet for people with anti-police bumper stickers". Unwinding the sentence, the "big deal" is, as I just said, that centering implausible risks takes real risks out of focus, and gives ammunition for advocates of the cameras --- of which there are a great many --- to push back on efforts to get the cameras down.
I spelled the "deeply problematic" things out elsewhere on the thread.
Feel free to tell me more about what Bloomingdale was doing with their cameras. With no detail, I'm inclined to believe the force simply didn't give a shit about the description field in the search request, because no serious, rigorous effort was made to regulate ALPRs in Bloomingdale, and so there isn't much signal in the logs.
What makes Flock bizarre is that it's a private business, and this is precisely how police departments are getting around a lot of traditional gates and checks on this sort of thing.
Police setting up a 1984 monitoring system throughout your city, tracking every car, person, activity -- yields lots of questions, oversight, concerns, debate, challenges, etc.
Some private business doing the same, and then letting the same police use it at will as a paying customer -- yay, all of the invasive monitoring with none of the oversight.
And of course, it's compounded by being pooled. Like RealPage, ALPR services like Flock, Axon Fleet Hub, and Motorola Vigilant VehicleManager offer data laundering so that organizations that shouldn't be talking can communicate.
Privacy laws now.
The real joke is that the 1984 system was already in place long before flock. We all carry phones. Either from tower records ot google advert tags, private industry already tracked our every movement. Licence plate readers? Why bother when every car now has bluetooth enabled and so is constantly prodcasting its LAP id. (Some cities have tracked cars this way for over a decade, mostly for traffic management.)
That's actually the one thing that does make sense: police has always wanted to be able to do this, but they legally can't. But they can reward a private company willing to do it for them, so that they can "ask for the data" without ever breaking the law.
The police can, in fact, operate cameras in public spaces and they have done so for decades. ALPRs have been widely deployed since the 1990s.
I'm frequent surprised by how many people think that privacy laws block the police from recording their activities in public. For whatever reason, Flock is getting a lot of press, but this is hardly a new field.
ANPR has not been widely deployed since the 1990's in the US and the US court system has consistently held that the degree to which a technology automates monitoring, searching, etc is very relevant to whether it violates people's reasonable expectations of privacy for very obvious reasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni...
> However, ANPR did not become widely used until new developments in cheaper and easier to use software were pioneered during the 1990s. The collection of ANPR data for future use (i.e., in solving then-unidentified crimes) was documented in the early 2000s.
“Fascism should rightly be called corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.”
- Benito Mussolini
Nah. Fascism only tolerates one power, that being itself. It can emerge from either the state or corporate side, and necessarily subsumes or destroys the other, just as it subsumes or destroys unions, families, friend networks, communications, and anything else that can establish power. That doesn't mean the merger of two of them is the defining feature.
That’s true of every system of government
No. Power can be delegated. I'd say capitalism puts ultimate power on the government who delegates power to holders of capital. (If that stops, it's not capitalism any more)
Corporations generally tend to only tolerate the state to the extent that guns or courts mandate that they must. How many billions of corporate dollars have gone to fund campaigns to deregulate, to skirt authority, to do whatever is necessary to make sure profits go up?
That's also the degree to which dogs tolerate unions - doesn't really mean anything
You are literally arguing with the statement of the man who invented fascism.
Was he a smart man or was he a fascist?
Fascism was corporative, but in Italian the word has a very different meaning compared to the English one.
Personally I don’t mind having Flock cameras or other surveillance to make it easier to stop crime. Right now in many cities there is simply no consequence for various crimes - especially property crimes. But I want these tools to be protected - requiring imminent danger or warrants for access. I don’t think the answer is to get rid of them entirely.
>These days, anyone can give an LLM footage from any source, and get this kind of information.
Is a bit misleading itself, to do this at scale requires all those iffy data centers.
What's an iffy data center?
One that gets built over the public's objection because just maybe the company building it will create an AGI that will take everyone's jobs?
Seeing commenters defending privatized mass surveillance tech in 2026 is crazy.
Flock is a YC company, right?
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety
To be fair, you are on Hacker News, which is mammon's central nervous system in 2026.
Can anybody find trustworthy stats that these actually reduce crime? All I see are occasional anecdotes about how they were used to find one person one time.
Skeptical me seriously doubts this is an effective solution for crime. But maybe that's because this country has a history of being willing to do a million expensive and privacy violating things, and only if it's a punitive measure.
I'm not sure about reducing crime but most American police departments have difficulty finding staff. Generally boring job in most places and not really liked in other places (status loss). Speeding things up is one of the ways to deal with it.
UK cctv and China's system are probably the closest examples?
I don't have stats, but most police have made it pretty clear that they're used for investigations that would otherwise have very little to go on.
I don't think anyone other than the manufacturers have made claims of cameras reducing crime. You can put all the AI bells and whistles on them, but they're still just cameras.
They're a fallback option, not a dragnet. The police are generally reactive to reports of crime, not proactively trying to piece together the details of everyone's lives and nail them the moment their dog poops on the sidewalk. No AI can even do that anyway and it would be a waste of money.
There are two vocal camps of people on these threads that are eroding HN: fearmongerers and grifters. I don't understand how it got this bad, but that's the real crisis here.
You are absolutely correct but you won't get anywhere here.
I have relatives who are cops and lawyers and city councilmen. No cop is sitting in a back room somewhere tracking all the cars on every street trying to do, uh, whatever it is people here are claiming they are going to do to them.
An obsessive stalker police officer that's angry at their ex girlfriend moving on and finding a new partner will probably not be interested in EVERY car, just the one she drives and the one her new boyfriend drives.
