Flock CEO's Address Spread Online as Surveillance Backlash Explodes
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I suppose we can start with all Blink, Ring and Nest Cams. Then we will continue with dash cam owners.
Like the CEO of Flock.
2. Building a mass surveillance dragnet and purpose-built tracking software and marketing it heavily to random local authorities.
Yep, totally the same thing...
Yes.
If they are using it to see when their amazon package got delivered, or for bog standard security purposes?
No.
this is whitepages reverse lookup
if he was just a guy chatting on the internet about cameras, sure, it would be doxxing, but he isnt. paparazzi have existed sonce forever
No one took away private detectives or paprazzi. But if you replace both with a 24/7 never resting and no additional money tracking system, everyone will be tracked. It's litterally the business model because the mass tracking of americans without a warrant is what makes these companies money, not the hardware.
As long as you feel fine having the government know absolutely everything you do, then keep supporting surveillance. I personally have nothing to fear, but I hate the idea that I am being surveilled by a private company.
I think we all have to fear police responding violently because Flock's sycophantic AI system told them with 100% confidence that we're the bad guy.
Flock's customers are data consumers.
Flock has every financial incentive to knowingly over-represent the reliability of their predictive analytics and actively conceal any issues with it.
If legally empowered and often armed end users are taking those representations at face value... well, there's the fundamental problem with Flock's business model.
It was hilarious and well deserved when people immediately started digging up his dirt in response and exposing stuff like extramarital affairs to the point he had to deploy lawyers. Even before that quote, journalists were using Google itself to search and discover his personal information, and Google's response was to blacklist the journalists. Funny how angry these billionaires get when their privacy gets violated, huh.
It's extremely obnoxious that these big tech executives subject us to surveillance only to turn around and buy back their privacy with their wealth. They should have exactly zero privacy. Doxxing? It's called sousveillance.
The stuff Flock is doing is going to be standard AI-driven surveillance in the future, and unless the actual practices are made into political third rails and made into criminal code violations, they will absolutely be legalized on some party line vote in the middle of the night.
Don't make it 'stop Flock,' make it 'criminalize AI-driven surveillance.' Denounce 'conspiracy to implement ai-driven surveillance' as an inherently immoral activity punishable by prison time.
“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work together for the benefit of all.” —- John Maynard Keynes
Guardrails because we cannot trust the human.
> The order came as The Texas Tribune was preparing to publish an investigation detailing how a state agency has devoted at least $30 million to building the state’s Flock surveillance network.
Lawmakers added $1 to Texans’ car insurance policies. That money paid for thousands of Flock cameras. - https://www.texastribune.org/2026/08/28/texas-flock-cameras-... - August 28th, 2026
Pennsylvania state senator planning bill to ban Flock, ALPR cameras - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49482256 - August 2026
https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/pa-state-senato...
In this thread, two posts up: people who want more powerful governments claim that "capitalism" is to blame for this state of affairs.
I'm genuinely curious how whatever you propose wouldn't be prior restraint.
The video capture is not the issue, but the data processing, retention, and sharing, which can trivially be regulated. CCTV for theft prevention and safety with a restricted retention period and no data sharing off the premises can remain legal. Data broker legislation adjacent.
Maybe?
> restricted retention period
Prior restraint.
> no data sharing off the premises
1000% prior restraint. In what world is this not abridging the freedom of the press?
Good luck.
Thanks!
Why does that freedom supersede all other guaranteed freedoms? For example the US constitution tries to protect its citizens from unlawful searches, etc. just as strongly as protecting the presses. Why do I have to sacrifice my freedom from searches to preserve Home Depot’s freedom to tape others?
Furthermore, no relevant court has found these to be "searches" or that they are "unreasonable."
Your "freedom from [government] searches" doesn't somehow make my Ring doorbell illegal.
There’s obviously a line somewhere though, right? Like if that same company put a camera in a bathroom stall?
