I posted this in another thread, and had my comment instantly flagged. Love this site.
Worth looking at how these cameras got approved in the first place. My county's ALPR interlocal passed on the consent agenda in December 2024, one block vote alongside forty other items, no discussion, and went through consent again in April 2025. Nothing was "hidden", it's just that "public" here means a 300 page agenda packet and a four hour YouTube video with no transcript, completely unreadable in practice.
So I spent a week and a half building a pipeline over what the county already publishes. It pulls the CivicPlus portal (agendas, minutes, item metadata, outcomes) and the YouTube channel, does ASR plus diarization, then aligns the transcript against the published agenda so the passage carries the item it happened under and whatever outcome the minutes recorded for it. Search is hybrid lexical and semantic, and the video is synced to the transcript so any claim can be checked against the recording.
The speaker attribution and the alignment was the hard part. Roughly two thirds of passages have no reliable name attached, and diarization gives you clusters rather than identities, so I mark confidence and basis rather than guessing a name. Alignment is very messy because the published agenda order and the order things actually get taken up diverge constantly, and the recorded outcome is often just "Approved the Consent Agenda" for an item that never got discussed. There is a labeling admin area to improve the dataset after initial collection
At my county meeting on Aug 25th (in a few days) I'm bringing up the fiscal side. Ours was approved under an item title that said no funding was required. No accounting has been done of what enforcement costs when someone takes a camera down. Prosecutor and court hours. Jail time, or just holding, if the state charges it. Lost future wages from otherwise upstanding citizens who now have a felony. None of that was in front of the commissioners when they approved it, and none of it is in front of them now.
Most counties run the same portal software and post to YouTube, so this should generalize. Code is at https://github.com/Tostino/civic-watch and the Pasco instance is at https://pasco.watch if anyone wants to point one at their own county. Happy to help if anyone wants.
You need a GPU for the ASR and diarization. I have an unraid box with an old GPU that I threw it on. So it's sitting in my closet and the ongoing cost is practically nil. There was a few dollars in LLM calls on initial ingestion using deepseek flash. Only fractions of a penny to ingest new data as it comes.
Obviously an unpopular opinion on this site, but I wish we had speed cameras, red-light cameras, and ALPRs everywhere. Cars are incredibly dangerous and large numbers of people drive them like absolute lunatics. There should be absolutely no expectation of privacy when using public streets. That position doesn't even account for the footage helping immensely with other investigations.
> There should be absolutely no expectation of privacy when using public streets.
Strong disagree. Life in public areas is often still part of private life. And we should treat it with the respect and privacy that it deserves. You going to the doctor? That's part of your private life. You meeting with an old friend to catch up? Also private, even though you do it in a public cafe.
It seems like (to my very uneducated mind) the founders were worried about the tyranny of government. We have the bill of rights and a constitution designed to limit government powers.
But then there are people who weaponize rights against the people in favor of the government.
A private company creating a mass-surveillance network of tracking everyone in public is absolutely a weaponization of rights. Rights designed to keep our government accountable. Our rights that give us tools to prevent government from weaponizing privacy against us (secret juries, secret trials, secret government employees, records etc citing 'privacy' as a reason for secrecy).
In the USA? Any café you go to is reasonably likely to have cameras, both inside and outside. If you mean driving to a doctor's office, you probably pass by hundreds of cameras along the way: video doorbells, dash cams, Teslas, Waymos, gas stations, ATMs, traffic-flow cameras, etc. If you are in one of the many cities with tens of thousands of existing non-Flock cameras, you are likely passing many more.
Independent cameras, often not networked let alone internet connected are not the same thing as a single entity controlling a huge, internet capable, always on, cloud recording panopticon.
Logistically the first limits things like police access by units of both access and time (is it recording? Does the memory card overwrite? Did it expire before a warrant was issued?)
Putting that all in a convenient console and handing direct god eye view to police with a "oh you need a warrant first, wink wink", massively reduces friction for abuse of power.
When the police ask for video evidence, they simply ask. They do not need a warrant. They might need a subpoena to force someone to hand it over, but I’m guessing that’s incredibly rare because people and businesses with cameras generally want to help. The issue is the incredible waste of time and money. It is incredibly inefficient to send a team out to collect footage instead of simply checking Flock, Axon, etc. No doubt, that hurdle prevents abuse, but it also hinders legitimate investigations. I would prefer strong safeguards against abuse while still allowing for real investigative wins.
Part of the problem is the people reacting to the data. Cops coming at an innocent someone, guns drawn, because of database and human error. If that person weren't so calm and level headed in the moment, when they were attacked by confused and mistaken aggressors, would they still be alive?