I won't speculate as to what your law enforcement family members may or may not be capable of when it comes to this technology, but I will speculate on what they will likely do if they found out about an obsessive stalker police officer that's watching their ex-girlfriend and her new partner using this tech: they will likely assist in hiding it so as to ensure that the optics of the justice system are not marred.
The reason I suspect they will behave in this way is not because they're bad people - but because they're likely normal people who are subject to normal influences and incentives. There will be no personal benefit, and significant personal risk associated with whistleblowing on this hypothetical officer, and so they will find rationalizations for why they shouldn't. Why it's fine to let this "one bad apple" go for the greater good of the optics of the justice system.
So it goes.
I also wonder what makes people think the cops are going to trust AI any more than anyone else. A mistake on bad information is even more dangerous for them and often makes national news.
If they don't reduce crimes what do they do? Oh right they track inconvenient people
Solving crime is still valuable even if it doesn’t reduce crime.
Bingo. Value is the operative word here. Money and privacy are valuable too, and I'm assuming that there must be some pitch deck somewhere that is presumably good and selling city councils on this. Where is it? What is the value we're supposed to get from this?
These horrific things are multiplying exponentially in my (rural GA) environs. There are a dozen of them along every conceivable cycling route I could take, and far more if I drive somewhere. If you think this is a city thing meant to deter urban crime, the explosive proliferation of Flock cameras in quite rural and suburban areas may shock you. I find them in the darndest of places, near but not on county lines, adjacent to minor bridges, etc. And next time I go through there, there are more. They seem to be procreating.
As others have pointed out, they're not just ALPRs or traffic cameras, and their use-cases, official and unofficial, are extremely dynamic and expanding fast. They are not the only thing of their kind, but they justly earned the lightning rod status for their conspicuous cooperation with the administration's immigration thuggery and the douchy--but highly consequential--pronouncements of their CEO. Moreover, there's a ticker tape of daily news about police misuse of Flock's database, mainly for stalking exes and things like that.
This _is_ a stop on the way to a Chinese-style surveillance state, and there's nothing inevitable about it. But it will happen if we allow it to happen.
Ben Johnson's video on the security vulnerabilities, linked in the article, always deserves an explicit shout-out. It's likely to intrigue the tinkerers here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY
Benn Jordan, you mean. Good video.
These things proliferate where people trust the government or see the government as a means to the end of getting one over on whoever is bad for them.
So the Nth generation group of townies that run any given rural shithole will happily slap them up, the government represents them as far as they're concerned.
And meanwhile in some snooty inner ring Chicago suburb that fancies themselves "progressive" (but in what direction?) they slap up the same damn cameras because they see it as a means to make more efficient the enforcement of the myriad of rules on which their enclave depends and they are wealthy and well represented so they have no fear of it being used against them.
Rural Georgia probably has a little of column A, little of column B going on.
I don't get why any of these devices are still intact...
Because most of the American public is not as reflexively anti-Flock as HN would lead you to believe. People acting like cameras recording their activities in public is some sort of grave privacy violation are not the norm.
Cameras recording tour activity in malls, and on public roads has been the case since the 90s. Flock became a lightning rod of attention due to ICE, but they don't actually represent any change from the status quo.
> they don't actually represent any change from the status quo.
Only in the sense that the frog has been boiled gradually. The mere presence of cameras in public spaces is not the inconsistency that you seem to think it is. A nationwide centralized aggregator is not even remotely the same thing as a privately owned corner store having a purely private video feed of the front door.
How do you think ALPR cameras worked during the 90s? Do you think a technician had to go through each camera individually looking for license plates? The data was aggregated and indexed even during the 90s. Some of those databases were national. The same criticisms being levied at flock would also apply to the status quo 20+ years ago.
A camera in 2026 is not the camera of 1996. Cameras today are connected to active and passive monitoring systems which are much more invasive to privacy. What will a camera be able to do in 2036?
To the contrary, cameras have been able to automatically read license plates since the 70s, and the technology became cheaper and more widely deployed in the 90s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni...
At the end of the day, a camera in public can only record images of people in public. That does not and never did require a warrant.
Right? The installers conveniently made them within baseball bat range. Luckily, we don't have them where I live (small West Texas town).
Are you willing to potentially be prosecuted to make a point that will ultimately come down to, "The cameras you destroyed are replaced with newly purchased units"?
The way to beat this isn't vandalism, it's getting them banned from every municipality and county in the country, while fighting at state levels for more bans.
It's also silly talk from kids online, just like "Don't vote, burn your local Wal-Mart" is only meant to impress other online children. The rest of us know that you'll neither vote, nor burn down the Wal-Mart.
You get to sacrifice your life one or zero times in your life. Surely there are some terminally ill people who would do it?
I can't speak for anyone else, but I suspect most terminally ill people want to spend time with the people they love, not breaking cameras and working their way through the legal system.
When I'm terminally ill one day I will find some good thing to do similar to vandalizing Flock cameras. If they arrest me, I won't care too much.
Both flck and pltr uses a loophole on the law that if no one holds data no one is doing anything wrong. This needs to be fixed. Holding information about people should have a maximum time limit and should be treated respectfully. Given it is impossible to make them stop, it should be easy to see what's on you and anything else is illegally obtained.
Holding information about people should be a massive liability. It should actively cost them money to know even a single bit of information about us. They should be scrambling to forget all about us the second the transaction's completed.
It's legal for any random citizen to build one of these surveillance networks, right?
That's a great point. We should build a network that tracks all cops to make sure they don't get up to no good while off duty.
