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Comment by chatmasta | Hacker News Reader

This is not a new startup. It predates the AI era. This is the company that installs cameras in public places and wires them all together with data sharing arrangements that circumvent those pesky jurisdictional separations of power. And guess which neighborhoods have the most cameras?

It’s a pre-crime company and data broker that sells to police forces and corporations (while sharing all the data between them). It’s one of the most regressive and heinous business models someone could spend their time building.

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I once read an article about a company that was using low flying planes and cameras. The goal was to be able to record and rewind video and then follow robbers back to their homes. Robberies are a big problem in LATAM. It could be very useful.

You're likely thinking of Persistent Surveillance Systems: https://www.pss-1.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare

Basically, get around those pesky amendments by third-partying evidence collection, then manufacture (parallel construction) cases.

It's also entirely unnecessary. It's essentially a conduit to feed "criminals" into the prison system to support whats basically the oldest form of disaster capitalism.

It's all so neat and tidy, it's almost like theres' no difference between government and business operatives.

>It's all so neat and tidy, it's almost like theres' no difference between government and business operatives.

Quoted for truth.

>And guess which neighborhoods have the most cameras?

The ones with highest amount of crime?

But it could also be the opposite: the neighbourhoods of the well off, who are willing to pay for this kind of service.

I really don't know, since both options seem likely.

The ones that police want to arrest the most citizens of.

As much as I dislike the police and the government in general I don’t think the police cares much about that.

It seems to be the opposite near me. There's a few well off neighborhoods that I've noticed have cameras all over, but the area near my work where there's new piles of broken glass every morning has nothing (not that I want more surveillance, but it makes the intent clear).

The neighborhoods that are less well off I spend less time in, so maybe I just haven't seen them, but usually surveillance there seems to be in the form of parking lot camera trailers.

No, not the ones with the highest crime but the poor/black/brown neighborhoods, at least in my city. I know, I live in a majority brown neighborhood and I've mapped the flock cameras in my city. There are more cameras in my neighborhood by about 3:1. To me this really shows the bias in my local PD because while there are pockets of high crime in my neighborhood, it is a huge neighborhood and the crime rate outside of those pockets is about the same as the rest of the city nevertheless, the cameras are not concentrated in the high-crime pockets but throughout the entire neighborhood.

Of course a crime-fighting company "sells to police forces and corporations". Who else would you sell crime-fighting tools to?

Flock reminds me of Replit: they both predate the modern era of AI, and in some sense they were lucky to be well-positioned when advances in AI enabled their core product to become much more powerful. Of course, the harder you work, the luckier you get....

They’re a surveillance company, not a crime-fighting company.

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