Stop Flock
stopflock.com
stopflock.com
Police departments are seriously understaffed in many major cities, and officers are much less efficient than they used to be. This has led to the decline of the beat cop, who provided a kind of ambient authority that helped create, both a sense and reality, of public order. People really want the sense (even more than the reality!) of public order; without that, they will jump to faddish solutions that promise it, regardless of the data for or against it.
The best counter to Flock is to provide alternatives to it, not just reject it while keeping the status quo going. We need a new, vitalized police culture, that shares mutual trust and engagement with the community.
We had one last year. Everyone around has cameras. The cops refused to do anything about it. They refused to get recordings. The neighbor went door to door and gathered it herself. Cops refused to do anything even though you can see the car and the plates from multiple videos, multiple angles.
Guess what the cops always have resources for? Hiding behind bushes and trees to ticket people going 5 over. Or at turns where they know they’ll get people before people see the cop car.
Our HOA came together and asked the police department about this. They gave us bullshit about how custody of evidence etc is hard and even if they put people in jail, the lenient judges will let them go anyway. It was fucked up.
Our HOA was going in hard about installing floc cameras everywhere. I had to fight hard not to get that done. One of the reasons I won wasn’t because privacy, it was because the cops literally were like unless we can directly pull video feeds from cameras, we won’t do much. And that access wasn’t available to those police department. At least at the time.
There have been many other such stories I’ve personally witnessed in the cities I’ve lived in.
Cops seem to have plenty of resources to bully people of color, seize assets and hide behind trees and bushes to ticket people, reduce the period of orange lights so people get more tickets etc. but never enough to actually do their jobs.
Which traffic enforcement though?
I really do not like the fact that lefts on red are not enforced. I have numerous times seen people run a red-red light infront of a cop car with no enforcement.
That said, people going 35 in a 30? Like I care. People weaving in between lanes? Yeah that seems much more dangerous.
Compare to e.g. Oakland, which recently approved a Flock expansion:
https://oaklandside.org/2025/12/17/oakland-flock-safety-coun...
Why?
https://sfstandard.com/2023/06/09/oakland-crime-police-respo...
https://oaklandside.org/2025/10/08/oakland-watchdog-audit-po...
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/oakland-police-off...
Now, will Flock help with this? No. But the visceral lack of safety people feel makes them more likely to see it as a necessary evil, not snake oil.
See San Francisco and their use of LPR cameras like Flock combined with drone surveillance.
https://abc7news.com/post/how-sfpds-new-investigation-center...
Etc.
I've noted this in the age verification debate, and in the Android developer verification debate as well.
Just denying the tradeoffs isn't productive, if tradeoffs affect others, just pushing your position disregarding the tradeoffs as fake or not important is divisive. In actuality I think that both parties become incentivized to solve the problems of the other group of people too, but as a centrist that position often gets pushback from both sides who seem to collaborate only indirectly from a place of adversarial competition and good vs evil framing, which I think is less productive than just recognizing the conflict and negotiating, but perhaps it's more engaging...
We simply aren't getting effective policing, and technology isn't the solution.
Reality is cops have become police report writers, traffic accident helpers, and domestic abuse arbiters, that is over half the job.
DAs and police in general are almost universally evaluated based on arrest numbers. Only very rarely on actual crime rates, and never on something as abstract as quality of life or local revenues or property values.
Gauging how good law enforcement is just by looking at arrest numbers is probably the wrong dial to be looking at.
Without that, we are quickly spiraling into the dystopia where privacy is gone, and when the wrong person gets access to the data, entire populations are threatened.
Consent should be _voluntary_, not mandatory.
When I installed the SoundCloud app and it told me by continuing I agree to them sharing my data with their 954 partners.[1]
1. I’m not even joining. When I mostly recently installed the SoundCloud app - for the first time on a new device, that’s what’s it said: 954 partners. How can anyone reasonably understand what it is their agreeing to in that scenario.
Which is why "we don't serve patrons without shoes and pants" policy is unconstitutional, yeah.
If you don't want to agree to a business's demands — you're welcome to not deal with them and look for an alternative. All the alternatives have the same (or even worse) demands? Unless you can prove collusion, that's just how the invisible hand of the market worked its magic out. Go petition you congressman to violate laissez-faire even more than it already is, I guess.
The shirt and shoes example is a great example in fact that illustrates the point. You don’t have unlimited freedom to not wear shoes, just like a business does not have unlimited freedom to impose whatever terms it likes, just because it put it in its ToS.
Okay, I am gonna be 100% serious here: you absolutely should have such a freedom. Just as loitering or jaywalking being a crime is inherently totalitarian, what the hell.