The police where I live are generally good, and I imagine that's the case many places. Treating police as the enemy, or a punching bag, is unfair and counterproductive.
(I can't speak to any places that might have a lot of corruption or ill intent.)
Places that aren't too corrupt, you'd be better off encouraging a partnership among citizens, police, lawmakers, and other officials. Which is how it's supposed to be. Everyone in the government has their respective duties, and they operate within a framework that's ultimately decided by the people.
If, for example, police propose certain surveillance, to help keep everyone safe, within their scope, then sometimes someone with different or larger scope might need to say, yes, but there's also these other considerations. Eventually a decision is made by the public or their elected representatives, and everyone nods with respect, and aligns, and continues their respective duties within the frameworks.
This wouldn't treat them as the enemy. We'd just track everywhere they go, for their safety. Really, we'd be helping them.
Are you one of those guys who hates the cops until you need one? Do you also forget that cops are people, too?
How backwards. Parent poster is talking about treating cops closer to how regular people are being treated.
If you're really committed to fairness, you'll take away the off-duty/unofficial privileges and immunities that they have which are not shared with "people too."
I used to hate the cops until I needed one, and then they were horrible to me and didn't solve my problem and actually started a reverse investigation against me for the thing I reported someone else doing, so now I hate the cops even when I need one.
Correct, at least in the US you can record people in public pretty much at any time.
Only in free countries. Many authoritarian regimes don’t let people take pictures in public.
Is there such a crime as creating false positives for the panopticon?
typically the state finds it has to pay out millions to those wrongly imprisoned. These cameras are not quite as good as flipping a coin in accuracy, so the tax payers are already on the hook
>there has been widespread public backlash to cameras that track everyone, whether or not they've been suspected of a crime.
Well, duh. It doesn't know your plate from anyone elses so your plate gets recorded along with everyone else. If you go about a normal person's business then there is no harm and nothing happens.
I'm sure someone will decide harm is being done even when nothing happens.
Meanwhile in Texas we can’t even have red light cameras to automatically ticket people willing to kill you just to catch a light.
"Meanwhile in <location> we can't even have Flock cameras to automatically catch people who may have killed someone"
Hopefully the absurdity of broad scale surveillance can't be so easily lost in hyperbole
Flock doesn't automatically catch people who killed someone. Red light cameras do catch people who run red lights.
No one in law enforcement is trying to help you. That's not what it's for.
And people that don't run red lights and suffer selective enforcement and are used for arbitrary surveillance and so on and so on. Don't let your naive view of what you want these things and their handlers to do distract you from reality, regardless of the brand or intent of widely deployed cameras.
Traditional red light cameras take a still frame and are triggered only during a red light violation.
That's actually a problem because sometimes they catch people who weren't running the red light, but easily fixed by capturing a bit more.
Thank goodness you found a basic flaw in red light and speed enforcement cameras. It's shame it's taken decades for someone to realize this issue and now we can finally start working on solutions like taking two photos.
Having been in Texas last month these cameras are all over your state. I saw them everywhere from the smallest city to houston
https://imgur.com/a/P7WxKpU
Make sure you're not looking at traffic control cameras. These are used to monitor traffic for the traffic lights.
They're all basically turned off by law, just not removed
That is ridiculous. Some level of surveillance is necessary to bring the society closer to the optimal state.
Honestly I like that policy. What's the legality of flock in Texas?
Totally legal.
The operating theory of all of these cameras is that anything happening in public sight is by its nature not private. The federal government is dumping millions and millions of dollars into grant programs for municipalities to buy it… It’s a giant federal surveillance program disguised as decisions made by individual police departments.
It’s hilarious and depressing to contrast the HN community reaction to Snowden versus the mostly meh response to flock.
The last 20 years has burned privacy into the ground for a large part of the population.
The plain view doctrine dates back to the 70s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_view_doctrine
Context matters. At the time cameras were large and bulky. Computers were massive and extremely power hungry. The world's communication networks didn't have the bandwidth to shuttle video around in bulk.
You're mistaken if you think the community is still the same percentage of humans.
That’s a fair point that I didn’t consider, thank you.
What meh response? There has been a continued and very vocal response against flock here.
If you pointed out any of the many problematic aspects of Snowden in those days, you’d be shouted down and voted into oblivion immediately.
Good, because nothing “problematic” about an individual matters one bit when presented with nefarious government activities. It’s obvious distraction technique 101.
Everyone should do their best to take down or disable every one they see in my opinion.
They owe George orwell’s estate a royalty for this idea.
There is no expectation of privacy in public. It's really that simple.
There may be no expectation of privacy in the sense someone may see you and take your picture.
There is an expectation you are not constantly tracked everywhere you go by a nationwide surveillance apparatus, that your location is not constantly monitored, indexed and shared. Unless you expect to live in an Orwellian distopia.
And what happens to you? Has something happened to you? Or anyone you know who wasn't involved in something illegal?
Actually, the supreme court ruled that police have to get a warrant to view cell tracking data and attach a location tracking device to cars.
Flock is a clever workaround that should be illegal, but before that can happens we can get them removed at the city council level.
Both of those two above cases involve tracking people both in public and in private. Furthermore the former involved compelling a company to fork over private information.
Traffic cameras, by comparison, only record people's in public. A police officer isn't violating privacy laws by standing at an intersection and writing down the plates of cars passing by is he? Flock is just automating that task.
The whole reason why we have license plates is to facilitate monitoring cars. If we really think that people have a right to keep their vehicular activities private, then surely the bigger privacy violation is the fact that we require cars to display unique identifiers in a prominent manner?
Do you agree with that, or are you just deferring to an overly simplified interpretation of the law?