I don't disagree: bad policing is a terrible issue. That does not mean we should prevent investigating stolen vehicles because a human might enter the characters incorrectly. I don't even understand how this story happened:
> In fact, four other 34 ## DTM cars were being tracked around Minnesota that week, according to Officer Ganshyn
Maybe we need even more AI, because I think Claude would probably flag this as goofy. No human involved thought that it was wild they would stop something like 100 or 1,296 vehicles?
>No human involved thought that it was wild they would stop something like 100 or 1,296 vehicles?
Because each city or county is doing its whole thing.
Which comes back a bit to, it's one thing for my county to be tracking its residents, but should officers in Texas have carte blanche? If anything, the local county should have to "release" before search results are opened up to someone foreign. My officers should be protecting me from invasions abroad.
You managed to say everything but the difficult bit. People don't generally have a problem with cameras, all our computers and phones have one. The problem is who can use them and when.
There are some of us who do have problems with cameras on computers/phones, and will take steps to disable or obscure them, if removal or purchase without such a feature isn't an option.
Personally I have nothing against municipally operated red light/speed camera system because those are triggered by a sensor rather than continuous so privacy is less of an issue.
I agree. I was able to talk to my local SF supervisor the other day and congratulate him on his work with speed cameras and red-light cameras. He shares the same position as you: there is no constitutional right to drive one's car on public streets without enforcement of the rules.
We recently got permission to expand red-light cameras and I'm hoping that this kind of neutral machine-based enforcement of laws helps move us to a more law-abiding society. Civil liberties require civilization. Abdicating public space to the anti-social only allows for a de-facto rule by the uncivilized.
It's not "neutral machine-based enforcement", it's a general purpose panopticon that tracks and logs everything, ready to be queried later by arbitrary people for arbitrary reasons.
Personally I agree with the desire for more traffic enforcement, even if it means I personally would suffer because frankly I like driving fast. But as a cyclist who also likes riding fast, and a parent to likes giving freedom to children, safer roads would be great.
The problem is that these systems, always and without fail, come with government and police overreach and then the "guilty unless proven innocent" paradigm creeps in, which we have already seen happen with flock. You have police using the technology to spy on their lovers and friends of their wives and husbands, and you have political campaigns finding ways to spy on their opponents, and activists getting special attention from prosecutors, etc. Which always happs, but with totalitarianism is an absolute train wreck for an open, fair, and power-balanced government.
Yeah - this is the important part. With a truly benevolent government I think this may in fact be the best option...
But not only do you have to trust the government now (and you likely should not), you also need to trust the government far into the future (which you absolutely cannot do) because the tools will still exist.
Don't accept tools that are also strong weapons for oppression.
OP made the mistake and included ALPRs in their list IMO. Because I'm having a hard time imagining how a sensor triggered red light camera could be used for oppression.
Have them take pictures of every car, now you've got half of what flock offers.
It's the widespread remote camera installs that are the main problem there. If they kept data locally and had to be collected by hand, it might be fine - that's difficult enough to grow to monitor everyone all the time. Aside from using film though, I'm not sure how that would be achieved.
(To be clear, I really do think we should be prosecuting speeding (and tailgating) MUCH more than we do. Far more death and damage occurs from it than we should allow. But ubiquitous networked cameras are not the way we should do that.)
Which is why you don't install them widely enough to enable broad surveillance, yes. Temporary additions to problem-areas can be fine though. Scale is part of the "should this be allowed" equation, we allow extremely intrusive things when they're tightly scoped (and court approved).
Let's take this to the next level, given the current reality.
Binge alcohol consumption is incredibly dangerous and contributes to a large number of national fatalities.
Governments should purchase a contract for a citizen tracking platform operated by a private company that monitors alcohol usage to ensure you're drinking responsibly and quickly detain those that aren't, given the threat they pose to themselves or the public. Governments should make tracking a requirement for legal alcohol consumption.
The private company expands to a nationwide network that allows the federal government, private contractors, and other people that gain access to monitor your environment (or your young kids) whenever they feel motivated, where ever you are.
For the name of safety, let's write legislation that gives the government's private contractors unfettered access to your microphones and cameras to help law enforcement be more efficient.
Slippery slope from cameras on public streets to giving contractors unfettered access to your phone’s camera! Why even let the government investigate crimes at all if something bad might happen in the future?
Instead of indulging in hyperbole, why not talk about the great evidence an ALPR outside a bar could provide with current technology? It’s absolutely a great idea. I hope that AI gets good enough to tell whether someone is plastered; that would save a lot of lives lost to selfish assholes.
The cameras have categorically not helped with investigation, as is shown time (1) and time (2) and time (3) again. This is just a vibe that supporters like and Flock loves to spin data however it can to support their continued expansion. Also, people do absolutely still have an expectation of privacy when it comes to regular travel, what an insane thing to say.
