Buyer cancels showing after Deflock shows two cameras utilized by the HOA | Hacker News Reader

Buyer cancels showing after Deflock shows two cameras utilized by the HOA

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115 pointsbilsbie165 comments

Found a link to the original reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/realtors/comments/1von5bt/just_had_...

Thanks, HN linking to X linking to Reddit..

HOA and Flock. That is one hellish dystopia over there now.

Imagine an HOA of 5,000 people that functions as a defacto city, surrounded itself with Flock, who has also successfully sued Google to remove itself from street view because it was private property and a privacy violation. The dissonance.

Unless that Flock data is also easily publicly available with 2 clicks, how is this comparable to Street View?

Street view can be used to show the HOA president had non-conforming begonias all along.

don’t forget!!!

Y Combinator invested in Flock Safety in 2017.

For the love of money

> You're thinking Chinese surveillance

> US-based surveillance helps victims and prevents more victims

https://x.com/garrytan/status/1963310592615485955?lang=en

Brought to you by the king of double standards, Garry Tan, CEO of YCombinator.

the sad thing about american propagandists is that they willingly participate completely free of pressure from their government

Don't generalize. You have "principle propagandists" who just prosternate for free and become someone else's mouthpiece because their propagandist upbringing taught them so. But what you're replying to is nothing like that, it's the propagandist who does it for personal (and massive) financial gain.

I suppose maybe I'm giving him too much credit with the assumption that he could make money without parroting propaganda mindlessly

That's a very charitable take.

My take is that his objection to a Chinese repressive regime isn't the repressive nature, it's that he's not part of the class doing the repressing.

true maybe he seems himself as a temporarily embarrassed dictator

Temporarily embarassed billionaire cum Dictator

Garry goes to the same church where Thiel held his Greta is the anti Christ talk.

Out of curiosity have they or will they have him back

Acts17 was created based on a speech Thiel gave and was launched at an event in Garrys home, where Thiel also spoke. Garry was employee #10 at Palantir. He's intimately connected to Thiel, likely believes in Thiels christo tech feudalism that they call network states and most likely supports project2025 and all they're doing.

Completely frivolous comment: people who insist on capitalizing “realtor” are hilarious. I know “Realtor” is a registered trademark, but that just makes it funnier to me.

On topic, we’ve stopped going to a popular pizza place near us because the owner put a Flock camera up.

I suspect it's a similar phenomenon as people capitalizing visa when the topic is international travel / migration instead of payment networks.

Or using title case for acronyms like "Nasa" particularly on government and news websites who should know better.

Do you mean like what the BBC does?

> However, our style is to use lower case with an initial cap for acronyms where you would normally pronounce the set of letters as a word (eg Maga, Sars, Aids, Nasa, Opec, Apec).

https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsstyleguide/all/

It’s a matter of style, not something someone “should know better.”

Not to start a whole flamewar over this, but it adds to confusion when it would look like another word like "Aids". Even their own final rule says not to do that.

> There are a few exceptions:

> Seasonal Affective Disorder becomes SAD ("Sad" would be confusing)

> Where a capped-down acronym risks being misunderstood as a word.

And when I say "should know better", a news organization, especially a place as respected as the BBC, should try to reduce confusion wherever possible. And as a matter of politeness, when it is an organization/person's name, it should probably cased the way they chose to name it, like "NASA" or "e e cummings".

No, it’s people in the industry correctly using a registered trademark. Sometimes you’ll even see someone say “I’m a Realtor®”. It’s all proper. It’s just funny because they’ve put so much effort into being perceived as a legitimate profession that they’ve made a mockery of it.

HOA busybodies might be worse than spying cops.

Would be a great angle as a buyer's agent to proactively show clients flock camera locations. At the same time, would be an interesting way to hinder the sale of a property by falsely reporting flock cameras where none are.

I find this unsettling. When a private entity buys Flock, how do they _use_ it? Is it more than ALPR? Are they sharing the data with the network and offer it to the police? Can they watch footage?

Knowing the types that gravitate towards HOA boards and the like, I take the least charitable view possible. Simply a system that is ripe for abuse and it's hard to justify any of the use cases as necessary. We've ceded control of our lives entirely to tyrants both small and large.

I would have to. (Well, I wouldn't even bother looking further into the property once I learned it involved an HOA, but for the sake of argument...) The presence of these cameras is wholly and entirely objectionable.

Why so much emphasis on Flock here? In manhattan i feel virtually every place has cameras.

You will be hard pressed to find a block without them. What’s stopping a company from paying these people for their footage in return for “safety”?

A network of cameras where everything they record everywhere is logged and searchable is exponentially more powerful and dangerous that a patchwork of individual, unrelated cameras.

> What’s stopping a company from paying these people for their footage in return for “safety”?