So on one extreme with have CCTV parking lot cams, on the other we have bathroom stalls. It seems like we could find where spy cameras that exist solely to break citizens rights to privacy land on the spectrum and write laws around that.
The government can certainly be limited by statute (police may be statutorily required to obtain a warrant to use aggregated ALPR data or may be barred from using it entirely), and may already be limited by existing case law - the relevant courts have not yet decided.
Limiting Home Depot from streaming a traffic cam or CCTV footage from the confines of their publicly-accessible property is no different than limiting a news crew who would choose to capture the same footage and share it with the world. This is very basic freedom of speech/press - especially when the information isn't being individualized to any one target (as a credit bureau might do.) Everyone is being collected and processed equally.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorrell_v._IMS_Health_Inc. - and have a look at the panel of Justices that ruled in consensus, even Sotomayor joined the still-existing majority on this matter. GP's proposed legislation almost certainly runs afoul of this fairly-recent decision.
> There’s obviously a line somewhere though
For the limitation of the government, the line is called "reasonable expectation of privacy." Any reasonable person would expect there to exist reasonable expectation to privacy in a bathroom stall, and the user of the stall has generally taken affirmative measures to ensure the same: they closed the door behind them, locked it.
When you are outdoors, especially on public property, you generally have no "expectation of privacy." See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katz_v._United_States
You may be recorded, the things you are observed doing are admissible in court, etc. in places where you reasonably expect people to be able to observe you. Driving down a public, taxpayer-funded road is the quintessential example of "no reasonable expectation of privacy."
what about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States?
> A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere ~ John Roberts
I do get the separation from private companies and government. I'm not arguing that. But this ruling was specifically about using Cell data collected by a private company being used to violate the privacy rights of citizens.
I don't think a private company harvesting data from public spaces and then reselling it is loop-hole enough to say "press rights > privacy rights". And there's precedence from the SCOTUS to support my belief on that.
Carpenter didn't stop these companies from collecting historic cell site data, selling it privately, or giving it to police with a warrant.
https://www.npr.org/2026/08/22/nx-s1-5931446/flock-fallout-c...
The question is: will Axon enshittify their mature products in order to pursue that panopticon money?
It would be an historic first if they didn't
Or they'll be legalized piecemeal and you'll get sneered at by the useful idiots for opposing each incremental step based on principal.
and then before you know it the state has implemented its mass surveillance apparatus across the entire country. And we though china's social credits were bad? just IMAGINE what those predatory tech bros are cookin up.
I'd like a national poll on this principle. My guess is a vast majority would disagree with it.
Not as far fetched as it sounds even. Plenty of not-quite-a-crime things they could track if desired.
Go look at what HN was saying and upvoting during the big data era. Endless scheming about orwellian ways to identify and "dispatch enforcement resources" on the pettiest thing. We're talking like buy a spool of romex get a letter in the mail from the .gov reminding you about code compliance. Or combing through small business financial to try and identify businesses that probably aren't high margin enough to be complying with all the rules. Real "I'm watching you" crap like that. And we're all supposed to go along with it because these people have our best interests at heard and/or mean well.
You take these same evil individuals and replace database integrations with pervasive cameras and AI and they will impoverish us all by grinding us under the thumb of government and say it's for our own good.
What would be legalized? You realize that recording people in public is already legal, right? I'm puzzled where people are getting the idea that Flock is doing something illegal.
Honestly the nuance isn't that intellectually taxing and having to explain it to people in the tech space is tiresome.
Like it or not recording and photographing people in public, then selling that information is not illegal. Paparazzi do it all the time. You can point a webcam out your window, run ALPR software on the video feed, and sell access to query that information. Nothing about that is illegal. If it is, then please reference the laws that prohibit this.
People talk about privacy laws being violated, but in general privacy laws do not cover public activity. Privacy laws mostly focus on protecting communications and activities carried out in private.
There's a big difference between "X is illegal" and "X is presently legal, but my prediction is that the Supreme Court will, in the future, rule that X is illegal."