You do have the right to go barefoot in your own home. And in true public spaces.
But, a property owner can require shoes. Do I care if somebody is barefoot in the local grocer? No, not really. But, the proprietor might because they want to limit their liability (should something fall on your foot, a cart run it over, or a loose tack/nail somehow land in an aisle, etc).
Microsoft (or Apple).
Any web host, payment processor, etc that's contracted to do work for your local government (I suppose you could try driving to the government office and pay by check, but then you need to give consent to Ford or Chevy).
Short of living like a hermit, there's no practical way to avoid all ridiculous T&C.
The only safe thing is for the records to never exist in the first place.
AP: Across US, police officers abuse confidential databases
https://apnews.com/general-news-699236946e3140659fff8a2362e1...
This was one of the motivations for passage of the Driver's Privacy Protection Act of 1994. Nowadays, officers need a legitimate reason to run a plate - unless the patrol car is fitted with automatic cameras[1] that look up every plate of every car they drive past.
> The Virginia state police used license plate readers to track people’s attendance at political events; > The New York Police Department used license plate readers to keep track of who visited certain places of worship, and how often;
> Despite all this surveillance, ALPR technology has been repeatedly shown to be unreliable; like other police technologies, ALPRs can and do make mistakes.[2]
Generally, court decisions have held that you have zero expectation of privacy when you are in public spaces. Current license plate standards[3] aim for plates that are not cluttered and are easily read by the human eyeball, despite being wrapped with license plate frames (which usually make the state hard/impossible to read which is the most common failure mode for ANLR[4]). If the reflectivity material (traditionally called "ScotchLite"[5]) is worn out (or defaced), most states require the plate to be replaced.
Notes:
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver%27s_Privacy_Protection_... Prior to passage, a slang term for running/looking up the plate/registration of a car with a pretty woman driver was "running a date".
1 - https://sls.eff.org/technologies/automated-license-plate-rea...
2 - https://www.aclum.org/publications/what-you-need-know-about-...
3 - https://www.aamva.org/getmedia/646bcc8a-219b-47d8-b5cd-72624...
4 - https://www.aamva.org/getmedia/0063bf88-cb44-4ab9-90b6-200c8...
5 - https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/scotchlite-reflective-material-u...
Disclaimers:
I used to work for my state's motor vehicle department and had database/developer access to driving licenses and motor vehicle registration records.
I graduated from a police academy when I was a youngster.*
The only way is through - everybody should get into the practice of stalking and gossiping about each other in a Molochian environment, where the people who do not do so suffer from the losing side of an information asymmetry.
Expect AI, especially post-Mythos, to just enable this at even further scale. Consumer grade wireless networking gear as a whole is a very wide attack surface and is basically never updated.
Note that PIs are effectively illegal under GDPR by default. They would generally need to provide Article 13 notice, i.e. you would become aware of them unless they were just asking around without actually following you. Member states can make them legal though (via Article 23) and likely in many cases they have done so.
EU is more complicated, but Article 14.5.b allows withholding notice if it would impair/defeat the purpose of processing. The PI must however apply "safeguards", whatever it could mean.
This becomes extremely relevant when you read it in the light of the C-422/24 decision. In that personal data collected via body worn cameras was determined to be "directly obtained". Paragraph 41 from the judgement:
> If it were accepted that Article 14 of the GDPR applies where personal data are collected by means of a body camera, the data subject would not receive any information at the time of collection, even though he or she is the source of those data, which would allow the controller not to provide information to that data subject immediately. Therefore, such an interpretation would carry the risk of the collection of personal data escaping the knowledge of the data subject and giving rise to hidden surveillance practices. Such a consequence would be incompatible with the objective, referred to in the preceding paragraph, of ensuring a high level of protection of the fundamental rights and freedoms of natural persons.
Given this it's very unlikely that PI observing (especially if they record) could be considered to be Article 14 instead of Article 13 type of collection as it's exactly "hidden surveillance practice" that the Court warned about.
Member states do have a right to restrict the Article 13 disclosure obligations via Article 23 restriction, but that requires specific law in the member state & the law itself must fulfill the obligations that Article 23 requires. Article 23(2) essentially forbids leaving everything up to the controller.
And as far as PI in the US goes, actions between stalking and PI "for self" tend to be so similar that I wouldn't necessarily recommend anyone to try it.
Pretty sure that would be considered stalking and is broadly illegal in the US, PIs being an exception.
The core ill is aggregated data, because that's what allows the mass in surveillance, data mining, etc.
The collection actions are almost immaterial. Without persistence they must be re-performed for each request, which naturally provides a throughput bottleneck and makes "for everyone" untenable.