The complexity of dealing with 1000 different relationships, with individual contracts, negotiations, prices, etc. to collect the information, and then building a platform on which to make that information available to customers.

Not much, but a decentralized system is often hard to exploit, and we're reaching points where we've established the surveillance state the populace is finally understanding the repercussions in a clear and poignant way.

Assume that means the public camera technology in general will be called Flock cameras, and people will have a more default negative reaction going forward.

I have cameras on my house; I asked my neighbours if they were okay with them beforehand.

They're local storage only, no net access. I got them after my garage was broken into the second time. It's been a few years, haven't had a third break-in yet.

What would you have done if they said no?

There are a bunch of other options. Cameras with agreed-upon privacy blackout areas. Realistic fake cameras. Non-camera security products, like lights and fences. Get a dog.

you place the camera in such a way that it only covers your own property. in germany having a camera that goes beyond your own property is even illegal, so that's the only way to place cameras there.

Beside the mass surveillance issues that are very real, let me just add that HOAs need to be made illegal except for condo buildings that obviously need to maintain and manage that building. There is absolutely no reason why a single family house needs to be in a mandatory HOA.

We've all heard or experienced the silly rules about how your house must look and the fines associated with it. None of that should be legal.

The one thing HOAs do is trash pickup but that should be a municipal government function. It is it everywhere else in the developed world.

And why do they exist? If you find yourself asking that about anything uniquely American the answer is almost always "systemic racism". And that's the case here. HOAs became popularized in the 20th century with racially restrictive covenants (ie to prevent the owner selling to black people) [1].

So where are we now? Instead of the HOA president spending their day driving past "problem" houses to look for any rules violations, are we going to have them doing that with Flock cameras instead? What a dystopian nightmare.

[1]: https://www.bostonfairhousing.org/timeline/1920s1948-Restric...

What about an HOA for the management of roads and rainwater runoff (ponds, etc)?

The answer is likely that it makes sense for maintenance purposes, but the legal authority granted to an HOA is overly broad.

It's certainly overly broad in many circumstances. I've lived in a townhome community with overly aggressive management.

However, "There is absolutely no reason why a single family house needs to be in a mandatory HOA" is easy to refute.

HOA's provide a way for managing shared infrastructure that would not be feasible for a single home owner. Common examples of basic infrastructure include roads, storm water management, lighting, and even community wells. I would argue that is the primary purpose. Not all neighborhoods are in a municipality either.

Not all neighborhoods are in a municipality either.

why is that? and why is the county or state government not taking over the responsibility then? for example in germany a democratic local government is guaranteed by basic law, so a neighborhood outside of a municipality is practically not possible and considered a violation of basic law.

Municipalities in the US are the same type of institution as HOA, self-organized to maintain property. Just like you may not have an HOA you may not have a municipality of any kind. Counties and states are usually not equipped to do maintenance work, same as the federal government. I also don't understand the preference of city government over HOA - it's not like cities don't have codes and you can do whatever you want with your property. It's subdued now but couple years ago we had anti-zoning posts as frequently as we have anti-Flock. Who creates zoning? The city does.

the difference is that HOAs are private and not state actors, when they really should be. that has some constitutional implications. they are not democratic because usually only property owners are voting members based on the size of the property. in a municipality everyone living there gets one vote.

you are right that in practice the difference may not be that noticeable, but i believe that not being state actors is a significant distinction. if it acts like a government, and if it quacks like a government it should be a government and be subject to those same rules.

not having a municipality of any kind in my opinion is an oversight of state/federal law. people should have democratic representation whereever they live. HOAs don't provide that.

What do you mean they are "private"? HOA literally means the association of all home owners, who are members and set, follow, and enforce its bylaws. It's a public institution, same as a municipality. The difference is in how each is established and controlled, but neither is private.

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

A homeowner association is a private, legally-incorporated organization that governs a housing community, collects dues, and sets rules for its residents.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_institution_(United_Sta...

A public institution is a juristic person in the United States which is backed through public funds and controlled by the state.

HOAs are not controlled or funded by the state, no more than Private Businesses are. municipalities are controlled by the state.

if municipalities have the same reach into how people manage their homes like HOAs do then the distinction may not matter. it is however a legally significant distinction.

one point where the distinction matters is that HOAs can limit your freedom of speech, while municipalities can not.

https://www.hopb.co/blog/freedom-in-associations-exercising-...

By your definitions public companies do not exist - most public companies are not funded by state. But sure, in this framework HOA's are "private" but so are the municipalities - they are not funded by state. And, obviously, everything is controlled by state - we have laws and regulations, both from the state and from the federal government.

