Flock Condemns False Child Predator Allegations, Yet Calls Critics Terrorists | Hacker News Reader

Flock Condemns False Child Predator Allegations, Yet Calls Critics Terrorists

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86 pointsjhonovich34 comments

Whether or not Flock employees are child predators or not, the crux of the issue lies in the third parties Flock allows access to these cameras. For a link to their actual blog post where they make this comment: https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/understanding-flocks-testin...

(The terrorist allegations are from an interview December of last year https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46357850 )

I don't think third party access matters in the reason it's being scrutinized. Flock is the tip of the commercial security state offloaded by the government to it can "sanewash" it as a input into government surveillance.

I don't care who operates flock; it's being used to do government surveillance at scale to avoid privacy laws.

The government is a third-party as well. Leveraging Flock to skirt privacy laws is two sides of the same coin; commercial entities are doing this too.

So, that's an interesting semantic. I think we're often dealing with the same philsophical argument about the FBI 'finding" terrorists versus 'inciting' terrorists via entrapment.

I'd argue Flock doesn't exist if the government for private surveillance didn't exist.

I'd agree with that to an extent. The USA is in a corporatocracy, so I'd argue it's the private corporate entities lobbying for the government to utilize their private surveillance. In general I try not to grant conspiratorial competency which could be better explained by the exchange of money.

Happy to life in a country where AI cameras are not a thing.

Yes... me too. It is called a democratic country, where citizens value the environment created around them by their government.

That is NOT what the USA is, at the moment. Very happy not to live there, or go there in any capacity.

Yes, in his texts Cleisthenes was pretty clear that AI cameras weren't acceptable in a democracy.

A lot of people seem to attribute voter decisions they don't like with != democracy. I don't think people realize that democracies can also be surveillance police state dystopias if that's what the people vote for. It doesn't make it less of a democracy

It’s a democracy when people vote for what I want.

I'm not from the US, so I hope you excuse my ignorance, but who exactly voted for mass surveillance or AI cameras?

No Democracy has voters vote on every position, they elect representatives who act on a number of policies and aims.

Unfortunately there is no representative that would vote on every issue how I would want them to vote.

That means if only politicians that are savvy enough to get campaign donations, air time, etc; that claim to represent me on more important issues than cameras, are the only ones on the ballot for me to choose from, and they all like cameras, I don't get much of a say in cameras.

That's not unreasonable, but then by your definition are there actually any democracies in the world as of current?

From a practical standpoint, how would that even work? Would the politican call you and everyone in their district before each vote and record it? Or would every bill that comes up have a poll?

When 75% of the people in the USA did NOT vote for the current regime, i can hardly call that democratic.

You pay taxes? Vote. Should be mandatory, and the government should make it extremely easy to do.

We Americans are easily terrified. It just takes a little eyebrow-waggling to suggest that the criminals are easily identified by the color of their skin, so that you're safe from any tactics used to suppress them.

We used to think of ourselves as gradually getting better. Turns out that all that accomplished was to encourage resentment, and we finally got tired of pretending otherwise. I dunno if we can ever get back the illusion of improvement, since it will be clear for a very long time just how powerful the urge to cower is. I hope it's soon enough for you to come visit some day, because we do also have a lot of virtues, but for the moment it's not safe for the inhabitants, much less the strangers.

Where is that? Are they banned, or just haven't reached you yet?

As dumb as it is that we've invited a corporation to spy with government approval, I suspect that less formal but still ubiquitous surveillance is coming for you, too, unless your government actively prevents it.

All of Europe. Haven’t seen an AI camera anywhere.

China's supreme court banned the use of facial recognition in public spaces in 2021.

Americans need to wake up and realize they are the exception not the rule when it comes to the normalization of a surveillance state

China has a social credit score that controls what schools, jobs, and things you can buy. If yohr score goes down too low you can lose your job and lose your degrees.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVkWokLqPOg

There has been a degree of misreporting and misconceptions in English-language mass media due to translation errors, sensationalism, conflicting information and lack of comprehensive analysis.[7][43][122][44][123] Examples of such popular misconceptions include a widespread misassumption that Chinese citizens are rewarded and punished based on a numerical score (social credit score) assigned by the system, that its decisions are taken by AI and that it constantly monitors Chinese citizens.[16][122][39][124][5][6]

From wikipedia, section Misconceptions, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit_system

No that is made up nonsense. It's mind boggling to me how many Americans truly believe in this.

They have attempted many times to create a credit score system like the US but have failed to centralize anything like the US has. The US credit score system is also much more pervasive and can sometimes determine whether or not you're allowed to buy a house.

Separately there was an attempt to build a "social credit" system that is only applied to political and business leaders. Basically anyone who holds some sort of power in society. It's not a way to control regular people. This also failed to ever come to anything that's truly nationalized.

Yes. They are banned in many places where the population has control of the government instead of letting Larry Ellison making that decision on your behalf.

I suspect that you underestimate how captured America's politics are on a relative scale.

Oh, I am well aware how deeply screwed we are. I hope everyone else is learning from our negative example.

> “Accusing someone of spying on children is not a policy disagreement; it is a life-altering allegation.” - flock

“life altering”? Oh so like a women and her kids being held at gun point while face down on the hot tarmac of a parking lot cause your stupid ai cameras got the wrong car.

I don’t know why they don’t like being accused of spying on children when they seem to be doing everything they can to spy on children.

Pretty amazing they’re framing it as an “accusation,” when there’s access logs obtained via FOIA request that prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they were spying on children.

Whats worse is the town has snubbed its residents:

https://www.axios.com/local/atlanta/2026/04/17/dunwoody-floc...

How did a Jewish Community Center end up allowing FLOCK to access its security cameras?

Pool and Gymnastics seem like sensitive places unless PEDO.

I hate to say it, but Jewish organizations get threats all the time. Just yesterday I was at a temple that removed its "reserved for Rabbi" parking space, because he had been threatened and didn't want to make identification easier.

An explanation rather than an excuse. But it's not entirely surprising that they would sign up for a service that might help them catch offenders.

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