Do you think every store in the Western world is just dumb for installing cameras? Cities like NYC, London, Singapore, etc.? I can't believe the number of people who want to argue that video footage is useless.
If you drive through any commercial area, you're captured by dozens of cameras. There are over a dozen doorbell cameras on my residential block alone. Cameras are absolutely ubiquitous, for good reason. In the United States, at least, it would be foolish to assume that driving on a public street is anything resembling privacy.
A weird take. They seem oblivious to the fact that real problem is not distrust of flock, it’s distrust of the police. They are in a situation where the public just barely trusts the local police, and a new surveillance system pushes them over the edge into hostility. They need to be working to gain much more trust.
Winona, MN has a population of 20k. I've never been there, but if it's like any of the small towns I lived in, most people trust the local police. If anything, the usual small-town complaint is that the police are not doing enough about <x>, where <x> are the homeless dudes in front of the library, or package theft, or whatever.
In small towns, people distrust the federal government and big tech a lot more.
Exactly. People don't trust the government the police serve.
The whole "state/feds decree stuff that's bad for you but your city/town enforces it on you anyway because they'll lose grant bucks if they don't" regulatory paradigm has a lot to do with this because it's why so much of the government's interaction with everyone and everything is so net negative.
Edit: For example stuff like passing police harassing someone for smoking alone in a park because the grantbucks are dependent on it being smoke free happens because of all this.
Police are bounded by evidentiary laws and warrant requirements, all of which legitimately do stand up in court. Flock is not.
So no, actually Flock itself is the problem. If Flock were willing to sign some consent decree that its data can only be accessed by police with a valid judicial warrant, for example, they probably could've headed off this entire mess.
But instead they called people "terroristic" for pushing back. Completely braindead move from the CEO.
The police have SWAT teams, guns, and jails, Flock does not. So I think the state security apparatus is a part of the problem, because if they don't like you and have access to surveillance technology, the outcomes can be far more severe than if Facebook doesn't like you, or the CEO of Flock doesn't like you.
People, broadly speaking, are totally fine with police having guns and jails.
Flock in absence of police is not that bad except for the whole "now we have no police" problem. Having police in the absence of Flock is totally fine, we've done it since forever.
I don't know. Since the advent of cameras we've caught a lot of cops beating the hell out of citizens. It probably happened a lot more before cameras. And then you'd catch a charge for resisting instead of the payout today.
You responded "I don't know, sometimes cameras catch cops beating people up" to the statement: "It is better to have cops than cameras."
If you have no cops, the cameras don't mean anything. It is now de facto legal for big people to beat up smaller people. Your cameras mean nothing. You can now film yourself getting beaten up every single day forever, and congrats, there's nothing to be done about it because there's no apparatus of the state to physically protect you.
It is empirically the case that societies have been perfectly capable of thriving while having police...
If you understood my comment to mean "police are perfect", then I must've been unclear. That's not my position and not a position I'm interested in defending or discussing.
I think people understand "rich tech CEO putting cameras everywhere offers no assurances of people's privacy and legal rights, instead opts to call them terrorists" perfectly well
The fundamental issue is that Flock doesn't care about people's privacy or rights. That washes out in a variety of ways including CEOs' statements, product-level security controls (thus creating the horror stories), and lack of legal commitments to protections.
I would personally be in favor of a fairly widespread camera network that had significant legal protections built in. Flock has demonstrated – in every possible way – they cannot possibly be the providers of such a system.
But also, I dont understand all this hand-wringing. EFF has a clear easy solution [1]: Put all the data behind a Warrant. Problem solved. No trust required.
Wanna look up where a murderer drove? Go get a warrant
Wanna look up where a robbery suspect drove to? Go get a Warrant.
Divorce case hinging on one party's whereabouts on a certain date? Warrant.
There are plenty of exceptions police can get to bypass warrant requirements. Think for example of stingers and other cell spoofing systems or the license plate readers they have on the front of their cruisers. Even if they do have to get a warrant judges are far more likely to simply grant any warrant request if it has to do with digital surveillance. Carpenter v. United States and Chatrie v. United States have outlined this behaviour, and in the wake of their rulings created the bias towards what are basically automatically approved warrants for such data.
The problem is that the fourth amendment at least for the US has been filled with so many exceptions it might as well not exist. And even if an officer does violate your fourth amendment rights, good luck getting them punished for it, because qualified immunity.
