Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast

I came in to the thread anticipating a highly placed tptacek comment defending Flock without grappling with any of their numerous problems, and claiming that "regular people" love Flock. Weird how predictable that's become.

you have no concerns about erosion of privacy or mass surveillance of innocents? i don’t get it.

> normal people who think expediting the interdiction of stolen vehicles (which are vectors of violent crime) is a perfectly reasonable thing for a city to invest in. The effectiveness is dramatically oversold. This has literally happened to me. Called 911 midway through the theft, cops pulled it up on Flock, the best they could tell me was "they went towards the highway" (no shit, Sherlock). I saw the parts on marketplace a week later (definitely mine, unique staining), 2 hours after they were listed and called it in. The PD where the parts are wouldn't do anything unless my PD called, my PD said the officer in charge was on vacation so they can't do anything until he's back. Take a wild guess who hasn't heard anything back. This should be their ideal situation; they got called mid-robbery, and someone else located the parts afterwards. If they can't solve that with Flock, lack of information is not the holdup here.

I got caught by an ALPR 20 years ago. I've been confused about 1) what is Flock's innovation 2) why are people up in arm.

I don't know where you live, but if you lived in Chicagoland the advice for how to engage on this would be easy: there are 1-4 (depending on your muni) Facebook groups where all the meaningful policy discussion happens. Hold your nose and log into Facebook and look.

> Why would Craigslist stop Flock-related posts from going through? The only answer I can think of is something along the lines of a National Security Letter. That's because you lack imagination. 99 percent chance they are blocking you because they don't want "divisive political rhetoric" on the platform. Allowing a surveillance state is "apolitical" as long as it doesn't involve rocking any boats or making any noise. ... and NSLs don't do that. It would really be nice if people actually understood what NSLs were before blaming everything on them. Trust me, they are bad enough without inventing stuff.

But the cops can access the private land cameras. I would wager most small to conglomerate level business opt-in. Last I checked the Lowes and Walmarts of the US share this data as its locks down shoplifters quicker.

If you were able to write one 20 years ago, I dare say an LLM could whip one up super-fast. Or just search the internet and tell you where to find one. One of the risks of LLMs is that a lot of tasks go from "an expert could do this easily given a few weeks" to "anyone who thinks to ask an LLM can do this easily and get results the same day"

Any competent llm would write a script using opencv to extract the license plates. I did this with Gemini 3, mostly for fun and to test it's capabilities. Teslausb records all dash cam videos and auto syncs it to my nas when in wifi range. Yolo and opencv extracts and does ocr on any defected license plate, and puts it all on a map, along with trip information. Not particularly useful or interesting, and not something I would have done pre-llms, but the difficulty was basically writing a one paragraph prompt and using some free tokens

But not so much between "this person walked in my door and stole my stuff" and "I left the door to my house open and then I put my stuff in the doorway." Flock cameras are roughly that secure.

Characterizing vehicles based on stickers (which easily can indicate political leanings) is absolutely problematic. It's just not considered problematic by conservatives, given police in the US are overwhelmingly conservative.

And of course, it's compounded by being pooled. Like RealPage, ALPR services like Flock, Axon Fleet Hub, and Motorola Vigilant VehicleManager offer data laundering so that organizations that shouldn't be talking can communicate. Privacy laws now.

The real joke is that the 1984 system was already in place long before flock. We all carry phones. Either from tower records ot google advert tags, private industry already tracked our every movement. Licence plate readers? Why bother when every car now has bluetooth enabled and so is constantly prodcasting its LAP id. (Some cities have tracked cars this way for over a decade, mostly for traffic management.)

That's actually the one thing that does make sense: police has always wanted to be able to do this, but they legally can't. But they can reward a private company willing to do it for them, so that they can "ask for the data" without ever breaking the law.

“Fascism should rightly be called corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.” - Benito Mussolini

What's an iffy data center?

How many people here are YC people? Using Google doesn't make you a Google employee.

The problem isn't the surveillance of land; nobody is getting up in arms over someone pointing a camera out of their window to watch their neighborhood street occasionally. The problem is the scale. Flock is running a massive network of cams equipped with ML classification and segmentation algos, running 24/7, to identify and catalog plates, faces, and voices of everyone in view. It's a nation-scale realtime surveillance dragnet, and obviously not what our current legislation on public camera use was written to address. In my area, I pass by at least five Flock cameras driving to my grocery store, meaning that Flock knows how often I get groceries, who rides along with me, which stores I visit, and how long I spend at each location. They can infer my working hours and routine travel routes. They have the technical capability to analyze the spatial and temporal distribution of my movements, and could "flag" me when I travel at odd hours or to unusual locations if they so chose. I would have no knowledge of or recourse against that invasion of my privacy. Flock is profiting from arbitrage of the mismatch between current laws around camera use in public ("no reasonable expectation of privacy") that, when legislated, did not envision a future where cheap always-connected hardware would enable a single company to blanket the country in ML-enabled camera/microphone turrets. These aren't "just cameras in public", these are full-featured surveillance stations networked to a centralized database and powerful edge compute capability, enabling the systematic tracking of every citizen at a precision that rivals placing GPS tracking bugs on every car (which is typically illegal). And because it's a private company, none of this information is auditable by (or accountable to) the general public that is subjected to the surveillance. In my view, what Flock is doing is deeply unethical and a gross exploitation of both US citizens and the spirit of the law.

