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City Learns Flock Accessed Cameras in Children's Gymnastics Room as a Sales Demo
- Bender 5mo agoOne of the previous discussions [1] [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47784045 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47784045
- aleksiy123 5mo agoWhile I think this isn’t great. Why is the camera there in the first place?? Presumably there are people that have access to it. And if you are demoing software that connects to cameras, then someone gave the sales guy access to those cameras. I’m also assuming those probably weren’t the only cameras…
- KaiserPro 5mo ago> Why is the camera there in the first place?? I imagine its for security. Ie if there are reports of robbery, you can find who did it. I know its not that popular in the states but its common elsewhere, but with better controls. (well, "better" as in controlled by shitty IoT devices) I think the thing with flock is just how poorly put together everything is. They are obviously insecure, and the entire network has massive holes in it. Yet its still being rolled out.
- ses1984 5mo agoWhy would a gymnastics gym get robbed? It’s just a bunch of smelly equipment that’s hard to sell and probably very little cash.
- tedggh 5mo agoLooting is done for fun too. It must suck to have kids show up for practice in the morning and some of the essential gear is gone. It doesn’t matter if it is inexpensive to replace, you still have to cancel class and take a day or two up replace it, file a police report, etc
- antiframe 5mo agoRight, but why is a Flock camera a better approach than: insurance, on-prem camera, etc. The Flock camera doesn't prevent theft. It increases remote viewing (especially if it's used in a demo to strangers they aren't customers yet, doubly especially if those strange customers are doing it because the might want to see young gymnasts)
- KaiserPro 5mo agonormally a condition of insurance is that you have CCTV and other preventative systems in place. > The Flock camera doesn't prevent theft. Not directly, but it does increase the chance of the perpetrator getting caught (not flock, the camera) in theory this means that less people are about to steal/break stuff. Also sign posts with saying that "this place has surveillance" tends to reduce opportunists. On a side note I would recommend volunteering at a community centre/sports/scouts/library. First its extremely rewarding, and secondly you learn about how things are in the real world "for the normals"
- gamerslexus 5mo agoAt least for private households, it's not mandatory to have surveillance cameras at home. If you do have one though, they will demand footage and can deny your claim if it was off, or worse. https://youtu.be/UMIwNiwQewQ?t=903 https://youtu.be/UMIwNiwQewQ?t=903
- KaiserPro 5mo agoYeah, I wouldnt have that in my house
- KaiserPro 5mo agohere its mostly mobile phones.
- Symbiote 5mo agoPossibly as a deterrent to a child (or adult) going through clothing/bags and stealing mobile phones while the owners are exercising.
- RandallBrown 5mo agoRobbery may not be the main reason for a camera. Having a video of any incident that happens (broken equipment leading to injury, angry parent, etc.) would be valuable.
- jjmarr 5mo agoIt's the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta. Jewish Community Centers are targeted more for attacks than a YMCA.
- direwolf20 5mo ago[flagged]
- amanaplanacanal 5mo agoPretty sure some Atlanta organization has exactly zero to do with whatever Holocaust you are thinking of.
- direwolf20 5mo ago[flagged]
- TZubiri 5mo agoSchool shootings?
- tremon 5mo agoThe only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a faceless guy with a camera?
- nerdsniper 5mo agoVandalism.
- rcoder 5mo agoIn many cases the people deploying these cameras have no idea the feeds are being resold to Flock. It’s not like they have a consumer brand and people are saying, “oh yeah, Flock, they’re the license plate camera folks…I definitely want one of those in my locker room.”
- aleksiy123 5mo agoI feel like I’m missing something. There is someone that is making the decision right? Or are you just saying the person placing the cameras is decoupled from the person making the decision to aggregate them all. But I still feel like the accountability is on who is giving the access to sensitive cameras.
- bluGill 5mo agoMost often the business hires a security contractor to take care of it, and signs the contract without understanding the terms. You should be able to trust your suppliers enough that you can do the above, they are the experts in the thing (cameras in this thing, but could be things like plumbing or accounting) and you have your own business to run. "Should" is key though, all too often someone doesn't do right by their clients.
- TZubiri 5mo ago>Most often the business hires a security contractor to take care of it, and signs the contract without understanding the terms. The bulk of the responsibility here would lie on whoever signed I think. It's one thing to click "I agree" when you are making a SaaS account for downloading cat videos. But at a job, you are getting paid to read these things and to make informed decisions.
- cogman10 5mo ago> Or are you just saying the person placing the cameras is decoupled from the person making the decision to aggregate them all. That's exactly what's happening. People are buying webcams which are cheap and have in their ToS something to the effect of "we get to sell everything the camera can see". Which, in turn, allows them to partner with Flock and sell video footage directly to them. Consider the fact that at one point, Amazon partnered with Flock to sell their ring camera footage to Flock. [1] It only got botched because of the creepy superbowl commercial selling the spying as "finding lost puppies". [1] https://apnews.com/article/amazon-flock-super-bowl-surveillance-privacy-32b7d32a06d369bffe3ffdcdd31962a1 https://apnews.com/article/amazon-flock-super-bowl-surveilla...