So long as it is configured to be a mass surveillance apparatus, then yes. It is possible to have lots of data without organizing it in a way to enable mass surveillance. Google, Facebook, and recently Ring, are excellent examples. I don't know what AccuWeather is to comment on it, but I would say your ISP (what I'm assuming is what you mean when you say "the internet" since "the internet" is not any single entity) is likely not a mass surveillance apparatus, since with the implementation of https, the spying they can do is superficial at best
* The NSA has backdoored core routers of the Internet, to gather traffic and metadata. The metadata is not superficial, but since the Internet is no longer decentralized, the useful surface for spying has moved into the applicaiton domains. This is what I mean by "The Internet".
* And FISA warrants do allow large-scale spying.
* Not only is Facebook explicitly a mass surveillance (and mass influence) device, but there are multiple vectors into it for law enforcement.
I mean ALPR's have worked wonders in my town [1]. So I'll keep supporting them until we restructure all our cities to drastically reduce car speeds. Plus post 2020 police backlash, detective work has basically disappeared and clearing rates have cratered [2]. Police are now no longer able to (or are refusing to) solve crime "the old fashioned way", and the public has no real leverage to "make them do it".
So I get it, we're in the middle of a populist uprising against it, and it's nice to ride that wave of support. But behind the scenes, these two factors are driving adoption, and we'll keep coming back to it when the backlash eventually fizzles.
I say we should just use this backlash to put in the protections EFF suggests or fix the two underlying causes. Those are the options.
Have you driven 7th St. between Adeline St. and Linden St? I wonder if maybe the speed limit is too low. One good thing about not having automated systems like this is it allows natural breaking of rules that are poor rules to begin with, and there is effort in manually enforcing, eventually leading to change
Super curious how anyone could think this. It’s not a highway, and there's pedestrians crossing. The buildings aren’t dense and the setbacks are large so maybe it “feels” like you should go faster but doesn’t mean it’s safe to.
And Oakland especially has really bad driving culture so I’m glad for this automatic enforcement.
> I mean ALPR's have worked wonders in my town [1]. So I'll keep supporting them
With flock, citizens are concerned by the privacy implications of the state keeping a dossier of each citizen’s movements.
But once we assure citizens the flock cameras have already issued 500,000 speeding fines in a single town this year, no doubt they’ll come to support the cameras.
Perhaps the cameras could also automatically issue parking fines, to garner even more popular support!
There are claims of safety improvements but strangely zero actual statistics about improved safety, measured speed is a proxy for safety but it has to be matched with actual casualty numbers and it is quite suspicious that these don't exist. Did the accident rate go down? Number of deaths or serious injuries?
>Police are now no longer able to (or are refusing to) solve crime "the old fashioned way"
This is pathetic, and I don't want to be controlled by robot overlords because local governments can't get their ducks in a row.
Mods: To reduce ambiguity, can we change "WPD" to "Winona, Minnesota PD"?
Email suggestions to the mods at hn@ycombinator.com.
Mentions-in-comments are a no-op.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36526450>
Alternative to archive.ph
No risk of CAPTCHA or geo-blocking
No cookies, no Javascript, text-only
https://archive.ph/VMVf6
https://i.ibb.co/WWWYznHX/flock-future.png ;-)
Also: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/06/06/web-of-knowledge/
A good sign, but I wonder if this will hold.
That sounds like a viable path to ending mass surveillance.
So they will be replacing them with Axon cameras I presume?
Looks like they’re actually listening to their community, so maybe not.
I feel like I’ve seen this exact reply in multiple Flock threads.
Probably because you have... several towns have said they were doing exactly this already in response to Flock opposition, as if it helps the matter.
I posted this in another thread, and had my comment instantly flagged. Love this site.
Worth looking at how these cameras got approved in the first place. My county's ALPR interlocal passed on the consent agenda in December 2024, one block vote alongside forty other items, no discussion, and went through consent again in April 2025. Nothing was "hidden", it's just that "public" here means a 300 page agenda packet and a four hour YouTube video with no transcript, completely unreadable in practice.
So I spent a week and a half building a pipeline over what the county already publishes. It pulls the CivicPlus portal (agendas, minutes, item metadata, outcomes) and the YouTube channel, does ASR plus diarization, then aligns the transcript against the published agenda so the passage carries the item it happened under and whatever outcome the minutes recorded for it. Search is hybrid lexical and semantic, and the video is synced to the transcript so any claim can be checked against the recording.
The speaker attribution and the alignment was the hard part. Roughly two thirds of passages have no reliable name attached, and diarization gives you clusters rather than identities, so I mark confidence and basis rather than guessing a name. Alignment is very messy because the published agenda order and the order things actually get taken up diverge constantly, and the recorded outcome is often just "Approved the Consent Agenda" for an item that never got discussed. There is a labeling admin area to improve the dataset after initial collection
At my county meeting on Aug 25th (in a few days) I'm bringing up the fiscal side. Ours was approved under an item title that said no funding was required. No accounting has been done of what enforcement costs when someone takes a camera down. Prosecutor and court hours. Jail time, or just holding, if the state charges it. Lost future wages from otherwise upstanding citizens who now have a felony. None of that was in front of the commissioners when they approved it, and none of it is in front of them now.