>if municipalities have the same reach into how people manage their homes

Municipalities have bigger reach because they also control what you do inside your home. Codes are more expansive and detailed than any HOA bylaws and cover interior much more than the exterior. And, of course, the municipality controls if you can live in your house at all and can kick you out if it wishes so.

we are simply using a different definition of public and private. i am using the legal one: public is government, private is everything else. i explained why the distinction matters and what effects it has.

your points are valid but arguing about the definition of what is public isn't helpful.

same goes for government control. you are not wrong, but again, the legal difference in what that control is matters. private entities have constitutional protection and rules that are clearly defined and distinct from the protection and rules for public institutions. the control the government has is simply different and that difference matters.

the bigger reach of municipalities doesn't go away in HOAs because most HOAs are within a municipality. that makes HOAs at best redundant, at worst you have to suffer both. at least with municipality you have democracy on your side. HOAs are controlled by owners, everyone else is second class. that's not a democracy. the result is that the combination of government and HOA gives you less freedom than government alone. HOAs don't replace the government, they don't make it go away.

HOAs in my opinion should be treated like government entities because they are given quasi government like powers without the same checks and balances that government has. they aren't and for me that's a problem.

We are not in a court, so even if there was a legal definition of "public", which does not appear to exist, it would not matter. The question is why HN "urbansits" are so livid about HOAs and want to replace them with municipalities. The reasons I see are pretty bizarre: while not having both makes some sense (in case you optimize for the absolute minimum regulations over everything else), this thread is specifically about replacing HOA with a municipality in case when only the former is present, which means more regulation. Your democracy argument makes no sense to me: the vote is always restricted, in HOA to owners (or rather to properties themselves, a husband and wife co-owning a home don't get two votes), in a city - to residents (and on some matters, to property owners only). In neither everyone can vote. HOAs are already treated as government entities - their bylaws are not different from the city ordinances, their fees are as same as city taxes and they are hard to get rid of. I imagine you mean something else since in your country the government is descending from feudal lords and your municipalities have started as fiefs. But in the US only similar government is at the state level, the states have constitutions and laws, everything else is what you would call "private" - townships, PTAs, school districts etc are essentially corporations.

In many places, the government maintains the roads and similar infrastructure. Property owners pay 'property tax' for this.

See, that's the great thing about America. We can have neighborhoods with HOAs and those without. You get to choose!

In most cities it's illegal to build a new neighbourhood without an HOA

See, that's the great thing about America. There's also cities where it is legal to build a new neighbourhood without an HOA. And if that at some point happens to no longer be the case in the USA, there are many more countries in America to choose from where there are places you could still live an HOA-free life, such as Canada.

No, the great thing about America is the illusion of choice. A or B? You get to decide! But the joke's on us because A and B are both owned by the same parent corporation, so either way, you're losing. In the case of HOAs and housing development, good luck finding a developer who's not going to make housing with an HOA. Why would they not have an HOA? It's in their interests to have one, so all the options end up having one, so then you don't actually get to choose to not have one!

You’re gonna run into a little bit of resistance on principles with that argument. For context, I would have absolutely no interest in living in an HOA neighborhood and I don’t support them at all.

But we do have a fairly strong precedent for freedom of association in this country and the freedom for people to join into groups and figure out how they want to live.

Not sure how you could write a law that would get rid of the kind of HOA’s. You don’t like without running straight into things like religious colonies, and a variety of other living arrangements.

Seems to me the current approach where you’ve been certain kinds of discrimination and so on is a little more sound. I could think of other reforms as well, for example perhaps a time limit on HOA‘s or the requirement of some sort of super majority or consensus to be taken at intervals to prevent automatic dissolution and restrictions on size structure.

Not sure how you could write a law that would get rid of the kind of HOA

you make HOAs be part of the government and follow democratic rules like any government, ie. they are just a smaller form of a municipality, or a subdivision of one. you do not allow the government to delegate responsibilities to private organizations. you guarantee everyone inalienable rights regarding their property that no HOA is allowed to override.

for example, even if the whole neighborhood agrees to surveillance, the right to privacy in your home/property and in certain places (like public pools) should be absolute and it should not be possible to take it away.

There are a few exceptions, I live in an odd neighborhood where a group got together and rehabbed a bunch of dilapidated homes facing an alley. They got permission from the city to make the alley a pedestrian mall and green space. Our HOA exists to maintain the pedestrian mall that is essentially our front yard.

> So where are we now? Instead of the HOA president spending their day driving past "problem" houses to look for any rules violations, are we going to have them doing that with Flock cameras instead? What a dystopian nightmare.

This actually very much understates the problems. HOAs are no longer small organizations where the local biddies gather to feel like they are back in high school because they have nothing better to do with their time. They've become defacto governments.

True story I at one point bought in a development that had an HOA the rules of the development were that for the first 5 years or until have the development was done then developer would be in charge of the HOA and then it would revert to the homeowners at 4 years 6 months the HOA board (who was the developers) voted to merge with another HOA to a that ran a dozen other developments and complexes throughout the state.