If we agree the aggregated data at rest is the problem, then addressing it would look like this:
1. Classify all data holders at scale into a regulated group
2. Apply initial regulations
- To respond to queries for copies of personal data held
- To update data or be liable in court for failing to do so
- To validate counterparties apply basic security due diligence before transferring data (or the transferer also faces liability)
- To maintain a *full* chain of custody of data (from originator through every intermediate party to holder) so that leaks / misuse can be traced
- To file yearly update on the types, amount of data, and counterparties it was transferred to with the federal government that are made public
It's not. But the first step is classifying and documenting the problem.
It is not realistic to say that no person is allowed to keep track of another person; watch where they go, when, with who, etc.
It should not be acceptable for a company to gather information on "everyone"; where they have been going, when, with who, how often, etc. And it should not be acceptable for them to sell that information (to government agencies OR private citizens).
It's a matter of scale.
- Making the first one illegal/impossible would be difficult/costly; and not doing so has a limited impact (to society, not to the single person affected).
- Making the second one illegal is much easier, and it's much easier to shut down a large company doing it than it is 1,000 individual stalkers. The impact of making it illegal is much wider and better for society as a whole.
We don't want anyone being stalked. But in a cost/benefit analysis, we can do something about one of them but not the other.
Government is the bogeyman we are afraid of, but ad tech is doing the actual heavy lifting.
Even if we somehow, perhaps via magic genie-wish, made the government totally disinterested... these systems would still enable dystopian levels of private surveillance and manipulation.
The precogs over at flock say you drive too close to the criminals though, and you know what that means. Stay loyal, stay safe citizens.
Then you want to stop the company.
Which is reasonable.
It'll be "make money off mass surveillance, but don't get caught like Flock did."
we are essentially already in that dystopia.
it is now more of a question of how bad it gets, and if the population will ever stand against it in any meaningful fashion.
Nevermind license plate readers have been collecting your data for decades. Nevermind you literally carry a tracking device on your person, likely 24/7.
I mean, cool, stop Flock, but don't stop there. Flock is very much not the final boss in this fight. The cynic in me says we will all get bored once Flock is off the radar though.
There’s also nothing inherently wrong with carrying sensors in your pocket. The “wrong” is in the providers/manufacturers exploiting the position they put themselves in. Managing data is hard, and most people don’t want to do the necessary work most of the time, so the providers/manufacturers offer to do that for their users/customers. However, they also exploit their csretaker position by tresting the data like they own it too, and extracting profit.
If the solutions to the Flock problems could be framed such that other providers/manufacturers had to build systems that were “local first” or “private by default” (as in pre-internet home computing plus explicit, finegrained shsring consents), then it would also be fine to carry sensors. I want my fitness tracker and GPS. I just don’t want the data it generates used to build advertising profiles on me such that ads (and government mass surveillance dragnets) can follow my every other move.
A camera pointing at your child's playground or gymnastics class is much more salient.
While the above is a difference in scale, the various "credit bureaus" have been doing this stuff for much, much longer.[0][1][2]
That's not to excuse the use of ALPRs and tracking on mobile devices. It's all really creepy and collection and trade in such should have strong negative incentives (company breaking fines, loss of corporate charter, jail time, etc.).
In the meantime, one has to deal with at least some of this stuff unless you're willing to go live in a leanto in the woods.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equifax#History
Not "Did you say I can 5x my ROI? Here, shut up and take my money!"
Assume VCs are brainless profit maximizers who don't understand ethics. How do you get them to say "I'm gonna stop you right there"?
Answer: Make it unprofitable to collect this data. Change the incentives.
So really, the correct answer IS on the legal level. Make a set of laws which make it burdensome at best and completely unprofitable at worst, and then the incentives within the system aligns.
Capital eschews no profit, or very small profit, just as Nature was formerly
said to abhor a vacuum. With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain
10 per cent. will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent. certain will
produce eagerness; 50 per cent., positive audacity; 100 per cent. will make it
ready to trample on all human laws; 300 per cent., and there is not a crime at
which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its
owner being hanged. If turbulence and strife will bring a profit, it will freely
encourage both. Smuggling and the slave-trade have amply proved all that is
here stated.
And mind you, VC are people who are both pretty good at earning money and also eager for even more money. That's how they got to where they are, after all, not necessarily by being virtuous (over a certain minimally required amount, or a social signaling of possessing such an amount).
In short, I wonder if this has any implications about their confidence in startups' viability in private sectors
That hits your toxic waste goal real fast.
Notes:
0 - Financial penalties would not be limited to "your share" of the penalty. If you have money, and the other parties don't, the plaintiffs can collect from whichever defendant has money.