No law is that simple. You can be photographed when you’re out in public most places, yet stalking is also illegal most places.
Of course there is.
You can take notice of beautiful women in public. You cannot take upskirt photos.
You can eavesdrop on a conversation at the park. You cannot put mics under all the benches.
Privacy is a situational continuum of invasiveness. Just because there is no expectation of privacy from the state in using public roads does not mean we should tolerate corporations building profiles analyzing the comings and goings of citizens.
There should be. Other countries have one and they seem no worse off for it.
There was an implicit expectation that, although people could take your picture, there weren't a million people roaming around taking everyone's pictures all the time because it takes a few seconds to take someone's picture.
I have strong expectations, in fact; I need the state to respect that.
There should be.
do you wear a skirt or a kilt? now about the no expectation of privacy in public ..
archived: https://nonogra.ph/flock-cameras-track-more-than-your-licens...
Consider using that one as well as archive.org(when no paywall), archive.today, megalodon.jp, archive box?
As a voter and taxpayer, I never asked for this.
That’s not how voting and paying taxes work.
Imagine representatives who did what voters actually wanted. There's probably a name for that. Representative democracy or something. As opposed to corporate representation.
This is why gerrymandering should be unconstitutional, and why corporations should have their rights explicitly curtailed: they're not citizens or the people.
I'm really unconvinced gerrymandering is the issue here.
It's not like Red cities have flock cameras and Blue cities don't.
It's really just that the Fairness Doctrine [1] needed to apply to more than radio. If you can constantly just repeat your point and then deny an opposition time then of course you'll get your point through.
Although maybe if super-pacs got outlawed then the Equal-time rule [2] would suffice.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule
Races are virtually uncompetitive; it means politicians only need to pander to the 40% bloc of the 10–20% of voters that show up in the primary. Once elected, the chance of losing their office is nearly 0. Gerrymandering absolutely reduces effective voting power. That's the whole point.
I misread "corporate democratism" and I like that - democratism is to democracy what scientism is to science - democratism is something that has the superficial appearance of democracy but isn't democracy because it doesn't achieve outcomes based on a consensus of voters.
Imagine what I really meant was that in those areas people largely approve of these cameras and it’s the minority that don’t.
Now of course your narrative is rude and more entertaining but sadly far from the mark. Saying “that’s not what I paid for” is all fine and dandy but it’s cuts both ways.
> in those areas people largely approve of these cameras
How sure of that are you? I’m thinking it’s mostly a mix of indifference and ignorance. Has anywhere you know of voted specifically on these cameras?
Alright, but in those areas did the politicians run on having those cameras installed everywhere? Were the voters given a proposition to approve?
Data centers seem to be widely unpopular on both the left and right, so I'm wonder where the representative democracy comes into play. More often than not local politicians approve these projects despite there being majority opposition from the public.
"Security" will be redefined.
Got these installed all over local parking lots for wallmart, home depot, ross, every exit solar panel and camera. Was wondering if there is some sort of quickly blinking infrared light or something that would make it visible to a naked eye of a cop, but not to a recording camera. I bet you would sell millions of those license plate holders in a heartbeat.
these are being mapped, i will like to see a GPS route option to avoid flock cameras, but I suspect they will end up flooding all intersections.
Like that paparazzi fabric that saturates the image?
If a certain group of people think that it should be their right to take others rights away and turn society into a dystopia for perceived security, then for the same reason it should be other individuals rights to assert that their rights should be protected by taking the first group's rights away to install or do whatever they think they can do for convenience/security's sake.
This includes "ancestry tests", security cameras with AI in them, upload IDs to "verify", and even social media where you are allowed to upload pictures with others in them.
And since we "supposedly" live in a democracy, we should be allowed to have a vote to decide on this, the group that wins is the majority, right? I don't understand why we're allowing our rights to erode before we have an informed election about this, in democracies.
What right is being taken away? Nobody ever had the right to not be recorded in public.
Furthermore surveillance isn't just an all or nothing thing. For example, the government can record your activities in public without a warrant, but they can't subpoena your phone calls without a warrant. That degree of surveillance has more checks and balances.
How you somehow try to go from recording people in public to "ancestry tests" is a pretty nonsensical argument.
> And since we "supposedly" live in a democracy, we should be allowed to have a vote to decide on this, the group that wins is the majority, right?
No, you'd have to win much more than the majority to change the constitution, which defines a lot of privacy rights. But if you have enough votes, then sure you could change the constitution.
Your language is far too kind for the invasion of privacy and our human expectations of what ought to be permissible. It's not just about being "recorded" in public. It's about having all public excursions recorded, cataloged, and analyzed. What this panopticon of private surveillance is, is way more similar to "stalking" than "recording".
Fundamentally the right to privacy is focused around what people do in private, not things that are publicly visible. If we really think that it's an invasion of privacy to track people's vehicles, the focus should be on abolishing license plates. After all, isn't the bigger problem the fact that cars are all required to display an identifier?
I kind of want to be able to see a Flock (YC S17)-related thread on HN without feeling obligated to participate, but, alas. Just for background: I was one of the ringleaders of a community effort that successfully kicked Flock out of Eugene and Springfield, Oregon, assisted a few other community efforts, went on to help draft some of the first state legislation for ALPRs in the country (Oregon SB1516, which passed, though I have some reservations about the resulting bill), and I am still working with other groups across the country.
During the development of the legislation, my opponents included Flock Safety (YC S17) and Axon, and, later, others. I had a rather contentious meeting at one point with a legislator and several Flock (YC S17) C-levels.
