Flock is rolling out a voluntary severance program
neowin.net
neowin.net
"Leviathan": The full name certainly strikes fear. One of my ancestors brought his family over from Scotland on the Leviathan which was a captured-and-repurposed German passenger vessel. We can imagine: it was ginormous. has an interesting derivation if we take it apart into component parts: they would be recognizable as good guys, or denim jeans I guess. Since Semitic roots standardized on the triple-consonant, we may see ancient tongues incorporated for this one.
"Be-el-ze-bub": "Lord of the Flies", of course; the implication of the English name of the novel about those good children on a desert island, who lived in interesting times. A theophoric name. Shares a root with "Ba'al" of the Tanakh. Glottal stops FTW.
"Nazgûl" -- mainly sounds like "ghoul" to us! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazg%C3%BBl#Etymological_conno...
Godwin's Law endures
I think you would be surprised. Now, whether or not the average local politician is indifferent is not the same as the average person.
What's really true is that people are, 99% of the time, not actually given that choice. For "revealed preferences theory" to work, the people involved would need to consistently have a free choice between two options. And for people who have had their finances gradually stretched and stretched over the past 40 years of growing inequality, "cheaper but worse" is not a free choice.
It's true there are people without choice, but most people aren't without choice, and they choose convenience.
People initially chose Facebook because it truly offered a novel and improved service, and the true cost users would pay for it wasn't obvious to anyone yet. The "wall", chronological friends-only feeds, etc. provided genuine value, and at that point the public at large were almost completely oblivious to how much personal data was being collected from them (and even less as to how it might be used in ways counter to their own interests). Once they'd fully captured the vast majority of user share, Facebook clawed back value by deprecating the chronological feed, serving ads and "high-engagement" posts in place of friend submissions, and generally ramped up their data harvesting significantly further since.
Most people would agree that the service is far worse than what they initially signed up for, but feel like there's no longer a viable alternative that would allow them to maintain the same level of communication with the people they care about.
Facebook users are not "choosing convenience" by staying on the only platform that all of their friends and family use exclusively. They're effectively held hostage by network effects that were intentionally planned and designed around producing that lock-in effect and guaranteeing that all potential alternatives either withered on the vine or were absorbed (e.g. Instagram). To the extent there's a "choice," it's a coerced choice on purpose.
Come on, you're trying to tell me that people didn't understand that when they give someone a thing, that someone has the thing they gave them?
> provided genuine value
Yes, the convenience.
> how much personal data was being collected from them
"They collected it; I didn't give it to them."
> but feel like there's no longer a viable alternative that would allow them to maintain the same level of communication with the people they care about.
Yes, "the pesky convenience is forcing me."
> Facebook users are not "choosing convenience" by staying on the only platform that all of their friends and family use exclusively.
"My friends and family are forcing me."
Despite my comments, I'm not totally against the use of Facebook, but I am against the surrender of personal agency and blame-shifting these comments are demonstrating.
This is a bad faith argument, because Facebook collects far, far more than "the thing they gave them".
Wasn't it just last year that it became known how Facebook and Instagram apps track your browsing through WebRTC? That alone is far far more than people knowingly give them.
Phone calls, knocks on doors, emails, regular meetups at places.
But Americans are raised from birth with the idea of “freedom” and a camera pointed at you recording your every move is antithetical to that. They somewhat tolerate it in private establishments like malls and restaurants but not in public spaces.
Those departments buy their products. If they took that angle publicly I bet many departments would suddenly been much less interested in buying/renewing. Accountability seems to be super unpopular (which says A LOT) with their customers.
Like, when the police were saying "we can't turn on body cameras all the time because it might violate victims rights" the correct response from axon was "we also happen to sell a very expensive victim redaction software on a separate SKU, until you buy that probably just want to let your officers use discretion wink-nod."
(I am maybe unfairly assuming here that their actual intent was to make money rather than protect the public from police abuses. I'd love to hear from folks at Axon if that isn't true!)