Imagine if your neighbor walked past your house every day and recorded your property with their phone camera. Imagine thirty strangers did that every day. Imagine being unable to walk more than two blocks out of your neighborhood before passing a random stranger standing up in a crows-nest on a telephone pole with a zoom lens camera photographing you and your kids and taking notes so they could sell your behavioral data to law enforcement and advertising agencies. Imagine several hundred strangers concurrently following you around your grocery store and silently monitoring your shopping habits. It’s okay though, these are public spaces, and you shouldn't expect to have power of consent over who is watching you.

It's more like the CNS of the golden-handcuffed wage slaves of the capital class.

> Speeding things up is one of the ways to deal with it. Making it a well-paid, high status job is another way to deal with it. Not easy. Not cheap. Involves fixing quite a few incentive structures as well and weeding out corruption... Yeah, I guess you're right, speeding things up a bit at the cost of everyone's privacy and liberties is going to be what they go for.

You are absolutely correct but you won't get anywhere here. I have relatives who are cops and lawyers and city councilmen. No cop is sitting in a back room somewhere tracking all the cars on every street trying to do, uh, whatever it is people here are claiming they are going to do to them.

There's clearly another vocal camp that's eroding HN: surveillance capitalists acting like everything's well and good, in the face of evidence that the opposite is widespread [0]. [0] https://www.404media.co/cops-keep-getting-arrested-for-using...

If they don't reduce crimes what do they do? Oh right they track inconvenient people

Whoops. Yeah.

That's a pretty astute diagnosis. The politology varies by county, but as far as this particular county goes, you've nailed it: lots of gun-totin' bubbas, and growing numbers of university-affiliated liberal-progressive intelligentsia who nevertheless have uncannily NIMBY politics.

A camera in 2026 is not the camera of 1996. Cameras today are connected to active and passive monitoring systems which are much more invasive to privacy. What will a camera be able to do in 2036?

> they don't actually represent any change from the status quo. Only in the sense that the frog has been boiled gradually. The mere presence of cameras in public spaces is not the inconsistency that you seem to think it is. A nationwide centralized aggregator is not even remotely the same thing as a privately owned corner store having a purely private video feed of the front door.

Can you find a dozen cases of cops using these to stalk people in the 90s? If not, that's a large change in the status quo, as that's what's been happening with Flock.

You get to sacrifice your life one or zero times in your life. Surely there are some terminally ill people who would do it?

Flock doesn't automatically catch people who killed someone. Red light cameras do catch people who run red lights.

I'm talking about red light cameras. Texas legislature ruled in 2019 that their photo evidence can't be used in court. Instead, a cop has to catch you in the act so now everyone runs red lights; I'm not even sure Houston puts cops on the traffic beat. And eventually you kinda entitle yourself to it too since the first part of your green light was spent waiting for other people to run their red light.

Make sure you're not looking at traffic control cameras. These are used to monitor traffic for the traffic lights.

They're all basically turned off by law, just not removed

Americans don't want to be optimal, they want to be free.

Totally legal. The operating theory of all of these cameras is that anything happening in public sight is by its nature not private. The federal government is dumping millions and millions of dollars into grant programs for municipalities to buy it… It’s a giant federal surveillance program disguised as decisions made by individual police departments. It’s hilarious and depressing to contrast the HN community reaction to Snowden versus the mostly meh response to flock.

Imagine representatives who did what voters actually wanted. There's probably a name for that. Representative democracy or something. As opposed to corporate representation.

And what happens to you? Has something happened to you? Or anyone you know who wasn't involved in something illegal?

Both of those two above cases involve tracking people both in public and in private. Furthermore the former involved compelling a company to fork over private information. Traffic cameras, by comparison, only record people's in public. A police officer isn't violating privacy laws by standing at an intersection and writing down the plates of cars passing by is he? Flock is just automating that task. The whole reason why we have license plates is to facilitate monitoring cars. If we really think that people have a right to keep their vehicular activities private, then surely the bigger privacy violation is the fact that we require cars to display unique identifiers in a prominent manner?

The police where I live are generally good, and I imagine that's the case many places. Treating police as the enemy, or a punching bag, is unfair and counterproductive. (I can't speak to any places that might have a lot of corruption or ill intent.) Places that aren't too corrupt, you'd be better off encouraging a partnership among citizens, police, lawmakers, and other officials. Which is how it's supposed to be. Everyone in the government has their respective duties, and they operate within a framework that's ultimately decided by the people. If, for example, police propose certain surveillance, to help keep everyone safe, within their scope, then sometimes someone with different or larger scope might need to say, yes, but there's also these other considerations. Eventually a decision is made by the public or their elected representatives, and everyone nods with respect, and aligns, and continues their respective duties within the frameworks.

Are you one of those guys who hates the cops until you need one? Do you also forget that cops are people, too?

Yes, but I'm not sure you can catalog all the features of the people you recorded and compile this into a real-time database that can be queried with relatively little oversight. I'm not a legal expert, but I suspect there would be both invasion of privacy (if private) and warrantless search/4th amendment/civil rights concerns (if law enforcement) concerns.

An individual setting up a network of 200-400 cameras throughout a city would not be lega because of property usage I would assume. Not necessarily because of the recording. A llone person doing this would definitely raise more eyebrows.

Your language is far too kind for the invasion of privacy and our human expectations of what ought to be permissible. It's not just about being "recorded" in public. It's about having all public excursions recorded, cataloged, and analyzed. What this panopticon of private surveillance is, is way more similar to "stalking" than "recording".