This has been eating a big part of my life for over a year now, so it's deeply, deeply disappointing to see some of the same talking points repeated on HN all this time later.
1. We've known for a year now that Flock (YC S17) captures more than just license plates. We decompiled some of their code on a legally-obtained device. That code very clearly included categories of interest for their onboard object detection software, and included, "cat", "dog", "person", "bicycle", among other vehicle-related things.
2. We also obtained, through public records requests, training materials from a local police department, and training materials from other police departments, that together showed that not only did the Flock (YC S17) interface provide search options for bicycles, but that police departments were sharing tactics for finding non-automobile objects in images.
3. Flock's (YC S17) own marketing materials have been advertising their ability to find "missing people" given a description of an individual's clothing for a long time now. See e.g.: https://www.flocksafety.com/products/flock-freeform
4. Newer devices are also running http://happytimesoft.com/products/rtsp-server/index.html RTSP software but I can't speak publicly about how I know that.
5. These systems were immediately abused by police departments across the country for non-law enforcement purposes, or for purposes contrary to local or state laws. Proponents of surveillance keep trying to steer the conversation towards "but think of all the crime we can prevent!" while pointedly avoiding all of the plethora of abuses of this system. Flock (YC S17) could have anticipated this or, by now, put controls in place to at least appear to want to reduce these forms of abuse, but they have never cooperated with any of that. There is no other way to view this at this point than that Flock tacitly approves of abuse of their system and any efforts they do undertake only ever result in less public oversight.
6. It is very much not a lost cause to fight against this. You don't have to accept a venture-capital-funded, rapid-growth, your-data-is-our-value tech company rolling out surveillance in your community because they convinced a gullible and poorly-informed police department that it's in everyone's best interest. There are many headwinds against these fights, but they are being won, and the fact that they're happening in larger population centers (which tend to be a bit more liberal) is purely a consequence of the effort required to win.
But, I've talked directly with a lot of community members across the country, and opposition to these systems cuts across political lines. Working to shut these down in your community is good work, and moreover, can help connect you to some other very decent people in your community.
And also FWIW I've had an ongoing dialogue with a local police chief on how to do a better job of balancing public safety against other concerns. There is a spectrum of opinions on these systems within the law enforcement community as well.
Flock (YC S17) has no place in a healthy society. "Hackers", of all people, should understand that in a way that the average member of the public wouldn't be expected to.
Solution to the Flock problem:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/vandals-strike-cut-flock-c...
Amazing innovation and dynamism.
We need some way to address the low level crime in the US. If you look at cities in east Asia, they're both much larger than typical US cities and much safer. It -is- possible to have safe large cities. The fact that we don't is a choice.
What's even more amazing is that they had these safe cities without [Flock, Motorola, Axon]. I guess we will never know how they did it, but at least we get the Chinese surveillance state.
My experience in major East Asian cities (predominantly Tokyo and Taipei) is that they have extensive networks of surveillance cameras operated by or accessible to the police.
Japanese police are very rarely willing to even ask to look at any of the disorganized hodgepodge of private cameras for property crimes or even minor physical altercations. They are far more likely to rely on personal accounts. TV dramas not withstanding.
Although Tokyo does have a system of traffic cameras which log traffic movement and license plates, that's most all that it does. Except in cases of murder or kidnapping (or political influence), it's quite rare to request the recordings of many private cameras. Outside of big cities, it's even more rare.
The largest connected system of cameras I'm aware of are for the subway camera systems (Shinjuku, Shinagawa, etc). Although independent systems, together they can do facial recognition to track individuals. Not a lot of AI yet, though.
In Tokyo, it is not uncommon to see bikes parked on residential streets with keys left overnight in their wheel locks (as if there aren't even mischievous 12 year olds?!). Oh, and outside of the cities, crime is even more rare. It is common in youth hostels for there to be open cubbies where personal items are stored in the front near the door. Nothing is taken. Most common thefts are: umbrellas (considered a fungible public good?), unlocked bikes (in high traffic business areas), women's underwear (off of outdoor drying racks).
I should mention that the list of thefts (other than an umbrella which I promptly replaced with its neighbor) are not ones that I have personally experienced, nor do I suspect that it is statistically accurate to those reported to police (conbini shoplifting and transit fare skipping must be larger). However, it is accurate to the top 3 "thefts" I've heard Tokyo residents complain about. If a native cares to correct me, I'd retract it.
Flock is not the police. Their main customer is Home Depot. Their second one is Lowe's.
Then come the big police department.
Allowing a private company to profit of holding information about me is innerving to me.
I would feel better if it was 100% run by the police. ( better, not good )
And it's not an accident that Flock cameras were implicated in many ICE raids at Home Depot and Lowe's, either.
Was that because of the cameras, or because illegal day laborers have been known to congregate in home center parking lots for 30+ years.
Then surely they're being used to bust the people hiring them, too ... Right?
It was both, of course, but it's not an accident they were placed there at scale.
My Home Depot, on the north coast, was selling off cases of Jarritos a few months ago. They very much cater to the day laborers.
I disagree, I see them all over the place, it is due to shoplifting.
It is also due to shoplifting. They wouldn't get deployed if nobody could justify them in any way.
https://prospect.org/2026/05/21/home-depot-lowes-downplay-cu...
I can’t remember the last place I visited which didn’t. Maybe Lake Atitlan pre-2020?
Still, a few some areas of Asia achieved this reputation back when cameras were still extremely rare.
Yes, there are cultural reasons crime is lower in East Asia too, but I haven't been to a major city there that doesn't have an extensive surveillance system.
Don't we? Crime rates have been dropping for decades.
https://usafacts.org/answers/what-is-the-crime-rate-in-the-u...