- throw848tjfj 5mo ago[flagged]
- throw848tjfj 5mo ago[flagged]
- collingreen 5mo agoWhat does this have to do with cameras covering little kids doing gymnastics? I'm sorry you had a bad experience and using cameras to protect yourself is a thing but filming kids doing gymnastics seems very very far from purely defensive.
- throw848tjfj 5mo agoBecause predators are even at schools! Our school gym park is used as a toilet by dog owners! I want to have video evidence, if some crazy person blames kid for provoking the attack!
- dghlsakjg 5mo agoThat’s understandable. Why does the video footage need to be able to be viewed live, remotely, by a sales team and a prospective client in another state? Predators have access to these cameras. There are numerous instances of police using these systems to stalk women. If I want video proof of what happened at a school, I’m much more comfortable with it being held on premises in a tamper evident location. That eliminates some of the predators from the situation.
- throw848tjfj 5mo ago[flagged]
- ashtonshears 5mo agoYour trauma is not reason to prescribe privacy invasion on others
- bluGill 5mo agoAny sane business that has lots of random people coming in will have cameras recording (except in bathrooms/locker rooms). There is too much opportunity for crime, and a camera is cheap. If something happens you pull up the feed from the last month and give the interesting parts to the police; most often you just delete everything after a month. More than one crime has been solved this way. That said, if there wasn't a crime the camera footage should be deleted.
- themafia 5mo ago> There is too much opportunity for crime, and a camera is cheap. The camera doesn't prevent crime. It just displaces it. Even when it doesn't it will not prevent the crime from happening. It _may_ provide you an opportunity to prosecute the person who committed it. In reality the only real reason to have one is to reduce your insurance premiums. > crime has been solved A perpetrator was potentially caught and now has to be tried or negotiated into a plea. I understand we use the term "solve" as a term of art but it's a particularly poor one. It speaks to the need of police to clear their books of negative indicators and not to any first order desirable social outcome. > That said That said, if during a demo, you access another customers equipment, I will _never_ do business with you. That's just extremely unprofessional behavior.
- SauntSolaire 5mo ago> The camera doesn't prevent crime. It just displaces it. That's why I periodically leave a bunch of bicycles with cheap locks downtown. They act like a kind of criminal sacrificial anode, reducing crime in the rest of the city.
- NonHyloMorph 5mo agoLol
- themafia 5mo agoThat's why the police don't enforce drug laws in _particular_ areas. What you describe is obviously already happening on a much larger scale. I'm not sure why people have trouble grasping something this basic.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- amelius 5mo ago> Presumably there are people that have access to it. Could also be AI.
- momentmaker 5mo agoThere is also another movement to stop Flock. And a discussion [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47772012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47772012
- nout 5mo agoSo there are people sitting in cubicles in various companies/orgs that flock sells the access to and they are watching your children on a screen. Usually the government is trying to wrap the spying/privacy breaches by "save the children", but this time if you want to save your children from some older dude watching them on a screen, you actually have to be against this privacy nightmare.
- californical 5mo agoThe crazy thing is that this isn’t even a hypothetical. Some random dude was watching your kids from an office building with spy cameras
- john_strinlai 5mo ago>“The city of Dunwoody is one city in our demo partner program,” a Flock spokesperson told 404 Media. “The cities involved in this program have authorized select Flock employees to demonstrate new products and features as we develop them in partnership with the city. the two things i still dont understand are: 1) why is there not a dedicated demo environment for demos, like practically every other software? i cant think of any reason why they need live data for a demonstration. (this might be addressed in the article, but the paragraph where it looks like it might be mentioned is also where the article is cut off) 2) is the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta (MCJCCA) city-owned? if not, the city should not be able to give permission to use the cameras. if so, was the MJCCA notified that the cameras would be used for demo purposes? were the parents notified?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- chneu 5mo agoAnswer to 1 is simple and obvious based on Flocks previous actions: they have no idea what they are doing and are reacting instead of planning.
- ToucanLoucan 5mo ago[flagged]
- PunchyHamster 5mo agoor they have exact idea what they are doing and don't give a shit
- roenxi 5mo agoCluelessness seems more likely. They'd have to be pretty stupid to use a live video for a demo in this way - there is almost literally no benefit compared to something more carefully curated, pre-recorded and staged. The money saved would not justify the risk of something weird happening on camera and disrupting the sale. Or, case in point, the current headline. If they want a creepy vibe approach or to appeal to the powerful paedophile market or whatever they're trying to do here then it is a lot easier to just hire some actors.
- driverdan 5mo agoMeanwhile YC President Garry Tan continues to support and defend Flock. I'm curious how he'd spin this as a good thing.
- pesus 5mo agoIt's it anything like the comments I see on here defending Flock, it'll just be a bunch of attempting to scare people with the idea of crime, and disparaging anyone in favor of privacy as being pro-crime.