1 - Everyone who ever owned the site with the toxic waste is liable for the cleanup. This is why when a gas station is sold (in the US), all of the fuel tanks are dug up and replaced - this way, none of the future leakage can be attributed to the previous owners.
What is the addressable market for ubiquitous public surveillance devices? Who is the customer?
To be beholden to the State for justice and protection is fine when the State is beholden to the Public for their consent. Today, in the West, the Public has been so thoroughly disarmed, and /disrobed/, that consent is a formality, consent can no longer be withheld.
Look no further than Flock and FISA for the ongoing crisis of consent.
When cops are released from the State apparatus, they'll be given the respect and admiration they deserve. Until then, it's difficult to separate them from their incentive structure.
that doesn't seem to be the case always, given the data on crime reporting:
"Patterns in police reporting for property crime during 2020–2023 were similar to those for violent crime. A quarter (25%) of all property victimizations in urban areas were reported to police, which was lower than the percentages in suburban (33%) and rural (36%) areas (figure 2). Similar to overall property victimization, a lower percentage of other theft victimizations were reported to police in urban areas (20%) compared to suburban (28%) and rural (31%) areas."
https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/reporting-police-ty...
"For violent crimes, in 1997, 7% of victims stated that “Police wouldn’t help” as the reason they did not call the police. This more than doubled to 16% by 2021. For property crimes, the corresponding rates were 12% in 1997 and 18% in 2021"
https://datacollaborativeforjustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2...
:D
I've had property stolen. Cameras generally won't help, and didn't help. Limiting ingredient is often not knowing who did it in any case-- in most places most common crime is committed by a tiny number of regular characters. Go look at the mountains of threads online where someone had a tracker enabled object stolen and knew exactly who had it only to have law enforcement do nothing.
It's actually a relatively new agency and clearly not effective.
Also, the abuses and violence are staggering. And they managed to deport or mistreat actual citizens, because they did not cared. Again, not effective.
Here is the problem - conservative and right wing people use "effective" as euphemism for "we want to see as much cruelty and abuse as possible".
1. Have an enforcement agency going around killing people, and locking people up who have valid reason to exist in country waiting for status updates.
OR
2. Complete anarchy and chaos, monkeys flying planes, elephants driving taxis, dogs marrying cats.
Actually you know what, I reckon give the elephants a go.
While there were deaths, I didn't see any that were the result of a "security risk". I did see a whole lot of stupid people doing stupid things, and none of them were ICE agents, so I'm surprised there weren't more deaths.
Random masked goons in unmarked cars trying to arrest people is pretty damn stupid, yes. Same goons putting themselves in front of cars, and shooting through side windows of cars driving away, or shooting at random people on the street, is pretty damn stupid.
The ICE agent was 100% in the wrong, completely, totally unjustified in murdering Renee Good.
Nothing you wrote changes that.
Something, something, forest, trees.
Looking at the non-US stats, it's pretty clear the latter is at least a lot more credible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Old_Dominion_University_s...
Unfortunately automated surveillance is considered the best detective tool we have but in reality it doesn't seem to be the case with public self surveillance and good ol' park a policeman box in every neighborhood seems to outperform automated surveillance. So there's much more to this than "surveillance is bad or good" discussions we have right now.
I used to work in criminal investigations. I understand how this might make investigation of real crime more difficult. But so does the fact that you need a warrant to enter someone's home, and yet we manage to investigate crime anyway.
Your data should be an extension of your home, even if it's held by another company. It should require a warrant and notification. You could even make the notification be 24 hours after the fact. But it should be required.
It's also easy to imagine reasonable compromises, like a time delay where they only have to report after e.g. 48 hours, and allowing a system whereby a judge can issue a warrant to extend that delay.
I watched ALPR proponents in Oak Park make exactly those kinds of arguments.
It's a bit like saying pornography is used in the study of human anatomy.
I was replying to the "used in active criminal investigations" part. Yes, the ALPR data managed by Flock is sometimes used in active criminal investigations. However, it's also used for many other things.
The many other things that it's used for supports ~jedberg's argument.
This would avoid having to define what is and isn't a mass surveillance system. Any camera recording off your property would have a legal risk for the operator-- but if you're just recording locally and only using it to discourage or solve crime you're suffering the risk would be minimal and justified.
Nice idea, but at least in the U.S. (with the lone exception of LE obtaining cell phone location records), courts have consistently held that if you give your data to someone else, you are no longer entitled to an expectation of privacy in it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
If you want your data to be considered an extension of your home, at least for now, keep it at home.