But if the choice is between liberty and safety, then Americans are supposed to choose liberty, that's why America is what it is.
Ben Franklin famously said, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Exactly. More people die from cars every month in the US than in 9/11. We value our freedom with cars, we should value our privacy to an even greater extent.
It is possible. What keeps japanese cities safe'er', is not the cameras though.
It’s the culture. Every Japanese person is always aware that they are “a part of society.”
Even the Yakuza participate in society. When they have big disasters, the local mobsters are usually helping people out, before the authorities can get going.
A lot of the neighborhoods where Flock is being deployed aren't even bad by higher standards, so I'm not sure what this has to do with anything.
East Asia built a uni-culture by being extremely racist against outsiders. I don't think you can get away with that anywhere else.
A friend of mine (white guy) married a Chinese woman and when they visited China they were subject to slurs and dirty looks in public.
There's a whole category of videos on social media of Japanese furiously angry at Westerners acting like fools on their subways. They're not happy about it.
I’m an Indian with a Taiwanese-American wife. I’ve never experienced even the mildest amount of racism in Taiwan. Everyone was kind and friendly to me. And Taiwan is very safe.
I’m not going to pretend that an anecdote fully captures a problem but considering I spent over a month there just living a normal life I imagine that if the problem were widespread I’d have many chances to experience it.
My elderly parents were there for two weeks too and they have nothing but positive things to say.
And finally, my wife’s cousin married a White man from Ireland and he has loved the place for the many years he’s lived there.
I don’t know if I would consider a month long vacation as evidence. Taiwan is pretty famous for have lower labor classes that they import from places like the Philippines and while people are friendly, they are still generally looked down upon. Not dissimilar to places like Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore. So I think racism is a pretty loaded and broad word and people typically think about it in purely an American context, it’s more common around the world than people think in all kinds of shades.
Ultimately I do agree with the original thesis around monocultures.
Well, certainly my experience on the ground is far more meaningful than someone’s statements without evidence. Just googling around it seems that American policing is generally considered fairly racially discriminatory so performing racism on its own is not getting us less crime. Taiwan doesn’t seem to have that problem as extensively.
And I’m an Indian who grew up in and spent the majority of my life in India as did my parents. I’ve lived in a few countries for years and stayed in many for months. My frame of reference is unlikely to be the American context for racism.
I don’t think anyone is arguing that Taiwan or Japan are uniquely or universally racist. The point is that many highly cohesive societies have clear social hierarchies and stronger in-group preferences than Americans (or other groups) often recognize.
Taiwan’s treatment of many Southeast Asian migrant workers is a commonly discussed example. People can be welcoming to tourists and expatriates while still having structural biases toward certain groups. Those aren’t contradictory observations.
Likewise, we wouldn’t dismiss concerns about women’s safety in India simply because a visitor spent a month there and had a wonderful experience. An individual’s experience matters, but it doesn’t settle broader questions about how different groups experience a society.
My opinion comes from having spent a lot of time around Asia and more than a month of “tourism”.
> I don’t think anyone is arguing that Taiwan or Japan are uniquely or universally racist.
The original comment used this as the explanation for why there's low crime. Here's a reminder of the context we are conversing within.
> > > > East Asia built a uni-culture by being extremely racist against outsiders. I don't think you can get away with that anywhere else.
I think "extreme racism to outsiders" is detectable within a month. I am as outsider as they come - being a brown-skinned South Asian Indian[0]. I also think that "I don't think you can get away with that anywhere else" means "uniquely". I guess we could argue about whether "extreme racism" means "universal racism" if you'd like but I don't think it's interesting as an explanation for safety. And the other statement I'm replying to there is
> > > > A friend of mine (white guy) married a Chinese woman and when they visited China they were subject to slurs and dirty looks in public.
My wife's cousin is married to a White Irish man who has lived there over a decade. This is not his experience anywhere in Taiwan, in particular, as opposed to the GP's China experience.
I think his decades of living there prior to and then after marrying my wife's cousin probably provide some experience. There's a lot of Planet of Hats thinking from Westerners visiting Asia. But different countries there are clearly different, just like France and Switzerland are different.
And in the end, if racism is not unique then it cannot explain difference in crime outcomes. To quote the great sage pj evans: "Cars have windows and can move. Houses have windows and can't move. So it's not the windows that make the car go. It's something else entirely."
And as a little epilogue, we may consider other countries with a foreign-born populace similar to Taiwan's: Poland, Argentina, Uruguay, and South Africa. None of them match Taiwan's broad lack of crime while having a similar degree of foreign-born people.
Which brings us again to whether the windows make the car go or not.
0: website in profile, feel free to take a look at my face
I think we’re talking past each other.
I’m not claiming “Taiwan is extremely racist, therefore low crime.” I’m saying cohesive societies often have stronger in-group preferences and social expectations than Americans tend to recognize, and those coexist with being welcoming to many foreigners.
Your experience and your relative’s experience are perfectly compatible with that. One or two positive anecdotes don’t tell us much about how a society views every minority or lower-status group any more than one bad anecdote proves pervasive racism.
As for crime, I agree it’s obviously not explained by a single variable. That’s a much stronger claim than I was making.
No desire to look at your profile but I hope the point I am trying to argue for is clearer to you.
I understand what you're saying but it seems like a complete non-sequitur given the context of the conversation, which I'll reproduce here in threaded fashion in case it's not visible in your client.
> > > We need some way to address the low level crime in the US. If you look at cities in east Asia, they're both much larger than typical US cities and much safer. It -is- possible to have safe large cities. The fact that we don't is a choice.