HOAs are now massive multi-million dollar corporations that controls vast swathes of land, and rule over their tenants without any of the checks or balances or recourse one has available against the government.

For those who say "just buy in a non-HOA area" the problem is that almost all new builds have HOAs built in from the start as part of the developers plan and so the options for those not wanting to deal with an HOA are increasingly limited.

In short abolish HOAs. If people want to get together to form groups of homeowners that's fine but there is no world in which someone should be able to take your house because your grass is too long.

HOAs have become defacto governments.

exactly, and they should be forced to operate like one, with democratic elections, and the same checks and balances like any other part of the government.

I’m sorry but this kind of thinking is non-sense. There are surely a few cases where someone lets power go to their head, but that happens in every place where humans have any power.

I’m on an HOA board because no else wants to because it’s boring. We maintain a large green space with walking paths and a community pool, and garbage pickup. We have whites, blacks, asians, hispanics, etc and nobody cares. Sometimes there is shared land in a development that has to be managed and somebody has to do it.

Most neighborhoods don't have these, and that's kind of the problem. The city should be constructing and maintaining parks and recreation, and they should take an egalitarian approach. Meaning, don't stuff all the nicest parts in the richest areas.

Also, the history of HOAs is explicitly racist. That doesn't mean all HOAs are racist now, although I think it would be naive to assume we've 100% eliminated all the racism. Sort of the same perspective on Voter ID. It was created for racism, only racism. Now, maybe it's not but... do we really think everyone forgot?

I can’t comment on HOAs being historically racist - I’ve not seen it. But how would that work? They don’t (at least now) get to vote on who is allowed to buy. So how would they keep out whoever they decided was undesirable? Were there bylaws about skin color?

> So how would they keep out whoever they decided was undesirable? Were there bylaws about skin color?

Originally? More than just HOA bylaws: HOA’s originally were implemented as part of a belt-and-suspenders approach along with racial covenants—particularly in building out suburban developments—in part in anticipation that the racial restrictions might later be struck down (as they were. In 1948); the HOAs would allow the white majority (guaranteed initially by the racial covenants, and even without active enforcement likely to be maintained by economic inequality for long after that) to drive out non-white residents through selective enforcement of facially race-neutral rules. And, while it is still not always easy to prove, for twenty years after explicit racial covenants attached to property were ruled illegal, other private discrimination related to housing was not, so there wasn't even a legal basis to challenge this.

I know most of these flock cameras are going up in low income black neighborhoods [1] to "protect" them, but don't these wealthy neighborhoods need "protection" too?

1: https://www.wvtf.org/news/2026-08-14/flock-cameras-trigger-p...

Wealthy neighbourhoods get actual protection, rather than protection-as-an-excuse-for-surveillance.

I would never want to buy a house near Flock cameras. That's worse than having an HOA. That one has both! That's a special kind of dystopian hellscape.

The comments under the post are difficult to read.

Really shouldn't have clicked the link or signed in to this cesspool...

It's "X". The only people left there are either required to have an account for their jobs, or they love this fascist shit. Why else would anyone stay on that shit hole of a platform now that Musk is running it?

Can someone explain why Flock is such a politically charged topic.

I’m only now becoming aware of it, and feel like I’m out of the loop on key aspects.

Is it really? It seems that the fight against total surveillance is bipartisan.

"charged" doesn't mean polarized. And "bipartisan" doesn't mean anything except in the broken system of the states.

> And "bipartisan" doesn't mean anything except in the broken system of the states.

So it does mean quite a bit, then. Especially since the topic is flock, which is only relevant to the states.

Yeah, anti-flock sentiment is one of the few things in our country that's bipartisan these days.

bipartisan among voters, bipartisan among politicians in the opposite directions. US politicians absolutely adore surveillance and always want more. The surveillance greed knows no bounds, and is supported by basically everyone at all levels of governance.

A private organization that is tied into governments and police departments across the country have cameras everywhere that can track license plates and have 24-hour video for tracking people and it is completely unregulated.

Flock has also set themselves up on a way to intentionally make both themselves and their customers largely unaccountable to the public through legal channels.

Most people do not want to be surveilled all the time. Most police departments would like to surveil everyone all the time. City governments tend to do what the police department wants unless a lot of people get mad.

Some things that people dislike about Flock:

Flock has had a a number of security issues where people have demonstrated that the cameras could be accessed easily by anyone because of (IIRC) the use of default passwords.

Flock have said that they weren't doing this or that (I don't recall the exact details, I think initially they may have said it was just recording license plates), but then people found out they were doing a lot more than that.

Flock and police departments have been found to have been doing way more than using the cameras to investigate crime, including stalking friends and lovers and exes, and in one case one of the guys was found to have been regularly watching a young girls gymnastics gym a lot.