Maybe offer up a few token cases where they caught abuse and the cop got in trouble or something changed as proof.
Nope. You’re right, they ran right into that wall.
I wonder what Paul Graham says to the Flock executives now?
Facebook got a lot of mileage out of that, running long after public scandals confirmed the early hints of possible sketchiness, back when Google was an attractive alternative.
Though I don't know that's still necessary. The job markets are different now, since there's not many tech employment options that aren't either sketchy or reviled. Anti-AI-worker sentiment seems high lately, outside of HN circles -- much more widespread and negative than I recall any kind of perception of pre-AI tech workers -- yet there aren't a lot of non-AI employment options.
So, some Flock employees might want to leave, over ethics, social status, or company internal culture, but... if they end up at a AI company, they might soon still be seeing a lot of social negative feedback anyway.
("Hi, nice to meet you. ... Me? Oh, I work on, uh, software. ... Yeah, AI is really disrupting things in my field, too. It's been a bit rough, but we're hanging in there.")
For some reason, Flock became a rallying point on both the left and the right.
Flock provides nothing direct to the consumer which means this is going to get worse and Id stake a wager they rebrand after raising their next huge round.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/28/more-americans-oppose-poli...
Idk, doesn't seem that surprising that it ruffles more feathers.
In other words, since surveillance of the public by definition involves the public, the public should have a say in how it is conducted and the companies that attempt to profit from it should have their revenue streams depend on a healthy relationship with the public.
Now we just need the same shame for broader surveillance capitalism (Google, Facebook, AI companies, etc).
I'm sure most people who work for flock compartmentalize their jobs to "I work on fingerprinting vehicles" or "I work on advanced OCR", or "I work on creating camera to camera trajectory graphs". This way they don't need to think about (too often) the larger ramifications of what they are doing. When the press points out what is the reality and that most people are pissed at Flock then the employees likely have to confront what they do in a way that they never had to.
I can understand being pro-surveillance, but Flock is a case study in how not to implement surveillance systems. Believing that surveillance can be a public good can’t somehow turn Flock into a public good. It’s not.
I didn’t know that Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil was something people willfully embraced.
If you know you are and don’t care, culture fit ! :)
Being a magnet of attention as a despised surveillance corp has to be tiring
I mean look at NSA, Presidency, etc. "no conscious, no problem!"
Just "other" victims and imply they are all criminals somehow someway and you can dismiss any feeling of doing wrong
Historically, surveillance is used for good and evil. Certainly, Nazi Germany would have killed many more Jews if flock had existed during that time. Their surveillance was pretty primitive by modern standards, and they still managed to track, identify, and execute millions of Jewish people.
Ultimately, we have to take a step back and analyze if our incentives and systems are designed such that surveillance is used for good, and evil use is deterred. And, regardless of political affiliation, the answer to that analysis should be a resounding no.
Do we keep our officials and law enforcement officers accountable? When surveillance is misused, does anyone even know, let alone prosecute? How difficult is it to misuse surveillance? How much transparency is built-in to how the surveillance is used? These are the questions we should be asking.
Flock has caught criminals and has prevented further crimes from happening. This is something that cannot be denied. The existence of Flock has defended people, and it has provided value to society. Saying that Flock is a just technology company and police officers are just humans. That trivializes what these entities are doing in society.
>Nazi Germany would have killed many more Jews if flock had existed during that time.
Or they could have more efficiently got the Jews out of the Germany before things got to the point where things got more extreme. This could have resulted in fewer Jews dying.
>Do we keep our officials and law enforcement officers accountable?
I think AI will be a major boon to being able to audit such queries for irregularities. The fact you can have a relatively impartial system able to highlight things makes it harder to cover up things.
Wrap it up folks, we've officially reached the worst take on the internet.
This ignores all of history - this isn't how the Nazis operated then and isn't how fascists have ever worked. Forced eviction and taking property is still a crime against humanity, and it's not like other countries were welcoming large numbers of jews with open arms.