The creepiest 'sales demo' of all time
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On Sept. 30, 2025, a Flock vice president logged into the Dunwoody PD’s Flock system and looked at a camera in the children’s gymnastics room of a private community center here in Dunwoody.
He did not look at any other cameras in the entire 400-camera network that day.
The community center shared their cameras directly to the PD under the pretense that access was “solely for real-time critical incident response.”
Flock and Dunwoody elected officials both say this was for a “sales demo.” They claim this was “part of authorized activity approved under the city's demo partner agreement.”
The problem with that is that the city cannot provide any information that that demo partner agreement exists.
What kind of sales demo would require looking at one camera in a children’s gymnastics room? Can anyone rationally explain why a police agency that is interested in Flock would like to see one third-party camera integration that is in a children’s gymnastics room?
Jason Hunyar lives in Dunwoody.
I love GDPR, but it's understandable for folks with no connection to the EU to just nope-out.
If I am Reuters and AP and have offices in EU of course I am interested in complying with local law, but it doesn’t make sense to me for a local newspaper to care whether they are in compliance with foreign statutes.
Still I will maintain that individuals are not going to face repercussions on vacation because they happen to manage a web property out of compliance with GDPR
The GDPR can state that they're the masters of the universe but that doesn't make it true. They lack jurisdiction, they can't sue in US court. The EU suing an US entity, in US court, for breaking EU law sounds like a great comedy I really want to see.
If the EU doesn't want EU citizens to use some service located in another country, they should stop their citizens from going there, like at the border, like blocking the IP, domain, etc.
You can choose differently, of course, and I’m not making value judgments here. Just explaining why a small local news site would geo-block the EU.
Funny init.
Rather than do the ethical thing and treat their own (American) users personal data with respect, they instead geoblock an entire continent.
I would be more worried about being struck by a meteorite than such a thing
Again, I agree it is very, very unlikely. But it’s possible, and in an age of mass outrage it isn’t incomprehensible that some activist, somewhere, might latch onto something they don’t like and just doggedly pursue someone. It does happen.
The conversation went like this:
IT director: “If we serve ads or collect data from EU users we have to be GDPR compliant. That’ll cost several thousand dollars worth of employee time”
Exec: “how much revenue is attributable to EU users.”
IT: “Single digit dollars per year”
Exec: “is there a cheaper solution?”
But now, instead of their story being read by people all over the world, having gone viral, it's just going to pirated. Not only losing them out on revenue, but recognition as well.
This is part of the long death of online local news. They can't be bothered to do the simplest things for their site (make personal data collection optional). But they have tons of time to fill them with online cancer and make them unusable without ad blocking.
It's such a low-probability event that I don't blame them for just saying, "Nah. Not gonna hassle with that."
The recognition argument is also quite weak--it's not like recognition pays the bills.
A small local news agency prioritizes serving small local news needs. I used to work at a small local newspaper. Spending four or five figures of limited money on IT overhauls means that something else has to be sacrificed. It isn’t that they can’t be bothered, it’s that it costs money and doesn’t serve their community or customers. Being GDPR compliant hinders their ability to do local news since it literally takes resources to accomplish.
Local news is dying, but it is not because of GDPR. That trend started well before then, and is very well understood. The amount of news content is a direct function of advertising revenue not actual news to be reported. Craigslist and google undercut them and that’s really the only relevant part of the story. GDPR noncompliance has nothing to do with the success or failure of a news outlet in middle America.
Do you make sure that your work is fully compliant with all Chinese laws? Why not? They are the world’s largest market, after all. Do you even know if your work is possible to access in China? Or is it the case that compliance with Chinese laws is irrelevant to your business models so it’s easier to just do nothing. Same logic…
I'm lucky in that I mostly work in areas where it really has no value add, and so far always get my way, but fuck I wish GDPR banners had some form of standard that didn't wreck internet experience in general.
Was it too hard to require the already opt-in nature of the cookies to no fuck with average user experience? no one in their right mind clicks accept all.
Was it too hard to enforce some default stance one can set?
Was it too hard to not fuck everything up without fixing the issue?
apprently. so now i have to constantly read and interpret information I have zero interest in to consistently hit the exact same button, to access information I _might_ be interested in. all of which is an excercise in dark pattern gymanastics so draining im near ready to swear off the open web entierly.
So, my problem remains, why do I now need an extra point of failure to surf the web due to something that was supposed to make it less, not more, hostile to do?
One could have acheived the same by simply banning addblock and cookie block detection. Simply let users set, in any privacy friendly browser or addon, whatever they like, and have it work reliably because industry isnt allowed to subvert.
Acheives the same while introducing less moving parts. the web is crazy bloated as it is, we need to trim back not stack on more.
"It's just a checkbox in cloudflare to not show up there" is so effortless that you need a compelling reason to ignore how easy it is.
And if you don't already have traffic analysis showing that 30% of your readers and thus 30% of your ad revenue is coming from the European continent... You spend the 45 seconds it takes to find the check box and you click. Then worrying about maybe possibly getting screwed by some far away legal something or other is irrelevant.
What’s the corollary for the patriot act? AFAIK, its provisions would only affect immigration and travel, which happen inside a country’s borders.
Patriot Act, FISA, Cloud Act allows the USA to basically impose its justice over other countries. And it's never in the interest of its citizens.
Whoever told you that was scamming you
At the time I was doing this, it was part of a very large company that quarterly ran audits of all their own systems for security and legal compliance, and they did GPDR as one of their things to audit against.
So we were not scammed, we had our internal employees do their job.
GDPR doesn't require you to perform audits, unlike other Regulations or certifications
Ever thought that complying with those "random" personal data protection laws shows a respect for users decency and privacy in your own country, as well as those users in the UK/EU?
IE surveillance dickheads see what is in the US and decide to enact it in their local country.
In this case, it is handy to see how the conversation about such surveillance is going.
I could think of one reason
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre
Companies push not only age verification (in way that usually is not anonymous) and cameras everywhere will give any pedophile with access to that location of any child they can get their hands of, their daily habits and when it's easiest to nab one of them.
They are creating Pedo Nexus, whether knowingly or not.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre
You don't need 24/7, online, searchable, AI enabled video feed to stop any of that
> On Sept. 30, 2025, a Flock vice president logged into the Dunwoody PD’s Flock system and looked at a camera in the children’s gymnastics room of a private community center here in Dunwoody.
And there is a lot being implied in this sentence.
1. https://www.404media.co/city-learns-flock-accessed-cameras-i...
3. https://www.techdirt.com/2026/05/05/flocks-sales-pitch-inclu... -- commenting on the 404 Media article
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