Most counties run the same portal software and post to YouTube, so this should generalize. Code is at https://github.com/Tostino/civic-watch and the Pasco instance is at https://pasco.watch if anyone wants to point one at their own county. Happy to help if anyone wants.
You should start with the lede:
"I built a tool to help you understand how/if your community has agreed to deploy Flock cameras. You can try it out here: [ ].
The hardest part of this was..."
Yeah, that would have been a smarter way to get my point across.
Looks neat, any chance you'd be willing to share how much this costs to run?
You need a GPU for the ASR and diarization. I have an unraid box with an old GPU that I threw it on. So it's sitting in my closet and the ongoing cost is practically nil. There was a few dollars in LLM calls on initial ingestion using deepseek flash. Only fractions of a penny to ingest new data as it comes.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7807998>
I'm not saying downvoted, i'm saying flagged. Like almost anything posted related to this surveillance state YC is invested in building.
Irrelevant distinction per this guideline.
Wanna beat the dead horse a little more?
Obviously an unpopular opinion on this site, but I wish we had speed cameras, red-light cameras, and ALPRs everywhere. Cars are incredibly dangerous and large numbers of people drive them like absolute lunatics. There should be absolutely no expectation of privacy when using public streets. That position doesn't even account for the footage helping immensely with other investigations.
They are great for tracking criminals who cross state lines for medical care.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/flock-safety-and-texas...
> There should be absolutely no expectation of privacy when using public streets.
Strong disagree. Life in public areas is often still part of private life. And we should treat it with the respect and privacy that it deserves. You going to the doctor? That's part of your private life. You meeting with an old friend to catch up? Also private, even though you do it in a public cafe.
I also disagree with OP.
It seems like (to my very uneducated mind) the founders were worried about the tyranny of government. We have the bill of rights and a constitution designed to limit government powers.
But then there are people who weaponize rights against the people in favor of the government.
A private company creating a mass-surveillance network of tracking everyone in public is absolutely a weaponization of rights. Rights designed to keep our government accountable. Our rights that give us tools to prevent government from weaponizing privacy against us (secret juries, secret trials, secret government employees, records etc citing 'privacy' as a reason for secrecy).
In the USA? Any café you go to is reasonably likely to have cameras, both inside and outside. If you mean driving to a doctor's office, you probably pass by hundreds of cameras along the way: video doorbells, dash cams, Teslas, Waymos, gas stations, ATMs, traffic-flow cameras, etc. If you are in one of the many cities with tens of thousands of existing non-Flock cameras, you are likely passing many more.
Not USA based so do with that what you will.
Independent cameras, often not networked let alone internet connected are not the same thing as a single entity controlling a huge, internet capable, always on, cloud recording panopticon.
Logistically the first limits things like police access by units of both access and time (is it recording? Does the memory card overwrite? Did it expire before a warrant was issued?)
Putting that all in a convenient console and handing direct god eye view to police with a "oh you need a warrant first, wink wink", massively reduces friction for abuse of power.
When the police ask for video evidence, they simply ask. They do not need a warrant. They might need a subpoena to force someone to hand it over, but I’m guessing that’s incredibly rare because people and businesses with cameras generally want to help. The issue is the incredible waste of time and money. It is incredibly inefficient to send a team out to collect footage instead of simply checking Flock, Axon, etc. No doubt, that hurdle prevents abuse, but it also hinders legitimate investigations. I would prefer strong safeguards against abuse while still allowing for real investigative wins.
To put it bluntly: That's dystopian.
Part of the problem is the people reacting to the data. Cops coming at an innocent someone, guns drawn, because of database and human error. If that person weren't so calm and level headed in the moment, when they were attacked by confused and mistaken aggressors, would they still be alive?
https://www.thedrive.com/news/how-flock-cameras-wrongly-trac...
I don't disagree: bad policing is a terrible issue. That does not mean we should prevent investigating stolen vehicles because a human might enter the characters incorrectly. I don't even understand how this story happened:
> In fact, four other 34 ## DTM cars were being tracked around Minnesota that week, according to Officer Ganshyn
Maybe we need even more AI, because I think Claude would probably flag this as goofy. No human involved thought that it was wild they would stop something like 100 or 1,296 vehicles?
>No human involved thought that it was wild they would stop something like 100 or 1,296 vehicles?
Because each city or county is doing its whole thing.
Which comes back a bit to, it's one thing for my county to be tracking its residents, but should officers in Texas have carte blanche? If anything, the local county should have to "release" before search results are opened up to someone foreign. My officers should be protecting me from invasions abroad.