> > East Asia built a uni-culture by being extremely racist against outsiders. I don't think you can get away with that anywhere else. A friend of mine (white guy) married a Chinese woman and when they visited China they were subject to slurs and dirty looks in public. There's a whole category of videos on social media of Japanese furiously angry at Westerners acting like fools on their subways. They're not happy about it.
The claim is precisely what you're saying you're not claiming. So you must understand that I am having this conversation in that context. Though I suppose we can both interpose unrelated facts into the conversation and claim contextual irrelevance in the motte and bailey style. Here are a few I present for discussion:
2 + 2 = 4
The sky is blue
> Though I suppose we can both interpose unrelated facts into the conversation and claim contextual irrelevance in the motte and bailey style. Here are a few I present for discussion: 2 + 2 = 4 The sky is blue
The “motte and bailey” accusation followed immediately by schoolyard sarcasm is an odd combination. If you’re going to accuse someone of rhetorical gamesmanship, it’s probably better not to end with rhetorical flourish instead of argument.
PRC has a demographic issue with missing women that engenders resentment of the foreign devils.
The pot calling the kettle black…
What are you even trying to say? Why does everything devolve into whataboutism?
Poverty and lack of economic opportunity are the biggest drivers of street-level crime. Good thing we have all these AI layoffs.
A choice that has tradeoffs. Assuming we're talking about the sorts of places that lean heavily into surveillance I don't want to live there and their views on the role of the government is one of the reasons.
You're correct that it is a choice. Flock would barely move the needle on stopping crimes caused by the mentally ill and drug addicted.
By low level crime you mean unlawful surveillance?
My small city was safer before flock.
Before, if the cops asked for witnesses to come forward, they always got someone because they had a good reputation and were trusted.
A few years of the people saying no to flock and the cops and city hall ignoring us has destroyed that trust.
Now, when the cops ask for help, they get told to go flock themselves.
I'd suggest a better way is to reform policing. They need to start working for all the people, not just the Epstein class.
How much of that is addressed by a strong social-safety net? How are addicts and homeless people handled? How about general poverty (a known driver of crime)?
That sounds pretty racist though…
Is the anti-prosecution narrative
> much safer
They have severe consequences for criminal behavior and no subculture that elevates criminality.
> and no subculture that elevates criminality
And which subculture, specifically, would you be referring to here?
What is the trade off though and are Americans willing to make it? What sort of social conditions lead to more low level crime? This sort of complaint is nothing new btw.
You're getting loads of replies that seem to knee-jerk defend US cities purely to oppose Flock. And let's be real and admit that adding more cameras does little to improve this. My whole neighbourhood has a panopticon of surveillance cameras on every property, yet there have still been home burglaries and several cars stolen.
Many Asian cities are safer -- and they undisputedly are -- for cultural reasons. You can't create culture through surveillance.
US cities are plenty safe. The fact that you think otherwise is propaganda you’ve been successfully served. I live in Nyc and visit other cities often.
You must live in a different New York City than the one I visited. I had the safety calibration of Tallinn, Estonia and Dubai, UAE.
The subway was extremely hostile. People were regularly drugged out of their mind. I saw one guy try to drink a Coca Cola upside down and spilled it all in the bus. Another crazy chased my limited mobility Estonian friend who wanted to visit nyc alongside me when she went alone for groceries.
Could it be that your frame of reference is broken and/or you’re numb to it?
You saw someone try to drink a soda upside down and spill it? We are going to need more than a Flock cam to stop that heinous act, perhaps a Flock robot arm that could grab the criminals arm and turn it right side up, or just restrain them while the authorities are on the way.
I saw a tall man on L train stomping aggressively through the car and yelling bloody murder that he is gonna "stab the next mf I see", while attempting to swing punches at random people. The whole train ended up getting evacuated, and the train line got delayed. That was last winter. Between then and now, I saw people threatening others on the subway multiple times.
The most recent incident was a few weeks ago on Q train, where a seated man was screaming at the woman across from him (who was trying to do her best to ignore him), how he was gonna kill her and "the rest of her people" (whatever that means).
But please tell me how stuff like this never happens.
And I am not even a subway hater overall, I take it daily, and it is my preferred method of transportation. And no, I am not taking subway into deep and shady parts of bronx or brooklyn, as heavy majority of my rides are contained between Dekalb/Jay St Metrotech (aka dt brooklyn) and midtown.
It just sounds like crazy talk to me, when someone claims that the safety cams in subway cars are not, at least, somewhat helpful. At least newer A/C train cars have those cams now, and, I hope, it will lead to prosecution of serial subway harassers.
These are all lies. Small towns have notiriously higher crime rates than Nyc. We should send the National Guard to your small town and place cameras every where. I dont feel safe in your small town. I moved away from middle America that’s swamped in meth, high murder rate, and racism. Sorry someone spilled a coca-cola though. Your pearls must be powder in your hands by now.
There’s possibly a fantasy mindset at play where people need a certain identity to be true. As we’ve witnessed on a national scale, humans have great capacity for fantastical thinking to support what a friend of mine calls their “binkie narrative.”
This is false. Urban areas have the highest rate of crime compared to rural and suburban. For example look at the years 2020 and 2021 from this report:[0]
Table 8
Rate of victimization, by type of crime and location of residence, 2020 and 2021
Location of residence
Total violent crime Violent crime excluding simple assault Total property crime
2020 2021* 2020 2021* 2020 2021*
Urban 19.0 † 24.5 7.7 9.7 158.9 157.5
Suburban 16.8 16.5 5.6 5.2 90.5 86.8
Rural 13.4 11.1 4.5 4.4 65.6 57.7
You can see clearly that urban has the highest rate of crime, and this has been true for decades.[1]
Also, many crimes are not recorded at all in NYC, which is why many stores have locked down all their items with a key that requires permission from a staff member to access. I haven't seen this in the small towms I've been to.