Because it's one of the actually visible bricks of the modern end of privacy, people are mad about it and there's multiple actions against them but it's all useless as they're here to stay and multiply. There's so many other bricks way worse and insidious, we the people simply can't fight every single brick these people are paid to develop.

The majority of the time in the US when the power of the state is expanded at the expense of the rights of voters, it's done by providing big optional benefits to voters, and starts out with strong privacy protections which are salami-sliced away.

Tracking people by their smartphones? Voters get smartphones out of it, and the state supposedly needs a warrant to track them (except when they don't). And they can always just not get one.

Tracking people's every purchase? Voters get credit cards, cashback, purchase protection and online shopping out of it. And they can always just use cash.

Tracking people's media consumption? Voters get free/super cheap ad supported media, the widest selection the world has ever seen. And they can still buy in stores with cash if they want.

Access to people's photos, no warrants required? Voters get great quality cameras on their phones, and free basic cloud backup in case their phones are ever damaged or lost. And you can always disable it.

An always-on microphone in every home? Voters get huge, incredibly cheap TVs with 4K netflix/Disney/whatever, incredibly cheap smart speakers etc. And the microphone only turns on when it hears certain things.

Flock's problem is they've done the big power transfer without providing the corresponding payoff, and too quickly.

>Flock's problem is they've done the big power transfer without providing the corresponding payoff, and too quickly.

Their problem is they believed their own bullshit and thought they were offering people a good deal that basically amounted to "the government 1984s you more than they already do but your package thief gets arrested for it".

Ignoring the fact that that deal is not necessarily good, if they had been slightly scummier, not given two shits about actually reducing petty crimes against the people and instead set out to help municipalities collect civil fines they probably could have gotten away without scrutiny for a very long time and gotten their systems deeply entrenched. The useful idiots would've eaten it right up with the flimsiest of pretexts so long as each segment of useful idiots was peddled to individually.

To borrow an idea from Nilay Patel of The Verge, all the other items in the parent comment describe consumer products. People like smartphone cameras and cheap TVs and effortless data backups, and they'll put up with some significant problems if it gets them great consumer products. When it's a concrete benefit weighed against an abstract harm, the benefit usually wins.

A massive network of surveillance cameras is not a consumer product. For most people, it's an abstract potential benefit of crime reduction weighed against an abstract definite harm to privacy. Definite usually wins against potential.

What I don't understand is, there are plenty of other incumbents that provide a similar service. I suspect Flock uniquely gets the treatment it does due to good branding, fast adoption, and broader association with Silicon Valley.

ie, most people cannot name the competitors, who were already in the space

Most people here are missing the point.

Flock isn't just a private mass surveillance corporation that leases cameras and infra to police departments. We've had that since digital cameras and the internet.

What Flock sells as its core product is "AI" surveillance and policing. What that actually means is that Flock trains their own statistical models on the data their cameras passively collect. Flock sells access to those models as a "one click" crime solver.

The result is not only the massive expansion of public surveillance, but the replacement of actual detective work with statistical modeling. By using a statistical model to "solve crime", police departments get to launder their responsibility away to the magic AI black box.

It seems reasonable that Axon, the #1 police body camera vendor, would benefit from a national social media wave of hate towards it's competitor Flock.

People who get angry enough to tear down the Flock cameras in their area get rounded up and classified by the Feds as "leftist terrorists".

Axon gets a major boost to it's revenue by landing fat .gov contracts for it's own version of 24/7 surveillance.

Government employees who approve the contracts get rich on insider trading.

https://www.axon.com/

There is pressure on both sides of the issue. A lot of people prioritize security over privacy. My subdivision has a single entrance. I've been lobbying the HOA members to support installing a prominent camera there to dissuade thieves. It's less important to me that it works then that it is visible. (I have one at my driveway entrance; the one at the subdivision entrance would help the whole community.)

I would certainly not support a Flock camera wired into their network, but do support a camera limited to HOA control. It would make me feel a little easier about trips away. The potential loss of privacy in my comings and goings seems like a reasonable price to me.

You get burglarized a lot?

A little. In the last one the culprit was caught on a game cam, the property was recovered, and the burglar did some jail time.

Is your community experiencing an epidemic of theft that needs dissuading? So much that you feel unsafe taking trips away from your home?

When my wife and I moved into our previous house (in a bit of a rough neighborhood), the owners before us had an ADT security system installed. We didn't re-up the contract, but we kept the sign.

If you didn't know - depending on the contract (who owns the hardware), plus the specific type of hardware it is, you can often move the monitoring to a different company and/or self-monitoring. There are national independent monitoring companies that will help you set this up.

(it feels weird to be advocating a different centralized surveillance solution in a thread about Flock. So I'll just add Fuck Flock!)