You managed to say everything but the difficult bit. People don't generally have a problem with cameras, all our computers and phones have one. The problem is who can use them and when.
There are some of us who do have problems with cameras on computers/phones, and will take steps to disable or obscure them, if removal or purchase without such a feature isn't an option.
Personally I have nothing against municipally operated red light/speed camera system because those are triggered by a sensor rather than continuous so privacy is less of an issue.
I agree. I was able to talk to my local SF supervisor the other day and congratulate him on his work with speed cameras and red-light cameras. He shares the same position as you: there is no constitutional right to drive one's car on public streets without enforcement of the rules.
We recently got permission to expand red-light cameras and I'm hoping that this kind of neutral machine-based enforcement of laws helps move us to a more law-abiding society. Civil liberties require civilization. Abdicating public space to the anti-social only allows for a de-facto rule by the uncivilized.
It's not "neutral machine-based enforcement", it's a general purpose panopticon that tracks and logs everything, ready to be queried later by arbitrary people for arbitrary reasons.
Personally I agree with the desire for more traffic enforcement, even if it means I personally would suffer because frankly I like driving fast. But as a cyclist who also likes riding fast, and a parent to likes giving freedom to children, safer roads would be great.
The problem is that these systems, always and without fail, come with government and police overreach and then the "guilty unless proven innocent" paradigm creeps in, which we have already seen happen with flock. You have police using the technology to spy on their lovers and friends of their wives and husbands, and you have political campaigns finding ways to spy on their opponents, and activists getting special attention from prosecutors, etc. Which always happs, but with totalitarianism is an absolute train wreck for an open, fair, and power-balanced government.
I would totally agree with you if I trusted the government
Yeah - this is the important part. With a truly benevolent government I think this may in fact be the best option...
But not only do you have to trust the government now (and you likely should not), you also need to trust the government far into the future (which you absolutely cannot do) because the tools will still exist.
Don't accept tools that are also strong weapons for oppression.
OP made the mistake and included ALPRs in their list IMO. Because I'm having a hard time imagining how a sensor triggered red light camera could be used for oppression.
Have them take pictures of every car, now you've got half of what flock offers.
It's the widespread remote camera installs that are the main problem there. If they kept data locally and had to be collected by hand, it might be fine - that's difficult enough to grow to monitor everyone all the time. Aside from using film though, I'm not sure how that would be achieved.
(To be clear, I really do think we should be prosecuting speeding (and tailgating) MUCH more than we do. Far more death and damage occurs from it than we should allow. But ubiquitous networked cameras are not the way we should do that.)
> But ubiquitous networked cameras are not the way we should do that
How else should it be done? I think they're going to pick the cheapest option most of the time.
Which is why you don't install them widely enough to enable broad surveillance, yes. Temporary additions to problem-areas can be fine though. Scale is part of the "should this be allowed" equation, we allow extremely intrusive things when they're tightly scoped (and court approved).
Let's take this to the next level, given the current reality.
Binge alcohol consumption is incredibly dangerous and contributes to a large number of national fatalities.
Governments should purchase a contract for a citizen tracking platform operated by a private company that monitors alcohol usage to ensure you're drinking responsibly and quickly detain those that aren't, given the threat they pose to themselves or the public. Governments should make tracking a requirement for legal alcohol consumption.
The private company expands to a nationwide network that allows the federal government, private contractors, and other people that gain access to monitor your environment (or your young kids) whenever they feel motivated, where ever you are.
For the name of safety, let's write legislation that gives the government's private contractors unfettered access to your microphones and cameras to help law enforcement be more efficient.
Slippery slope from cameras on public streets to giving contractors unfettered access to your phone’s camera! Why even let the government investigate crimes at all if something bad might happen in the future?
Instead of indulging in hyperbole, why not talk about the great evidence an ALPR outside a bar could provide with current technology? It’s absolutely a great idea. I hope that AI gets good enough to tell whether someone is plastered; that would save a lot of lives lost to selfish assholes.
My point is if you trust the people on the other side of the camera, you should trust them with a camera that’s always on you.
Let’s put them outside Gay bars and Planned Parenthoods, just in the name of safety.
Think of all the college age women some guy halfway across the country can stalk.
The cameras have categorically not helped with investigation, as is shown time (1) and time (2) and time (3) again. This is just a vibe that supporters like and Flock loves to spin data however it can to support their continued expansion. Also, people do absolutely still have an expectation of privacy when it comes to regular travel, what an insane thing to say.
(1) https://futurism.com/future-society/flock-surveillance-atlan... (2) https://www.forbes.com/sites/cyrusfarivar/2024/02/29/flock-a... (3) https://www.readfrontier.org/stories/tulsas-surveillance-gam...