[0] https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv21.pdf
[1] https://ovc.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh226/files/ncvrw2018/...
The pandemic years are the exception. Please dont use cherry picked facts to spread FUD.
2022 and 2023 numbers are even worse: https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/cv23.pdf
Same with 2024: https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/cv24.pdf
Also my second link from my first post showed higher Urban Victimization rates in urban areas in every year from 1995 to 2015.
His small town? Tallinn is comparatively tiny to NYC admittedly but Dubai is a fairly large and urban city. I think that it doesn’t quite fit the appellation.
You’re describing a spilled soda as a safety issue. The other person isn’t the one with a broken frame of reference.
No, he's describing someone so stoned out of their mind they don't know how to drink a soda. I feel most people would read his comment and understand that.
And that isnt a crime. It’s a strawman trying to say it’s a crime.
I live in NYC and I don't think it is safe, so there's one person that disagrees with you. Part of the problem in NYC is when you commit a low-level crime the social-justice warriors let the person back out on the street without charging them. This is why when somebody kills somebody in NYC you often hear that the person had been arrested for various things twelve times earlier. Just covering up the "un-safeness" by saying "it's safe" or citing crime stats doesn't change what people can see with their own eyes.
This is a bail reform propaganda. If you feel unsafe because we dont put deoderant thieves in Rikers then move.
Can't wait for all the pharmacies in your neighborhood to close because you think punishing deodorant thieves is wrong.
In your conception, the only reason any drug store is able to stay in business is because deodorant thieves are getting hard time?
If enough people are stealing deodorant to put them out of business, I think there are some big social problems that jail time isn’t going to fix.
Frankly, i’d 100% of the time rather bare the cost of shoplifters thru slightly higher prices than thru paying ~$100,000 year each incarcerating anyone who shoplifts.
There are “low level” crimes that are predictable signs of violent crime. E.g. intimate partner violence. I’d love to see those taken more seriously, even if it’s just for the downstream effects.
Are you sure these people weren't making plea deals or having their cases dismissed because prosecutors can't try every single low level criminal case? I'm not sure where "social-justice warriors" comes in to play. It's the legal system making choices about what crimes are worth prosecuting.
> I'm not sure where "social-justice warriors" comes in to play.
See the DSA candidates in the recent elections including the major - they explicitly state they do not support prison sentences and in many cases do not believe in police.
It’s hard to distil to a single comment but I think it might be a poor example given the NYPD takes about double the budget per capita to be less safe than Toronto.
I think the only objective conclusion we can come to in a comments section is that going by “I visited there” vibes isn’t going to be useful.
What about the high murder rate and meth problems of middle America, lets talk about that more instead of the “oh no homeless people” rhetoric all the time.
This type of "there is no problem and any evidence is propaganda" denial is why social disorder like rampant petty theft, open air drug use, and people shitting in the streets is destroying these cities.
What about the meth heads shitting in the streets of the small town? Rampant assault and murder rates. What about all the drinking and driving killing people in America. No, no, it’s Nyc that’s scary.
NYC is safer than many cities for sure.
But there are approximately zero meth heads shitting in the streets in small towns in the US.
I have never once seen a person shitting in the streets in a small town. I saw it within 24 hours of visiting Portland. I’ve never seen that in NYC either to be clear.
Yes, crime in small towns is bad too. Do we agree?
No because the small towns looneys aren’t on the online forums raving about the meth head they saw on the street one time in their town.
NYC is quite safe compared to most US cities. It is still more dangerous than most major cities in the developed world.
I did a quick check here and it has a lower crime and a higher safety score than London and Paris.
https://www.numbeo.com/crime/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Uni...
London is a uniquely dangerous city due to Islamic terrorism and Paris due to well known issues with crime.
> London is a uniquely dangerous city due to Islamic terrorism and Paris due to crime.
There aren’t that many comparable cities to NY. Only London and NY reach the Alpha++ world city designation.
I don’t see any Islamic terror attacks in London during the year those stats are pulled from.
As for Paris the crime index is high “due to crime” is a tautology.
The point re: Paris is that most cities would look better when compared to Paris on safety.
> Only London and NY reach the Alpha++ world city designation.
As someone that's spent the last two decades living in both, it's a little bit of past glory. Miami is more ambitious, Lisbon is where smart international companies go. London still has great universities but they're lessened and capital goes elsewhere.
> Miami is more ambitious
My wife grew up there, and I worked for a company based there for years, and I can’t really even come up with a good educated guess for that that means.
You could argue that London is past its prime, but you could have made that argument 75 years ago. It still retains its alpha++ designation and it’s the top ranking in the global financial centers index.
But regardless neither Lisbon nor Miami is a peer to NYC right now.
Really? I lived in Greenwich village until last year and I’d have people threaten to kill me for politely declining to give them change. I live in Park Slope now and there’s violent people on the F line all the time. Maybe wealthy neighbourhoods are super dangerous or maybe you’re just not noticing.
I've lived in major US cities my entire life and have never been a victim of crime. Do you have any facts to back up this seemingly outrageous claim?
> If you look at cities in east Asia, they're... much safer.
ah yes, the famously dependable statistics of east Asia, with their famously free press and citizen auditing communities, and the famously dependable impressions of tourists and expatriates...
What do you mean we don't? Our cities seem quite safe...