That is, recordings of people in public settings (in some jurisdictions) are property of the recorder, but it still isn't a home (just imagine how that would work in some jurisdictions, someone takes a picture of you and it's trespassing? Would you be able to shoot them?)
This would be excluding gag orders correct?
And regular orders currently notify the service provider, but they don't necessarily notify the target, they just don't have a prohibition on the service provider notifying the target.
Finally, recordings of public areas actually aren't be impacted by warrants at all, right? But what you are saying is not just that LEA would need warrants to look at public recordings from a willingly cooperating camera owner, and that the warrants can't be gag orders (unless specified), but that the targets must be notified, even if the subject under search were someone else, the fact that I'm included in a recording would compel the LEA to notify me?
And how exactly would I be notified? Wouldn't that necessitate even more privacy invading features like facial recognition and a facial to contact information technology? Not an uncommon paradox.
Again, just want to understand the position, my position might leak as the question being leading, but I can't help it.
Much like you can't gag a search warrant on a home, you wouldn't be able to gag these orders either.
> And regular orders currently notify the service provider, but they don't necessarily notify the target, they just don't have a prohibition on the service provider notifying the target.
True, but my proposal would require that they notify you.
> Finally, recordings of public areas actually aren't be impacted by warrants at all, right?
No, but I'm saying this should apply to any time a 3rd party releases information to anyone, including law enforcement. In this case the Flock cameras feed into a private database. They should disclose when someone looks something up.
> And how exactly would I be notified?
Presumably if they can identify you then there would be a way to notify you. But those details could be left to the author of the bill.
My main point is that your data, when housed with a 3rd party, should be considered an extension of your home and offer the same guarentees and protections as the items actually in your home.
What we have in argentina is an Habeas Data law, if someone has data about you, you can ask for it, (or ask it be amended or deleted. Pretty simple right?
The home bit is no go though. Maybe an extension of the self? Too flimsy though, there's enough strong of a case treating it as what it is, an image, a visual representation of a person. A home is a specific of a concept that means something else
It sounds good but the implementation would be harder than achieving single payer healthcare that's better than what Medicare is now destroyed by for-profit prior authorizations and fake healthcare with lifetime limits.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-193593234
Why does the VP of strategic relations need to watch the kids gymnastics class?
This stuff is more easily available in rudimentary systems. Consider the model of recording everything and just dumping tapes somewhere. Much harder to monitor abuse than a well designed system with an audit log. Better yet, have computers process the data and only expose what's absolutely necessary. Technology lets you do that.
But I want to push back against this idea that we have anything resembling a police or surveillance state. Nothing will dispel this myth more than an experience reporting a crime to police. Think about thefts in drug stores. They have security guards, cameras, security devices, etc, but every day the same group of people walk in and walk out with stolen goods. Everyone knows who they are, but police do absolutely nothing to stop them, because there is no political will. So the solution is to put deodorant behind lock and key and close down stores in high crime areas.
So besides these one off creepy stories of people abusing the system, this stuff amounts to nothing. I want to use technology more and perhaps our murder clearance rate can stop going down.
https://www.murderdata.org/2021/10/homicide-clearance-in-uni...
When it comes to firearms, the vast majority of deaths are suicides with homicides being about a third of that. And the majority of homicides are domestic violence which usually happen inside the home.
The fact that the homicide clearance rate has decreased DESPITE turning our entire society into one of the most advanced surveillance states in human history pisses me off. That's MY tax money going to subsidize these companies that are taking away ALL OF OUR rights. In 2021 China's supreme court banned the use of facial recognition technologies in public places and then further strengthened that ban in 2025. They also got the PIPL in 2021 which is an even stronger version of the GDPR. In these respects, the US has regressed beyond The People's Republic of mf'ing China.
Your answer is to give these companies MORE of my money. I think the answer is to force them to pay us all back and let us reinvest it into problems that are actually relevant to anyone who doesn't obsessively consume True Crime podcasts
My answer is to arrest and prosecute the people that are destroying polite society. I don't get your point in China. I could care less.
My children going to a park with regular drug users with convenient needle drop (remove needle drops and arrest the handful of drug users that hang around children's parks with dangerous drugs on them)
Package thefts (sting operation to arrest the handful of people organizing these thefts)
Crazy people on subway (end "showtime" and people sleeping on the train)
People driving dangerously (cameras)
Smell of weed everywhere (don't allow smoking weed in public)
But I guess the few random fully avoidable deaths is acceptable because its not that often? Kind of like a child sacrifice we have to endure because its somehow compassionate to let crazy people roam the streets and assault people randomly?
None of this involves corporate CEOs and is relatively simple to solve.
You are overindexing on it because you watch too much TV.