Do you think every store in the Western world is just dumb for installing cameras? Cities like NYC, London, Singapore, etc.? I can't believe the number of people who want to argue that video footage is useless.
If you drive through any commercial area, you're captured by dozens of cameras. There are over a dozen doorbell cameras on my residential block alone. Cameras are absolutely ubiquitous, for good reason. In the United States, at least, it would be foolish to assume that driving on a public street is anything resembling privacy.
A weird take. They seem oblivious to the fact that real problem is not distrust of flock, it’s distrust of the police. They are in a situation where the public just barely trusts the local police, and a new surveillance system pushes them over the edge into hostility. They need to be working to gain much more trust.
Winona, MN has a population of 20k. I've never been there, but if it's like any of the small towns I lived in, most people trust the local police. If anything, the usual small-town complaint is that the police are not doing enough about <x>, where <x> are the homeless dudes in front of the library, or package theft, or whatever.
In small towns, people distrust the federal government and big tech a lot more.
The wonderful thing about Flock is that you also get to be watched over by all the outside police you don't trust.
Exactly. People don't trust the government the police serve.
The whole "state/feds decree stuff that's bad for you but your city/town enforces it on you anyway because they'll lose grant bucks if they don't" regulatory paradigm has a lot to do with this because it's why so much of the government's interaction with everyone and everything is so net negative.
Edit: For example stuff like passing police harassing someone for smoking alone in a park because the grantbucks are dependent on it being smoke free happens because of all this.
>They seem oblivious to the fact that real problem is not distrust of flock
I really distrust flock in and of itself.
Police are bounded by evidentiary laws and warrant requirements, all of which legitimately do stand up in court. Flock is not.
So no, actually Flock itself is the problem. If Flock were willing to sign some consent decree that its data can only be accessed by police with a valid judicial warrant, for example, they probably could've headed off this entire mess.
But instead they called people "terroristic" for pushing back. Completely braindead move from the CEO.
The police have SWAT teams, guns, and jails, Flock does not. So I think the state security apparatus is a part of the problem, because if they don't like you and have access to surveillance technology, the outcomes can be far more severe than if Facebook doesn't like you, or the CEO of Flock doesn't like you.
People, broadly speaking, are totally fine with police having guns and jails.
Flock in absence of police is not that bad except for the whole "now we have no police" problem. Having police in the absence of Flock is totally fine, we've done it since forever.
I don't know. Since the advent of cameras we've caught a lot of cops beating the hell out of citizens. It probably happened a lot more before cameras. And then you'd catch a charge for resisting instead of the payout today.
Let's play this out: Cops don't exist. On video, you catch a person beating the hell out of a citizen.
...
...
...
Welp, sucks to get the shit beaten out of you, better luck next time.
I don't understand your point
You responded "I don't know, sometimes cameras catch cops beating people up" to the statement: "It is better to have cops than cameras."
If you have no cops, the cameras don't mean anything. It is now de facto legal for big people to beat up smaller people. Your cameras mean nothing. You can now film yourself getting beaten up every single day forever, and congrats, there's nothing to be done about it because there's no apparatus of the state to physically protect you.
I'm responding to the idea that police in the absence of flock is totally fine.
It is empirically the case that societies have been perfectly capable of thriving while having police...
If you understood my comment to mean "police are perfect", then I must've been unclear. That's not my position and not a position I'm interested in defending or discussing.
You did it! You burned the strawman! Gold star!
I’m not sure people think that way, or even understand the details. But they see lots of stories about police officers misusing the system.
I think people understand "rich tech CEO putting cameras everywhere offers no assurances of people's privacy and legal rights, instead opts to call them terrorists" perfectly well
The fundamental issue is that Flock doesn't care about people's privacy or rights. That washes out in a variety of ways including CEOs' statements, product-level security controls (thus creating the horror stories), and lack of legal commitments to protections.
I would personally be in favor of a fairly widespread camera network that had significant legal protections built in. Flock has demonstrated – in every possible way – they cannot possibly be the providers of such a system.
But also, I dont understand all this hand-wringing. EFF has a clear easy solution [1]: Put all the data behind a Warrant. Problem solved. No trust required.
Wanna look up where a murderer drove? Go get a warrant
Wanna look up where a robbery suspect drove to? Go get a Warrant.
Divorce case hinging on one party's whereabouts on a certain date? Warrant.
Speeding tickets are automatically filed anyways.
[1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/08/too-little-too-late-fl...
There are plenty of exceptions police can get to bypass warrant requirements. Think for example of stingers and other cell spoofing systems or the license plate readers they have on the front of their cruisers. Even if they do have to get a warrant judges are far more likely to simply grant any warrant request if it has to do with digital surveillance. Carpenter v. United States and Chatrie v. United States have outlined this behaviour, and in the wake of their rulings created the bias towards what are basically automatically approved warrants for such data.