If they put up a fake camera, what happens when an incident occurs and the footage is requested? Does it just become an internal secret that it’s not a real camera?

On the other hand, installing a real camera means costs associated with monitoring so you also need to convince everyone it’s worth that cost.

I think of it as a scarecrow.

> I've been lobbying the HOA members to support installing a prominent camera there to dissuade thieves.

Do you actually get thieves or have you worked yourself up over nothing?

Congratulations if you've never been burgled. I've been hit by it three big times and dozens of small ones, mostly in suburbia. If you haven't I can see why you would put a higher priority on privacy.

Mostly because we have almost no proof that cameras actually deter anything, it's just intuition.

If I had to guess, burglary happens due to economic factors. How rich are you compared to the people around you. If you're extremely rich and everyone else poor, then yeah, you're gonna be robbed. If Elon Musk moved into my neighborhood and built a 100 million dollar mega mansion, he will be ransacked. He'd have to put up fences and have armed security. That's why he doesn't live in my neighborhood.

In the worst case, you're paying the privacy cost for... nothing. You prevent nothing.

In the best case, you prevent some thieving.

So, I don't know where it lies. We need controlled studies on this for sure, not just intuition.

My neighbor caught a burglar on a game cam. The responding deputy recognized him, got my neighbor's property back, and the thief did jail time. That's exactly the result I'm hoping for.

Why is it OK for everyone to carry a surveillance device (smart phone) everywhere they go, but installing a camera on a public roadway is not OK?

I don't understand the hatred for Flock. And I don't think the complainers see the irony of tweeting complaints about Flock from their iPhones.

> Why is it OK for everyone to carry a surveillance device (smart phone) everywhere they go, but installing a camera on a public roadway is not OK?

I don't live-stream my phone's camera to people with guns empowered to shoot people?

And the police can't use my phone camera to track down where their ex-girlfriend has been going for the past two weeks.

Because I get to (ideally) control when the camera records?

The phone is fine anyways; Google/Apple knows what's best for me.

In theory, the phone camera (and microphone) are not supposed to be on 24/7 and sending that info to a 3rd party. Whether that can be known for sure is probably known only to the hardware/software manufacturers. Supposedly, the Russian app Max randomly switches on the camera (can't find a citation for that now), so you can use that as an example of how far it could go.

We have protections for smart phones which limit when a police department can search for them. Further, it's harder for police departments to get at the contents of a phone.

Flock cameras provide no barrier for police departments to use them (hence the police using them to track their exes). It provides cops with the ability to target and ruin the day of someone they don't like for whatever reason they like.

But further, these cameras are coordinated and the system is designed for easy access of the data for the entire network. Your cellphone and other's cellphones only track them. There is no easy access network that anyone could use (except for maybe apple/google) and the main information they'd get is location data, not footage. And critically, I can turn my cell phone off.

It gets further messed up in that flock can grant access to their surveillance system to private individuals, where there is absolutely no legal barrier to what they can look up. That means if they want to start building advertising profiles, make hiring decisions, or just want to stalk their exes, they can.

I don't really have a problem with a CCTV system. I have a problem with a giant network of cameras recording everything which is built for easy access and tracking of individuals.

Cellphones aren't that. But to the extent they could become that, I oppose that as well.

> Flock cameras provide no barrier

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine

> In 2026, the Supreme Court limited the application of the doctrine to digital location data as well. Chatrie v. United States held that law enforcement conducts a Fourth Amendment search when it compels Google to provide a user's historical location information, even though the data is held by a third-party techonology company.

That's not a refute. As I said, flock is providing no barrier. It's the responsibility of the cops to not use the system illegally.

And the police don't really care [1]. You could almost certainly do that audit nationwide and find huge portions of the police force breaking the law routinely.

That said, I'd certainly support legislation which forced these surveillance systems to require any who wants to use the system to present a search warrant. And to enforce the parameters of that warrant and not allow for searches exceeding it. But I imagine flock wouldn't like that. After all, their entire business model is providing fast and broad searches without requiring a warrant.

[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/georgia-cops-keep-get...

imo, just because something bad exists doesn't mean other bad things are now allowed to exist, but instead focusing on improving "bad thing".

Not really comparable between the two:

Smartphone:

- camera mostly offline unless something is happening

- recording time is usually short and focused on that thing happening right now, not everywhere

- the point of view is usually close to ground, aka less things to capture

- mostly if not always is done with a human carrying it, so you are aware of that recording

- not connected to any analytical AI software that fingerprints everything passing by

Flock:

- cameras are always online

- recording is always on 24/7 and on a wide angle

- usually at high elevation so it exposes more (like a swimming pool in your house)

- stealthy compared to a human holding a cam, just another pole in the street.