Your kids would be a lot safer and better off if we moved some of our money away from surveillance and put it into cleaning up superfund sites on the NPL
https://epa.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=...
Look at this map and count how many superfund sites are within a 10 mile radius of you
Cops already exist, they are just told they can't enforce the law.
One of the key aspects of police and surveillance states is that the incentives are structured so that the policing and surveillance need not be done with the interest of public welfare in mind. As you said there is no political will.
Deflock: https://deflock.org/
More importantly, can I borrow you car? I have some, uh, stuff, to go do.
Facial recognition performs so poorly on non-white people that you'd have to find the most racist officer saying "they all look the same to me" to get that degree of defectivity.
That's besides the point, you don't need to question a picture with accompanying information (such as location, detected speed).
> Facial recognition performs so poorly on non-white people
You don't need facial recognition. Car with plate XYZ (trivial character recognition) ran a red light, $1000 fine with associated picture proof of the crime sent to the owner of the car as registered in their locality. Done.
Most of those red light tickets you’d be surprised but city subreddit advice will be like “ignore it, don’t even look up the ticket number because that acknowledged you received the ticket.” They only mail it to you via regular mail. They have no clue if it actually got to you.
Doesn't matter, fine the owner and let them deal with the driver.
This is true in theory but not so much in practice. The American legal system only works for people with enough time and/or money to pursue justice (or whatever else they want from the legal system). Like traffic tickets on a road trip - very few people can actually go back to fight them.
Facial recognition is irrelevant if the liability is on whomever the vehicle is registered to.
We don't need mass surveillance for traffic control. It can be done by the police if they really wanted to do it. Truth is, they don't care enough about road safety. This is about surveillance of citizens for control. First step is just infrastructure setup - next step is using it to prosecute those who dare to challenge the rise of fascism.
Be an advocate for your own rights to privacy. Don't simply accept it as normalcy.
You want this on our roads? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud8kFCmalgg&t=112s
Give me a database of everywhere you have ever driven, and I will find multiple ways to make you look like a criminal.
An example is cops stopping and searching you. If they're looking for a murderer, and they stop people coming out of Home Depot, and find a shovel, lye and rope in your trunk - hey, looks like a murderer! But it also could just be any customer going to Home Depot to get gardening supplies. So they can only stop people if they have probable cause: a reason they specifically think this specific person is the murderer.
(The other reason for probable cause, which is just as valid today as it was during the Framers' time, was to protect innocent civilians from unreasonable search and seizure by the Government, as well as protecting personal privacy. Mass surveillance violates all those principles.)
Everyone is a criminal. Directed [per|pro]secution is a thing. And not a new one either[0]:
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I
will find something in them which will hang him.
I really wish we had a more robust information environment where we could discuss things with more nuance.
We need to find a way to make partnering with flock a liability.
In New Orleans, a private rogue network of surveillance camera has been erected in reaction to a too constraining live facial recognition ban.
I think it would be much harder to stop.
"Commit crime -> brief retention period -> activist judge lets you go" loop, then you can definitely build a business model that just capitalizes on the fact that there's no consequences to committing a crime, and local/state governments have to waste copious amount of money due to the incredibly inflated demand of first responder services.
First: that's not what a "sanctuary city" is. That term specifically refers to cities that don't let their local law enforcement and courts assist ICE/CBP. The idea is that local crimes happen to everyone regardless of immigration status and we don't want a situation where undocumented people live lawlessly because they can't talk to police or court officers without fear of deportation.
Second: there's no "activist judge lets you go" loop. In practice judges are pretty tightly constrained by the law when it comes to pretrial detention. However, there _is_ a "cops refuse to do their job out of protest" loop.
And also: none of this is a technical problem! It's all political/social dynamics and surveillance doesn't affect it at all.
They go hand in hand.
- An example of who I classify as an "activist judge" is Teresa Stokes. She let out the repeat offender with 14 prior arrests that stabbed Iryna Zarutska in Charlotte[1].
[1] https://timmoore.house.gov/media/press-releases/congressman-...
Nonetheless, it’s true for most voters in Oakland or SF. Just last month, a judge let a homeless stabber back on the street after he threatened and tried attacking SF’s mayor and his bodyguard. The Progressive reaction was to blame the mayor and the police— and then the newly freed homeless guy immediately broke the law again and had to be re-arrested.
That is, you can put up cameras wherever you want, but you can't gain any kind of competitive advantage by doing so.
I think the public would be more alert to the dangers of mass surveillance if the magnitude of that surveillance was more obvious. And if everyone was watching everyone, at least it wouldn't as easily abused for purposes such as selective prosecution or blackmail.
