Flock Claims It's the First Company to Expose Police Misuse of Surveillance Tech | Hacker News Reader

Flock Claims It's the First Company to Expose Police Misuse of Surveillance Tech

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8 pointsspeckx6 comments

Flock isn't even finding the abuse or exposing the abuse. Sometimes it's their customers (police) discovering the abuse - if they actually perform audits like they should, but usually it's citizens submitting FOIA requests for data and discovering the abuses.

This isn’t true. Flock has an entire team dedicated to creating these auditing tools.

That’s why we hear about abuse of flock over abuse of axon which does not offer those tools.

Show me an example of Flock (i.e. a Flock employee or official company record) exposing a cop for abusing their systems. Providing auditing tools to the customers to discover abuse is not exposing the abuse. If they were exposing the abuse they would be publishing publicly when officers submitted searches that violated a search policy, which they could do with their 'transparency' portals. But they'll never do that.

That doesn’t make any sense at all.

You’re right I guess in that flock isn’t themselves going through audit logs I don’t believe but everything else is incorrect.

I don't really think it is Flocks job to do the auditing. Flocks job is to make auditing possible and to surface abuse to the parties involved in policing the usage.

Deflect all you want - nothing I said was incorrect or nonsensical. Flock only provides auditing tools because they're required to for compliance reasons. Then they use the tools as PR to essentially say 'look we're catching bad cops' which is not the case. As I said from the beginning - the responsibility for catching abusers is passed on to the customers and citizens doing FOIA requests. Flock is not 'exposing' the abuse at all, they're facilitating it and passing the moderation responsibilities down. Their CEO is a compulsive liar and sucks at PR.

Flock has an entire team enabling abuse from local to federal and others. The whole point of Flock is to surveil and that is an abuse of privacy. No wonder the CEO has to hide the image of his house. I'd be scared for my life too, if I were pissing off the public so bad.

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