- and most importantly, that differentiate flock from even other CCTV let alone smartphones, is the network and the AI analysis that are also directly connected to law enforcement who happen to abuse it.

So yeah it’s not it even close, if you see some stranger standing next to your house for few hours let alone with a smartphone recording your house and pool, sure hell you will report them or go and confront them, not the case with flock.

From the original thread:

> Why would you want to live in an area that has that creepy of a tech product facing the pool? I wouldn’t want the hoa or an enterprising creep of a cop spying on my kids or myself either.

You've all spent two decades strapping microphone/camera/gps combos to the side of your head and filling your homes/cars/tvs/fridges with big tech cameras and microphones but this is the line apparently.

I'm not well versed in American privacy expectations but it seems kind of arbitrary from an outsiders perspective.

Really, the standard argument "There's a X% loss of privacy, why expect any privacy at all?"

It wasn't lost or even taken, people voluntarily paid to have it taken away.

Would accepting these cameras be easier if you all paid $25 a month for it?

I don’t know what you’ve been doing, but I have spent the last decade continuously reducing my exposure.

First off, I don't enjoy the intense kind of Internet surveillance we have today; the advertiser tracking and logging of everywhere we go and everything we see. I think most sessions should be kept private, just between me, my ISP, and Google/Microsoft.

However, I am perfectly fine with Flock (or other) cameras existing and providing services on behalf of government. If the tech exists to watch public spaces all the time and massively process the data, then so be it; who can stop it? So there are abuses: any system can be abused, so improve the controls and stop corruption at its root, not its symptoms.

I bet that most anti-Flock people lobby hard for bodycams on police, and they thrive on those amateur social-media videos that appear to depict "police brutality" or "ICE overreach" on the streets. It only seems fair, that if amateur video can be leveraged to whip the public into a righteous frenzy, that professional video networks should be in place as well.

Lastly, I don't mind the folks who are chopping down Flock trees. I think it's kind of adorable, actually. I believe that Flock should've used better care and highway safety standards to install the things, rather than hastily throwing them in any open space. You kids with your axes like President Washington's cherry trees! Power to the people!

If you've done nothing wrong you've got nothing to hide, right?

Personally I see no worthwhile reason the state should be able to track the location of every person at any time. Phones make this bad enough, but at least that's warrant required and requires active intervention. Passive tracking of everybodies actions through total camera surveillance is a brutal thought, no?

No, actually it's more than that.

While your premise is true, it's also true that if I have done something wrong then I have no problem being called out and brought to justice on those merits.

Someone who is doing wrong hopes to be disciplined. Many criminals secretly just hope to be caught so they can stop doing wrong. It seems nearly absurd that criminals who "have something to hide" continually just cover up more and more and act covertly, as if they could never be found out.

If I did something in public that was so egregious that a camera recorded me and it could be used as evidence against me, I hope that it would.

Likewise, if I were involved in any dispute or crime, as a witness or victim, and there were surveillance that indicated my role was innocence, bystander, or victimhood, I would hope that the evidence showed that as well.

I don't have any illusions, in the face of corruption and oppression, that surveillance will be entirely fair, but it can be widespread and equally applied, and it's only through its ubiquitousness that it will be ultimately effective.

> Someone who is doing wrong hopes to be disciplined.

Between the op and this comment you have to be trolling. Or you are so clueless to how the real world works you are equivalent to a child. Either way you shouldn't post.

Can someone explain to me why you wouldn't want a camera accessible to police monitoring the comings and goings of your residence? Seems it would make it trivial to catch any criminal behavior.

And the pool makes sense as well as pools are incredibly dangerous. If children are regularly breaking in and swimming at night, which has been known to happen, it's a huge liability to residents not to mention the possibility of someone drowning

I guess it could be private effort (everyone I know has a ring or Google home type system monitoring their residence 24/7), but I think the hysterics around Flock is mostly an online phenomenon.

> Can someone explain to me why you wouldn't want a camera accessible to police monitoring the comings and goings of your residence?

You can't be serious.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/08/02/how-pol...

"Flock’s array of license-plate cameras was built to fight crime. But at least 50 law enforcement officers were charged with or accused of misusing it and other systems."

They're stalking people with them.

Is this net bad behaviour that was added due to Flock, or was it a bad actor who happened to use Flock?

Agreed that it's bad behaviour, and that we don't want police overstepping. But I don't see how the use of Flock by police can't be monitored in a way, which catches or even eliminates this issue.

> Is this net bad behaviour that was added due to Flock, or was it a bad actor who happened to use Flock?

Every tool we give to cops gets widely abused.

Which is precisely why we should be slow to provide them with new ones.

Yes, surely if we add more surveillance then the problems of surveillance will be solved.