We should probably oppose this.
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[1]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/07/toronto-r...
UPDATE: don't conflate stalking with observation. These are not the same. You can observe, but you cannot intimidate.
Then on the way home I'll park where I left off. If anyone asks me I'll them everything I know about you. It's "public" information after all.
So, I won't follow you, but when you _do_ leave, I'm going to call some people to let them know that happened. Still cool?
Take this opportunity to learn that different people might have different thresholds to feel intimidated and that normal people don't feel comfortable being tracked at all times in real life, regardless of the mechanism by which it's being executed.
In the above example, maybe you feel uncomfortable because the film crew is following you around in broad daylight? Would you feel better if they stayed hidden like the flock cameras in this example?
I get that some people have a desire for privacy in public. And I'm even sympathetic to it. However, with the exception of the EU, privacy in public not is a right, nor is it a thing most people believe they possess. (And even ECHR Article 8 has a carveout for recording public activities for legitimate purposes.)
If you think you should have such privacy rights, by all means, use the political process to achieve it. But note that it's not cost-free, and there will be tradeoffs.
In the film crew example, what is the difference if the crew is sufficiently far away from you such that you won't know? The paparazzi already do it to celebrities, seems reasonable for individuals to just track each other at a distance if we're all okay with your proposed path.
They often do. What am I gonna do, run up to anyone who's taking cell phone videos that might have me in it and try to force them to stop recording? That would make me look unhinged.
Now, the obvious response to that is “if you’re not watching, it can’t be recorded in the first place.” But we have legitimate reasons for wanting to observe public activities. The question is, how do we strike the right balance between legitimate use and abuse?
Rejecting reality doesn't mean it's not real. The direction passive surveillance is going and is at is already approaching active surveillance in terms of outcomes. The only difference is it's being applied more uniformly, rather than just to a specific individual. But the outcomes in terms of tracking all of our whereabouts are indistinguishable.
This is the entire premise of the post, which you are tiptoeing around and never directly answering the question of "is it fine for everyone to be tracked in public at all times"? A yes or no here would be helpful.
Privacy is important just as democracy is important, but crime and lawlessness feel more immediate and will always take center stage.
Any message to try to address the spread of flock and flock-like business models have to address what replaces it. If the only choice people are given is either having flock, or car break-ins, then I think we can probably guess what people would choose.
SFPD at least, has credited flock and flock-like tech for why property crime has dropped so much in recent years.
I'll step in and add a voice. Ultimately, Flock is solving a real problem with crime. This is why police departments when them.
Stopping Flock doesn't address the need that got police departments to use them. If you want to "stop flock", you need to address that need better.
So I was disappointed by what felt like very weak arguments in the article. Basically seems to come down it “it can be abused”. But many things can be abused. The solution is to fix the abuse problem.
I’d like to hear stronger arguments against these devices, so that I’m better informed locally.
This isn't your life pro tip to get you some additional 20% discount on the next McDonald's order, or some ethical kind of abuse that gets you your needed treatment, because the healthcare system is just too nonexistent to care, though.
Any criticism against the use of surveillance technology needs to resort to the rhetoric of COULD, because any other choice of words would put the final nail in any surveillance companies' coffin, with evidence from either whistleblowers or circumvented security issues.
It's certainly hard to look behind the curtains - fair, but in a world where the top companies are selling advertisements by accumulating and correlating large-scale tracking information from every person on earth, regardless whether they're users of the products or not, it should be much harder to shrug off such a possibility as dystopian nonsense than to see it as the fucked up reality (circumvention of fundamental rights included) that it is.
No, the solution is to fix the societal issues leading people to resort to crime. Surveillance cameras are not a solution, they are a band-aid placed several steps away from the wound.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/flock-safety-and-texas...
If someone breaks into my car and a Flock camera sees it, is their right to privacy in a public space more important than my right to not have my property get stolen?
Sarah Brayne (2020) Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing, Oxford University Press
https://www.amazon.com/Predict-Surveil-Discretion-Future-Pol...
An academic study about the use of surveillance technology at the Los Angeles Police Department, the book documents the LAPD's use of data brokerage firms (e.g., Palantir) that collect and aggregate information from public records and private sources, as well as automatic license plate readers like Flock, and Suspicious Activity Reports generated by police and civilians, which include reports of mundane activities such as using binoculars, drawing diagrams, or taking pictures or "video footage with no apparent aesthetic value." All this data ultimately gets parked in Fusion Center facilities, built in the aftermath of 9/11, where federal, state and local law enforcement agencies collaborate to collect, aggregate, analyze and share information. As the author observes, "The use of data in law enforcement is not new. For almost a century, police have been gathering data, e.g., records of citations, collisions, warrants, incarcerations, sex offender and gang registries, etc. What is new and important about the current age of big data is the role in public policing of private capitalist firms who provide database systems with huge volumes of information about people, not just those in the criminal justice system."