- mrhottakes 5mo agoProbably something like "but imagine how much money a few people are making from it!"
- fragmede 5mo agoIf a school shooter was in your children's daycare, wouldn't you want there to be cameras so you knew where they were? ...is how I imagine that one goes.
- subscribed 5mo agoCameras would get shot first. Come on.
- cyberax 5mo agoSo you can then watch the shooting in nice graphic details, right? Or do you want cameras integrated with remote-controlled machine guns?
- jmward01 5mo agoIsolated information isn't a problem. If it takes effort to access information then mass information abuse doesn't scale, it is free of cost, and consequence, access that is the issue here. Flock is attempting to destroy barriers to access around real time surveillance. There is a clear distinction between someone having a business surveillance system that points at the street that the police can get access to with some sort of device specific request and no-requirement needed brows the world access that Flock is pushing. This is different. This is evil.
- throwway120385 5mo agoIOW, Flock is building the Telescreen from 1984.
- goolz 5mo agoI swear it is like we stumbled into a real life PKD book.
- righthand 5mo agoProbably A Scanner Darkly but I’m also sure parts of The Three Stigmata of Eldritch Palmer will come true too.
- tptacek 5mo agoThis story is a duplicate of a well-attended thread, without Significant New Information (SNI): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47784045 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47784045
- knownjorbist 5mo agoWhat other companies are pushing into this space with similar offerings, but flying under the radar compared to all the bad press Flock has been getting?
- chaqchase 5mo agoIf a demo environment isn't tightly scoped and audited, it's production in practice. The demo label doesn't matter.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- givemeethekeys 5mo agoAll Flock footage should be subject to FOIA requests.
- SpaceL10n 5mo agoJust broadcast all the cameras everywhere on the internet all the time. The panopticon is coming.
- hoppyhoppy2 5mo agoIncluding the footage from Flock cameras placed by private businesses on their own property?
- dghlsakjg 5mo agoIf that data crosses onto government servers at any point, yes.
- AngryData 5mo agoIf the government has access to it and it isn't otherwise publicly broadcast, yes. It is straight up illegal for the government to do it itself, just because they found a loophole of buying the surveillance they want from private institutions instead of using their own camera doesn't mean it is right or should be allowed to continue.
- FireBeyond 5mo agoAnd you better believe Flock considers it a sales channel to also sell to data brokers and such institutions with the aim of having them be able to share data with agencies who'd otherwise be prohibited (and they also won't turn off such sharing functionality just because you're an agency in that state - that's not their job).
- cnst 5mo agoAn underrated comment. But sunlight is the best disinfectant. I think it's the fundamental issue with these cameras, that it takes pictures of us, but we ourselves cannot access it. Even though it was us who has paid for it!
- andrefelipeafos 5mo ago[flagged]
- cineticdaffodil 5mo agoThe incentives of panopticon company seem peversly aligned to bring out the worst in humanity and fearmonger politicisns into endless societsl scaffolding.
- BoorishBears 5mo agoThis is massively underplaying what happened. From the original source: > [Randy Gluck - Flock Growth/Strategy] clicked through 3 private cameras at the JCC before he settled on JCC camera ‘Main Pool Right’. It was over 3 hours later before his next view on traffic cameras. > [Bob Carter - Flock VP of Strategic Relations and BD] also has some interesting searches. On September 30th, 2025 - Bob looked at just one camera. This camera is in the gymnastics room of the JCC. > [James Harding] The 1/7 session is the more notable one. He manually clicked through every JCC baseball field camera one per second, then paused 16 seconds before hitting Fitness, then Front Pool(1), Front Pool(2), Front Pool(3) — with 4-7 second pauses between each pool camera. Then after browsing other cameras, came back to Holding Cell 1 and 2, then Brook Run Playground 4 times over 33 seconds, then went back to Fitness again 12 minutes later. [...] his saved dashboard includes both holding cells and all three pool cameras, which is an unusual set of cameras to keep on a monitoring dashboard. > [Yoruel Sanguillen] was manually clicking through JCC cameras one per second — baseball fields, cafe, camp cameras, clock tower — then hit Fitline Desk and paused 58 seconds. Moved to Front Pool(1) and paused 47 seconds. Then FitLine Weight, Fitness, paused 72 seconds, then Fitness North Exit and rapidly through all three Front Pool cameras in 3 seconds before moving to Guard House. > [Kayce Lowe] came back on 2/14 - her first views were Gymnastics M/H front view left, Fitness, Gymnastics, Fitline Hall, FitLine Weight. She picked up exactly where she left off. This reads like Flock employees are individually using the camera system to watch people in sensitive settings. I'm unsure why 404 media is portraying this as related to a demo, it's seems like these are individuals acting independently.
- shevy-java 5mo agoSo flocker-cams spy on children as they are doing physical exercise? That can't be an accident.
- rapnie 5mo agohttps://archive.is/JXgLO https://archive.is/JXgLO
- jockerh 5mo agoYeah