The word “Flock” is quickly becoming toxic, in the future we’ll be able to use it as a shorthand for all companies of this type. e.g. if I call something a cleanex everyone knows what I’m talking about regardless of whether Cleanex the company actually made the item being referred to. Similarly we’ll be able to just say “flock camera” and everyone will know what it is regardless of who makes the camera.
I still agree with you though ."Flock Camera" is very likely to become the general term for "public surveillance camera" and it will carry a negative weight.
At that point, though, there will be a large group of people trained on how to defeat a company like Flock.
Flock CEO gets his house blurred out on Google Maps and Zillow
However, if we lived in such a society, we wouldn't want tools like Flock to begin with.
edit: to be clear, we are far too corrupt a society to have things like Flock. The point of my comment was this irony.
In utopia, we would also not need Flock.
Privacy should be a human right.
I feel like the best solution is very tightly regulating and auditing this technology so it can only be used to benefit society.
We live in a world that is most corrupt and above the law, at the very top. Why would anyone trust that world? Trust is required for this technology to be willingly adopted.
I really don't believe this, nor do i believe any amount of regulation will actually prevent dipshit US cops from abusing it
Like when a cop wants to stalk his ex-girlfriend, or ex-wife. Who else is gonna solve this problem if not flock?
I disagree. What problems does it solve better than anything else? Any examples?
The best solution is to NOT LIVE IN A SURVEILLANCE STATE.
"If you exercise your rights, you will be hurt" - what a world to live in.
Maybe in liberal California (where your 80 year old grandmother has a duty to retreat), thankfully not in my state. A punch to the face can be fatal, and you don't have to take one. Also, what an idiotic idea that one must assume that a "punch to the face" is all that is going to follow - and not a knife, head smashing on the ground, etc. This is frankly disgusting.
> Sometimes being a piece of shit should result in an ass whupping.
Got it, sometimes lawfully exercising your rights should mean you befall violence: I am glad I don't live in whatever shithole area you reside in. Perhaps we should extend this ideology to voting for the wrong candidate? - If you don't vote for who I want, it should result in an "ass whupping." Maybe your property: if you don't give me the contents of your wallet, it should result in an "ass whupping." This is bully mentality, and isn't tolerated in polite society.
Would a cop in your state tolerate a punch to the face? How would you expect him to respond?
The law is not moral license. You can legally do lots of disgusting things, like threaten to murder someone over a non-lethal engagement. Lots of those disgusting things warrant a nice punch in the face, and crying about it or declaring the moral high ground isn't going to move the needle. Why are we cry-bullying and hiding behind threat of lethal violence? Pretty ironic that someone who would criticize "liberal" states for not letting you get away with murder somehow thinks THAT remedy is more civilized than run of the mill combat. You can leave your Grandma at home, this isn't about her, this is about you deciding what is legally permissible is the only thing that matters.
Definitely "bully mentality" to think fisticuffs shouldn't result in unilateral execution by unhinged randos. Summary execution is the "civilized" response. Would-be murderers probably shouldn't be giving lectures online. You astonish me.
2) If your argument is that flock cameras are illegal, take them to court.
So this small-town attitude was imported when people urbanized, and a lot of neighborhoods had this sort of grapevine as well. Furthermore, the urban centers established some distinct "brother's keepers" practices.
There were the City Directories. Before telephones, these were the White Pages and Yellow Pages. Your name, your occupation, your address. All your neighbors and the businesses on your street. All indexed and alphabetized handily. Everyone in the city would know what you did; they all got subscribed to these directories. These are invaluable resources for researchers today, so that we can find folks and know their professions, sometimes on a year-by-year basis.
Census reports were taken every 10 years. These can be highly unreliable resources! The census takers had no way of verifying information or investigating answers! They always took citizens at face-value, so it was the practice of new immigrants and criminals, and others in the shadows, to conceal the truth from the census takers. But nevertheless, some facts were obvious, and so there was good information gathered, and released by USGov, about household compositions.