You've obviously not read the 13th amendment...
> Flock advertises a drop in crime, but the true cost is a culture of mistrust and preemptive suspicion. As the EFF warns, communities are being sold a false promise of safety - at the expense of civil rights* (EFF).
...
> True safety comes from healthy, empowered communities; not automated suspicion. Community-led safety initiatives have demonstrated significant results: North Lawndale saw a 58% decrease in gun violence after READI Chicago began implementing their program there. In cities nationwide, the presence of local nonprofits has been statistically linked to reductions in homicide, violent crime, and property crime (Brennan Center, The DePaulia, American Sociological Association).
These are incredibly weak arguments. I haven't personally looked into how good Flock cameras are at actually preventing crime and catching criminals, but if this is the best counterargument their detractors can come up with, it makes me suspect they're actually pretty good.
Crime is extremely bad. Mass surveillance is bad too, especially if abused, but being glib or dismissive about the real trade-offs is counterproductive.
Also, recording in public spaces (or private spaces that you own) is an important and fundamental right just like the right to privacy; simply banning this kind of surveillance would also infringe on civil liberties in a different way. I agree that laws and norms need adjusting in light of new technology, but that discussion needs more nuance than this.
As much as I fear the Orwellian future this could turn into, I think its important to recognize that the burden of preventing that is on lawmakers, not companies.
He explains in the interview that he would love for laws to be passed to create tighter controls over how these systems are used. The problem is that police departments don't want it! Perhaps they can elect to do it themselves, but then they expose themselves to competitors who have "more powerful features".
Something like 70% of homocides go unresolved! I think its cool that Flock is trying to help police departments fight crime. But it's time to yell at your lawmakers. Don't hate the player, hate the game!
1) Suppose there will be another shooting. Don't you want to know what exactly has happened before you go to the protest? Suppose your child will be hurt. Wouldn't you do anything to capture the culprit? How exactly would you feel if the police would tell you that they couldn't get the video with culprits face, because watching it would be a violation of someone's privacy?
2) Everyone has a camera in their pocket. Someone is filming all the time. Police can seize this video. Isn't that a privacy risk? Should we ban cameras in smartphones?
3) Should we even be private in the public? Doesn't privacy in public spaces encourage crime? I will die on a battle to keep the privacy in my home, but in public? I personally prefer to be safe, than private, in public.
4) What about private cameras near homes filming 24/7? Are those risks for privacy?
5) People in power will always be corrupt, have bad intentions, will use public goods for personal gain. Should we disregard broader benefits because there will be isolated cases where those benefits will be exploited?
Happy downvoting.
2) > Isn't that a privacy risk?
Yes, it is!
> Should we ban cameras in smartphones?
No? How about making it difficult for the police to seize everyone's videos without a good reason? We already do that for phone videos, it's called warrants. But Flock doesn't. They just ask cops to enter any arbitrary "reason" text into a HTML textbox and instantly get access to everyone's videos. And if the people explicitly said they don't want those specific cops to have access, like many people decided about ICE? Well, just ask the next county over and use their system, it's not checked in any way.
I'm really struggling to see the parallel between being filmed in public and committing revenge murder.
Especially with mass-surveillance, which affects everyone. It's not possible to mass-surveil only people who would commit crimes, you need to surveil all innocent people too.
Right and you used murder as an example. Do you think murder is even remotely comparable to putting up a security camera in a public space?
Yes, a victim might want some sort of response that is socially unacceptable, sure. But if you want to make a convincing argument you have to explain why the proposed response is unacceptable. Not some different, extreme, response of your own invention.
I'm really not sure how "committing vigilante murder is wrong" is supposed to be a good argument against putting up security cameras in a public space.
There is no way Flock could practically ramp up production or manpower to replace the entire fleet before failing to meet contractual requirements with their customers that keep money flowing in.
Further, I'm not sure why there is an expectation of privacy in public places. You don't have to consent to being filmed when you're walking down a public sidewalk.
If they were able to successfully change laws so they can fly anonymously they can probably change laws on cameras in public places, at least for them anyway.
Privacy for the special people.
https://gizmodo.com/taylor-swift-and-elon-can-finally-fly-pr...
Edit: not a low effort comment. This is something you should all read and demand the same of. I consternated on how not to call your regime moronic. It _is_ moronic that you don’t have these basic protections and we keep having to listen to you all whine about that.