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Comment by lokar | Hacker News Reader

A weird take. They seem oblivious to the fact that real problem is not distrust of flock, it’s distrust of the police. They are in a situation where the public just barely trusts the local police, and a new surveillance system pushes them over the edge into hostility. They need to be working to gain much more trust.

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Winona, MN has a population of 20k. I've never been there, but if it's like any of the small towns I lived in, most people trust the local police. If anything, the usual small-town complaint is that the police are not doing enough about <x>, where <x> are the homeless dudes in front of the library, or package theft, or whatever.

In small towns, people distrust the federal government and big tech a lot more.

The wonderful thing about Flock is that you also get to be watched over by all the outside police you don't trust.

Exactly. People don't trust the government the police serve.

The whole "state/feds decree stuff that's bad for you but your city/town enforces it on you anyway because they'll lose grant bucks if they don't" regulatory paradigm has a lot to do with this because it's why so much of the government's interaction with everyone and everything is so net negative.

Edit: For example stuff like passing police harassing someone for smoking alone in a park because the grantbucks are dependent on it being smoke free happens because of all this.

>They seem oblivious to the fact that real problem is not distrust of flock

I really distrust flock in and of itself.

Police are bounded by evidentiary laws and warrant requirements, all of which legitimately do stand up in court. Flock is not.

So no, actually Flock itself is the problem. If Flock were willing to sign some consent decree that its data can only be accessed by police with a valid judicial warrant, for example, they probably could've headed off this entire mess.

But instead they called people "terroristic" for pushing back. Completely braindead move from the CEO.

The police have SWAT teams, guns, and jails, Flock does not. So I think the state security apparatus is a part of the problem, because if they don't like you and have access to surveillance technology, the outcomes can be far more severe than if Facebook doesn't like you, or the CEO of Flock doesn't like you.

People, broadly speaking, are totally fine with police having guns and jails.

Flock in absence of police is not that bad except for the whole "now we have no police" problem. Having police in the absence of Flock is totally fine, we've done it since forever.

I don't know. Since the advent of cameras we've caught a lot of cops beating the hell out of citizens. It probably happened a lot more before cameras. And then you'd catch a charge for resisting instead of the payout today.

Let's play this out: Cops don't exist. On video, you catch a person beating the hell out of a citizen.

...

Welp, sucks to get the shit beaten out of you, better luck next time.

I don't understand your point

You responded "I don't know, sometimes cameras catch cops beating people up" to the statement: "It is better to have cops than cameras."

If you have no cops, the cameras don't mean anything. It is now de facto legal for big people to beat up smaller people. Your cameras mean nothing. You can now film yourself getting beaten up every single day forever, and congrats, there's nothing to be done about it because there's no apparatus of the state to physically protect you.

I'm responding to the idea that police in the absence of flock is totally fine.

It is empirically the case that societies have been perfectly capable of thriving while having police...

If you understood my comment to mean "police are perfect", then I must've been unclear. That's not my position and not a position I'm interested in defending or discussing.

You did it! You burned the strawman! Gold star!

I’m not sure people think that way, or even understand the details. But they see lots of stories about police officers misusing the system.

I think people understand "rich tech CEO putting cameras everywhere offers no assurances of people's privacy and legal rights, instead opts to call them terrorists" perfectly well

The fundamental issue is that Flock doesn't care about people's privacy or rights. That washes out in a variety of ways including CEOs' statements, product-level security controls (thus creating the horror stories), and lack of legal commitments to protections.

I would personally be in favor of a fairly widespread camera network that had significant legal protections built in. Flock has demonstrated – in every possible way – they cannot possibly be the providers of such a system.

They’re oblivious to this fact because it’s not true. Most people by a substantial margin trust their local police.

Oh no, we distrust both.

But also, I dont understand all this hand-wringing. EFF has a clear easy solution [1]: Put all the data behind a Warrant. Problem solved. No trust required.

Wanna look up where a murderer drove? Go get a warrant

Wanna look up where a robbery suspect drove to? Go get a Warrant.

Divorce case hinging on one party's whereabouts on a certain date? Warrant.

Speeding tickets are automatically filed anyways.

[1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/08/too-little-too-late-fl...

The EFF is wrong. The clear solution is NOT COLLECTING THE DATA.

There is no reason or justification for us to live in a surveillance state, "protecting" the data with a warrant doesn't cut it.

Cutting down and destroying mass surveillance equipment is a patriotic action and should be applauded.

It should be a criminal act to attempt to build a mass surveillance apparatus, whether it's for law enforcement or private use.