Also, the newspapers have been a crazy treasure trove of information since their inception. I was literally able to track the movements of some of my relatives, because the newspapers in each town would report when a family member, or friend, visited someone. They would say if they came by car, and how long they planned to stay, and where they're from and all that. So anyone traveling in the 1930s and 1940s and so on, their movements were never "private" and you had journalists who acted as Human License Plate Reporters, ensuring that the whole town knew you were hanging out for the weekend!
A license plate is specifically a tracking number to identify a registered vehicle on a public road. The 4th Amendment gives you privacy inside of your car, but your car is not itself guaranteed privacy. Before Flock, police departments already had informally aggregated data from speed cameras, red light cameras, and toll booths. The distinction being that any evidence collected in such a way is purely circumstantial and still requires a warrant to investigate.
The big irony though of Flock plate readers is that because they're just tracking license plates, they're not actually that useful at solving meaningful crime. Realistically there are a small number of hit-and-runs that could be solved, and they can make certain investigations a bit shorter. And most of what we read about is officer directed stalking or harassment activities.
It's all of Flock's other advertised services that should really freak people out. The facial recognition, the audio scanners, the individual-level tracking databases - right now they're a fancy VIN lookup service. It's all the other stuff they're trying to sell departments on that are getting into really egregious 4th Amendment violations.
> Another prompt instructs the system to list everyone arrested more than twice in two years for “any offense,” exempting only narcotics arrests, and then says to map where those people live, retrieve the calls for service at their homes, and “do a workup on the top three individuals.” The prompt begins with everyone in the area who has an arrest record and ends with dossiers on three of them, chosen by the software.
> A “workup,” in Flock’s terminology, is a one-command background check. It starts with a name and a date of birth and returns what the department’s records and commercial data hold: vehicles, prior listings as a suspect, and, on a second screen, relatives, phone numbers, and online accounts.
This stuff is beyond the wildest fantasies of East Germany's Stasi, and it's going to be a whack-a-mole game dealing with all the baby Flocks that spring up if Flock itself can be shut down.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/flock-safety-os-investigate/
I feel like that's a bit of a false equivalency. The soviet secret police had surprisingly little hard evidence on anyone - part of the terror of these regimes is that they could act decisively with little more than a rumor or gossip and be free from scrutiny for any mistakes.
My thinking is if we can stop pervasive AI-driven surveillance we might be saved from a totalitarian regime who views The Handmaid's Tale as an instruction manual, and instead be able to settle for a run-of-the-mill corrupt authoritarian one.
There's the one where a guy was surrounded by cops with their guns pointing at him because of a flock fuckup. He had a partial plate match (as in, some of the digits matched, but not an exact match) with a plate that was lost or stolen (as in the plate itself was stolen, not the car it was attached to.) That one went viral because the guy was an editor at a magazine driving a loaner car
There's this one where a lady was pulled out of her car at gunpoint after flock flagged her as a murder suspect. This happened twice in a weekend. She was never suspected of murder, it was a mistaken flag. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/aug/28/milwaukee-p...
Flock doesn't require evidence for an alert to be put in their system. If you have access you can apparently just put out an alert saying someone is a murder suspect, and some police department will repeatedly drag a woman out of her car until the media embarrasses them publicly
Purely statistically, this is a good first-pass filter if you are looking for perps. Chance a random adult is arrested in a 8-year window: ~5%. Chance a former convict gets arrested in an 8-year window: ~49%. So, it is ~10x the rate. Makes sense, statistically, to start there.
https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/recidivism-am...
The potential for abuse is obviously massive, but the benefit to society is too.
as the ml improves, its tracking absolutely everything. they could rwll you the migration paths of the local racoons and coyotes, for instance
Warrants (are supposed to) have judicial oversight and are limited in their scope. There's also a paper trail attached to information obtained from a warrant.
In general, we need a digital bill of rights -- tech has changed and exceeded what the software written by the founding fathers can handle.