The problem is that the fourth amendment at least for the US has been filled with so many exceptions it might as well not exist. And even if an officer does violate your fourth amendment rights, good luck getting them punished for it, because qualified immunity.
> Speeding tickets are automatically filed anyways.
Not in States with coherent Constitutions.
What happens when say FBI gets a warrant for "foreign actors" and sends it to a FISA court in secret?
The EFF is wrong. The clear solution is NOT COLLECTING THE DATA.
There is no reason or justification for us to live in a surveillance state, "protecting" the data with a warrant doesn't cut it.
Cutting down and destroying mass surveillance equipment is a patriotic action and should be applauded.
It should be a criminal act to attempt to build a mass surveillance apparatus, whether it's for law enforcement or private use.
Would Ring be considered a mass surveillance apparatus? Accuweather? Facebook? Google? The Internet?
So long as it is configured to be a mass surveillance apparatus, then yes. It is possible to have lots of data without organizing it in a way to enable mass surveillance. Google, Facebook, and recently Ring, are excellent examples. I don't know what AccuWeather is to comment on it, but I would say your ISP (what I'm assuming is what you mean when you say "the internet" since "the internet" is not any single entity) is likely not a mass surveillance apparatus, since with the implementation of https, the spying they can do is superficial at best
* The NSA has backdoored core routers of the Internet, to gather traffic and metadata. The metadata is not superficial, but since the Internet is no longer decentralized, the useful surface for spying has moved into the applicaiton domains. This is what I mean by "The Internet". * And FISA warrants do allow large-scale spying. * Not only is Facebook explicitly a mass surveillance (and mass influence) device, but there are multiple vectors into it for law enforcement.
I mean ALPR's have worked wonders in my town [1]. So I'll keep supporting them until we restructure all our cities to drastically reduce car speeds. Plus post 2020 police backlash, detective work has basically disappeared and clearing rates have cratered [2]. Police are now no longer able to (or are refusing to) solve crime "the old fashioned way", and the public has no real leverage to "make them do it".
So I get it, we're in the middle of a populist uprising against it, and it's nice to ride that wave of support. But behind the scenes, these two factors are driving adoption, and we'll keep coming back to it when the backlash eventually fizzles.
I say we should just use this backlash to put in the protections EFF suggests or fix the two underlying causes. Those are the options.
[1]: https://www.oaklandca.gov/Public-Safety-Streets/Traffic-Safe...
[2]: https://stateline.org/2025/11/24/why-clearance-rates-dont-te...
Have you driven 7th St. between Adeline St. and Linden St? I wonder if maybe the speed limit is too low. One good thing about not having automated systems like this is it allows natural breaking of rules that are poor rules to begin with, and there is effort in manually enforcing, eventually leading to change
“I wonder if maybe the speed limit is too low”
Super curious how anyone could think this. It’s not a highway, and there's pedestrians crossing. The buildings aren’t dense and the setbacks are large so maybe it “feels” like you should go faster but doesn’t mean it’s safe to.
And Oakland especially has really bad driving culture so I’m glad for this automatic enforcement.
> I mean ALPR's have worked wonders in my town [1]. So I'll keep supporting them
With flock, citizens are concerned by the privacy implications of the state keeping a dossier of each citizen’s movements.
But once we assure citizens the flock cameras have already issued 500,000 speeding fines in a single town this year, no doubt they’ll come to support the cameras.
Perhaps the cameras could also automatically issue parking fines, to garner even more popular support!
Yes we should just always give in to populism’s demands and it’ll have no negative consequences ever /s
…oops [1]
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/18/headway/motor-vehicles-fa...
Issuing tickets doesn't require retaining any data on vehicles you aren't ticketing, you're conflating issues.
I'm not. There are two issues in my comment.
Did clearing rate crater because there was a change or because the police is throwing a toddler tantrum strike and refuses to work?
Since outright refusal to do their jobs is more common than any real difficulty.
"I mean ALPR's have worked wonders in my town"
Among those wonders being nearly 200,000 tickets.
There are claims of safety improvements but strangely zero actual statistics about improved safety, measured speed is a proxy for safety but it has to be matched with actual casualty numbers and it is quite suspicious that these don't exist. Did the accident rate go down? Number of deaths or serious injuries?
>Police are now no longer able to (or are refusing to) solve crime "the old fashioned way"
This is pathetic, and I don't want to be controlled by robot overlords because local governments can't get their ducks in a row.
Oh no, we distrust both.
They’re oblivious to this fact because it’s not true. Most people by a substantial margin trust their local police.
These can be separate and both true.