Would Ring be considered a mass surveillance apparatus? Accuweather? Facebook? Google? The Internet?

So long as it is configured to be a mass surveillance apparatus, then yes. It is possible to have lots of data without organizing it in a way to enable mass surveillance. Google, Facebook, and recently Ring, are excellent examples. I don't know what AccuWeather is to comment on it, but I would say your ISP (what I'm assuming is what you mean when you say "the internet" since "the internet" is not any single entity) is likely not a mass surveillance apparatus, since with the implementation of https, the spying they can do is superficial at best

* The NSA has backdoored core routers of the Internet, to gather traffic and metadata. The metadata is not superficial, but since the Internet is no longer decentralized, the useful surface for spying has moved into the applicaiton domains. This is what I mean by "The Internet". * And FISA warrants do allow large-scale spying. * Not only is Facebook explicitly a mass surveillance (and mass influence) device, but there are multiple vectors into it for law enforcement.

I mean ALPR's have worked wonders in my town [1]. So I'll keep supporting them until we restructure all our cities to drastically reduce car speeds. Plus post 2020 police backlash, detective work has basically disappeared and clearing rates have cratered [2]. Police are now no longer able to (or are refusing to) solve crime "the old fashioned way", and the public has no real leverage to "make them do it".

So I get it, we're in the middle of a populist uprising against it, and it's nice to ride that wave of support. But behind the scenes, these two factors are driving adoption, and we'll keep coming back to it when the backlash eventually fizzles.

I say we should just use this backlash to put in the protections EFF suggests or fix the two underlying causes. Those are the options.

[1]: https://www.oaklandca.gov/Public-Safety-Streets/Traffic-Safe...

[2]: https://stateline.org/2025/11/24/why-clearance-rates-dont-te...

Issuing tickets doesn't require retaining any data on vehicles you aren't ticketing, you're conflating issues.

I'm not. There are two issues in my comment.

> I mean ALPR's have worked wonders in my town [1]. So I'll keep supporting them

With flock, citizens are concerned by the privacy implications of the state keeping a dossier of each citizen’s movements.

But once we assure citizens the flock cameras have already issued 500,000 speeding fines in a single town this year, no doubt they’ll come to support the cameras.

Perhaps the cameras could also automatically issue parking fines, to garner even more popular support!

Yes we should just always give in to populism’s demands and it’ll have no negative consequences ever /s

…oops [1]

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/18/headway/motor-vehicles-fa...

Have you driven 7th St. between Adeline St. and Linden St? I wonder if maybe the speed limit is too low. One good thing about not having automated systems like this is it allows natural breaking of rules that are poor rules to begin with, and there is effort in manually enforcing, eventually leading to change

“I wonder if maybe the speed limit is too low”

Super curious how anyone could think this. It’s not a highway, and there's pedestrians crossing. The buildings aren’t dense and the setbacks are large so maybe it “feels” like you should go faster but doesn’t mean it’s safe to.

And Oakland especially has really bad driving culture so I’m glad for this automatic enforcement.

Did clearing rate crater because there was a change or because the police is throwing a toddler tantrum strike and refuses to work?

Since outright refusal to do their jobs is more common than any real difficulty.

"I mean ALPR's have worked wonders in my town"

Among those wonders being nearly 200,000 tickets.

There are claims of safety improvements but strangely zero actual statistics about improved safety, measured speed is a proxy for safety but it has to be matched with actual casualty numbers and it is quite suspicious that these don't exist. Did the accident rate go down? Number of deaths or serious injuries?

>Police are now no longer able to (or are refusing to) solve crime "the old fashioned way"

This is pathetic, and I don't want to be controlled by robot overlords because local governments can't get their ducks in a row.

There are plenty of exceptions police can get to bypass warrant requirements. Think for example of stingers and other cell spoofing systems or the license plate readers they have on the front of their cruisers. Even if they do have to get a warrant judges are far more likely to simply grant any warrant request if it has to do with digital surveillance. Carpenter v. United States and Chatrie v. United States have outlined this behaviour, and in the wake of their rulings created the bias towards what are basically automatically approved warrants for such data.

What happens when say FBI gets a warrant for "foreign actors" and sends it to a FISA court in secret?

The problem is that the fourth amendment at least for the US has been filled with so many exceptions it might as well not exist. And even if an officer does violate your fourth amendment rights, good luck getting them punished for it, because qualified immunity.

> Speeding tickets are automatically filed anyways.

Not in States with coherent Constitutions.

These can be separate and both true.

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