Police have bad behavior because it's de-facto allowed. Police have very little accountability. They can do whatever they want and nobody really cares in a way that matters. The department protects them, courts go light on them, and prosecutors don't prosecute. If you surveil the police, it doesn't matter. You can catch the police killing someone on camera and they're not going to jail.

When bad behavior is allowed, and said bad behavior "helps" your life in some way, why wouldn't you do it? It's a matter of incentives. We build an incentive structure where police are rewarded for being awful. So the end result is the police are awful basically by construction. They can't not be awful.

You're absolutely right! If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. That's why I installed a camera in your bathroom and made it publicly accessible to the internet. If somebody commits a crime in your bathroom, they'll be trivially caught.

Find me some evidence that Flock ever helped catch a criminal.

This assumes the police are always upstanding and never have ulterior motives. Which has proven not to be true. [0] and tons of others

[0] https://www.kcra.com/article/new-bedford-police-officer-on-l...

This assumes that the benefit of allowing police to effectively do their job outweighs instances of abuse of that power.

I don't get this argument. Police aren't perfect therefore police shouldn't be granted the ability to do their job?

Police already can't do their job because we select for sub-90 IQ cops.

Giving idiot cops abusable tools is PURE AND UTTER STUPIDITY. If you think otherwise, I can't wait for those same idiots to kick in your door despite you having done nothing wrong due to some false accusation by a clanker and show you the error of your mistaken train of thought.

If by that you mean we formally select for police with lower intelligence, that's not true; it's an Internet urban myth. If you meant something along the lines of the job's conditions and circumstances intrinsically selects for people with lower intelligence, I mean, I disagree, but you could have the debate.

"that's not true; it's an Internet urban myth."

Jordan vs City of New London, year 2000, US 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals - try again.

Yes, this has come up several times on HN before. In a single municipality, with a population of 27,000, more than 25 years ago, one person was declined for a job on the basis of being overqualified. Meanwhile, virtually every major police department in the country administers a form of cognitive testing to all new recruits, and many require post-secondary schooling.

Single municipality? No. Learn what the Wonderlic score is and how it was used in the 80s and 90s. Police departments used to have an IQ cap of 110 (about 27 on the Wonderlic score scale) and would not hire applicants with higher Wonderlic scores.

Try again - you're arguing with someone that's been in court over this.

I'm familiar with Wonderlic and would be very happy for sources on this, because the only sources I've ever seen have been that dumb New London case.

What sources are you using? The og reporter did provide a source but you have not.

Just want to say that I went looking for cases other than New London and found nothing. You've got something interesting to share here, share it!

Nobody's taking away their ability to do their job. What we're trying to do is make sure that the police don't abuse their power, that their use of power is accountable, and that they can be held liable for it when they do abuse it.

Police have to get warrants for searches as well, and nobody seems to be saying that that stops them from being able to do their job.

You're saying two separate things.

We should make sure police don't abuse their power. That's what auditing and strict access controls are for. If someone abuses it, they are held accountable.

But that doesn't mean you need a warrant for everything. It's much like police have guns and can use them at their discretion, but every time an officer draws a weapon of fires is brought under scrutiny. It works exactly the same way. Imagine if police had to go to a judge before they were able to draw their weapons!

But Flock cameras aren't a gun, and they should be held to the same standard as any other information-gathering - it should require a warrant.

I have neighbors and that’s good enough. We all think Flock is creepy and nobody wants to be listed in a database. At this point everyone’s had their PII leaked more than once, so everyone knows the risk.

I personally have an NVR that isn’t connected to the internet and I encourage others to do the same if they want cameras.

The police aren't your friends

This isn't true. Most police are your friends. The problem is a few are not your friends and nobody can tell the difference until it is too late.

Privacy. Controlling your own data.

If it was just 2-4 weeks of camera footage archives accessible to local police with paper trail on an as-needed basis, I doubt there would be much opposition.

But then this happened in my county:

https://www.lakemchenryscanner.com/2026/06/19/prosecutors-sa...

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety

Benjamin Franklin, Philadelphia, 1756.

“Where there is no law, there is no freedom.”

John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1689)

Ah yes, laws, notoriously non-existent before the introduction of camera surveillance.

The irony of this quote, is it's about a communities right to fund their own defense when the greater powers (London at the time, federal gov't now) will not provide what is needed. It's about a community having the power and holding that power. The flock business model is precisely this. Those who pay for the cameras decide how it is used. Your participation in local government will have greater and faster impact in the use of your local ALPR technology than the federal government will have for a long time.

Have you seen American cops?

If only everything worked perfectly as intended. In the real world there are unintended consequences of most things we do and we need to balance.

The question isn't what good can these do, the question is does the good outweigh the bad? At best we can say the jury is still out on that question - and we can only say that on the assumption that Flock and the law (likely both) does something about the ways the system can be abused.

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