Police officer arrested after tracking ex-girlfriend on Flock over 2k times | Hacker News Reader

Police officer arrested after tracking ex-girlfriend on Flock over 2k times

cnn.com

104 pointscocacola130 comments

This is just a drop in the bucket. There have been at least 50 cops charged with using flock data to stalk ex partners and women they are interested in!

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

LOVEINT strikes back, eh?

Who watches the watchers?

Abuse of the privilege should be harsher as the privileges grows.

Is this the first time that Flock has proactively alerted a customer to abusive behavior without being asked to do so?

After 2k times, they couldn't resist anymore. /s

>“It’s a very effective tool and we don’t want to be judged on the poor decisions made by one officer.”

Yeah, I bet you don't.

LOVEINT is likely highly undernoticed.

I am unsure if I'm 100% anti-Flock, but requiring a court order or exigent circumstance to look at any Flock camera feed may be necessary.

This is where I'm at. It's a valuable, powerful technology, but police should absolutely not be allowed to just use it for whatever they want.

Shut it all down until we build a framework for handling this kind of power responsibily.

At the absolute very least - access should be aggressively logged and analysed.

And shut it down.

Given that America selects its cops like I select my cheeseburgers at my local joint, I don't think any framework will suffice.

Frameworks only work when there are consequences for not following them.

This is based on a belief that courts or government do put and will always put regular people first. Which is again and again proven wrong.

Flock is a ThinThread / Trailblazer level domestic surveillance tool. How did we handle those as a nation?

In a weird way, I think real time referendum is going on as we speak.

With all of the privacy concerns of Flock, at least in the interim it’s a useful honeypot for criminal law enforcement.

Completely agree that there is a possible silver lining of exposing some of these. However, even if they get fired from this department, they often just get hired later by their buddies in the neighboring county.

> Police officer *arrested* after tracking ex-girlfriend on Flock over 2k times

What’s your point? The bar to arrest him is higher than the bar for termination so it’s highly likely he’ll be fired at the very least, especially if he’s charged. Also, more broadly, what I mentioned above is a general statement about firing/hiring practices after cases like this one.

Public records and databases available to citizens is a potential control against these folks getting hired again in positions of power and trust in the future (positions that warrant a greater level of accountability, imho). It is a form of append only public distributed trust ledger. Correlate such datasets against your local law enforcement staffing continually if their hiring criteria is suboptimal, using a combination of FOIA/FOIL requests and on the ground activism/investigative journalism.

The IJ Database of ALPR Abuse - https://ij.org/the-ij-database-of-alpr-abuse/ (181 incidents documented, as of this comment)

I have to assume this is just the dumbest of the criminals that are getting caught. I don't know why it takes 2K cases to determine "hey, this might not be above board...".

It's sounds like it was detected only after Flock turned on their AI auditor. Kinda concerning no one was looking at the data previously. Unless the target is the most slippery criminal mastermind and is evading police several times a day in broad daylight, 2000 searches by the same user is almost certainly an abuse of the system.

They say that themselves: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49468552

> it’s a useful honeypot for criminal law enforcement.

Only if they do it 2k times.

Anyone notice how the exact number of searches is 2048, a power of 2. Weird coincidence, I guess.

I guess I'm a heartless engineer, because I could never imagine myself loving (obsessing over) someone so much that I would feel a need to check in on them 2,000 times.

How do people find jobs where they can spend this much time doing things that aren't part of their job?

shut it down!

So the limit is 1.9k times? /s

They must really want to use this tech on us if they're willing to throw their own under the bus for using it "wrong".

Regardless, hemming and hawing about lack of access controls and rogue (i.e. not using to do their job properly) cops is implicitly saying that this system could/would/should exist if it has "proper" access controls, whatever that means. It's like seeing a slave labor gulag and saying that the prisoners need better recreation ad more frequent laundry as if that would make it not fundamentally a gulag. To say things like access controls need to be fixed or tied to warrants is advocating for turd polishing. Even with proper access controls the purpose of these systems is to create misery at the hands of the state. The turd is still a turd even if it's shiny.

The aristocrats have had to split their treasure with the thugs since the beginning of time and this represents a very real chance to keep huge swaths of that treasure for themselves. Finally they can automate away doing violence against anyone who threatens the social order when it used to be an unavoidable cost of doing business.

It's not just cops.

Flock employees themselves have allegedly watched a pretty questionable stuff, for example kids' gymnastics room: https://www.gadgetreview.com/flock-safety-employees-watched-...

Available tech will be used. If it will be used, there will be instances when it is abused. In banking world, people often have access to data from lx, tr and other data brokers, and even though access and use is rather heavily tracked, you still have people checking things they shouldn't.

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