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Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast
- ChrisMarshallNY 4mo agoYeah, I'm not a fan of these things. If they were just ALPRs, I could probably give them a bit of slack -if they tightened up their security-, but all the other stuff they do, makes them pretty much untenable. However: > This makes AI powered cameras like Flock's distinct from traditional surveillance or traffic cams, which require someone to manually look over footage in order to find a specific vehicle or individual. Is a bit misleading. These days, anyone can give an LLM footage from any source, and get this kind of information.
- erikerikson 4mo agoI think there's a limit to how misleading. There's a very important difference between "anyone could walk through my door and steal my stuff" and "this person walked in my door and stole my stuff".
- TheRealPomax 4mo agoBut 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.
- lesuorac 4mo agoIsn't Flock more like a house sitter in the analogy though? "I gave the person keys to my house and then I trusted they wouldn't open bathroom doors while somebody was there". Like law enforcement is being given access to the systems, the door isn't "left open", a key was given to them.
- cyanydeez 4mo ago>These days, anyone can give an LLM footage from any source, and get this kind of information. Is a bit misleading itself, to do this at scale requires all those iffy data centers.
- llm_nerd 4mo agoWhat makes Flock bizarre is that it's a private business, and this is precisely how police departments are getting around a lot of traditional gates and checks on this sort of thing. Police setting up a 1984 monitoring system throughout your city, tracking every car, person, activity -- yields lots of questions, oversight, concerns, debate, challenges, etc. Some private business doing the same, and then letting the same police use it at will as a paying customer -- yay, all of the invasive monitoring with none of the oversight.
- TheRealPomax 4mo agoThat'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.
- Manuel_D 4mo agoThe police can, in fact, operate cameras in public spaces and they have done so for decades. ALPRs have been widely deployed since the 1990s. I'm frequent surprised by how many people think that privacy laws block the police from recording their activities in public. For whatever reason, Flock is getting a lot of press, but this is hardly a new field.
- KennyBlanken 4mo agoANPR has not been widely deployed since the 1990's in the US and the US court system has consistently held that the degree to which a technology automates monitoring, searching, etc is very relevant to whether it violates people's reasonable expectations of privacy for very obvious reasons.
- Manuel_D 4mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni... > However, ANPR did not become widely used until new developments in cheaper and easier to use software were pioneered during the 1990s. The collection of ANPR data for future use (i.e., in solving then-unidentified crimes) was documented in the early 2000s.
- maccard 4mo agoWhat LLM can I get and feed hundreds of hours of video into that will give me the position of a specific vehicle alongside when that happened? An LLM isn’t going to help you here, but basic Computer Vision and a SQL database has been a solution _if you have the cameras_. I wrote a license plate reader as a university project using OpenCV almost 20 years ago.
- handoflixue 4mo agoIf 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"
- jubilanti 4mo ago[flagged]
- tough 4mo agowhy wouldn't codex or claude just reach for whatever FOSS https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr
- jubilanti 4mo ago[flagged]
- microgpt 4mo agoYes, an ALPR is basically just a glorified [thing that an ALPR does]
- SR2Z 4mo agoI honestly can't tell if this is ragebait or you believe this. My friend, if you have a database of license plates extracted from single images taken by multiple cameras, YOU ARE TRACKING UNIQUE VEHICLES ACROSS A REGION. Terabytes of data don't matter because you don't need to search terabytes, you need to search a few MB of text data. You don't even have to store the original video.
- jubilanti 4mo ago[flagged]
- tptacek 4mo agoThat's interesting, because the ALPR part of Flock is what caused all the problems here; the rest of it, of characterizing vehicles with attributes beyond just plates, wasn't really problematic at all.
- KennyBlanken 4mo agoCharacterizing 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.
- tptacek 4mo agoLook, I agree that's problematic conceptually, but it's absolutely not what's happening. ALPRs don't select cars on spec, like, "this car looks out of place here". Nobody has time for that. They're matching specific descriptions of cars to incidents, like, "this vehicle has been present at the site of 5 previous package thefts". Here's another way to look at this. Municipalities are the primary operators of ALPR cameras. Any municipality that would scan bumper stickers looking for Trump opponents is not going to be receptive to any appeals for regulation. One problem with this whole debate is that people are coming to it with movie plot concerns rather than understanding what's actually happening with them. That wouldn't be a big deal if this was a slam dunk public policy case, but it isn't: there is broad bipartisan support for these devices. There are deeply problematic things happening just with license plate pings!
- chaps 4mo agoThey're matching specific descriptions of cars to incidents, like, "this vehicle has been present at the site of 5 previous package thefts". You're hand-waving a hell of a lot of things away and you expect that everyone knows what you're talking about. Please stop doing that. - Who is "They"? - Why do you say "nobody has time for that"? What is "that"? - Why are you dismissing genuine concerns through unhelpful language like, "coming to it with movie plot concerns". - Why wouldn't "that" be a big deal? What is "that"?! - What are the deeply problematic things? - "They're matching specific descriptions of cars to incidents" -- no they're not. Just looking at Bloomingdale's audit logs, there are 13k examples of searches done for the simple reason, "suspicious". - Why does municipalities being the primary operators matter? Asking from a place of genuine confusion by how you think about these things.
- SilverElfin 4mo agoPersonally I don’t mind having Flock cameras or other surveillance to make it easier to stop crime. Right now in many cities there is simply no consequence for various crimes - especially property crimes. But I want these tools to be protected - requiring imminent danger or warrants for access. I don’t think the answer is to get rid of them entirely.
- faggitsanjay 4mo ago[flagged]
- arkhiver 4mo agoarchived: https://nonogra.ph/flock-cameras-track-more-than-your-license-plate-and-theyre-spreading-fast-06-28-2026 https://nonogra.ph/flock-cameras-track-more-than-your-licens...
- Cider9986 4mo agoConsider using that one as well as archive.org(when no paywall), archive.today, megalodon.jp, archive box?
- icapybara 4mo agoWe need some way to address the low level crime in the US. If you look at cities in east Asia, they're both much larger than typical US cities and much safer. It -is- possible to have safe large cities. The fact that we don't is a choice.
- monkaiju 4mo agoWhat do you mean we don't? Our cities seem quite safe...
- greenleafone7 4mo agoIt is possible. What keeps japanese cities safe'er', is not the cameras though.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4mo agoIt’s the culture. Every Japanese person is always aware that they are “a part of society.” Even the Yakuza participate in society. When they have big disasters, the local mobsters are usually helping people out, before the authorities can get going.
- greenleafone7 4mo agoYou participate and feel that you belong to a society in the same way you would do for a family. The members have to be your own. This has been empirically shown to be true in every single case. If I force my way in your house and you are legally obligated to consider me part of your family, you might for a while, but your level of participation and your willingness for it will drop by a lot. Pretending it isn't so will not help anyone, it will make things harder. Japan, to their credit, does not pretend.
- righthand 4mo agoUS cities are plenty safe. The fact that you think otherwise is propaganda you’ve been successfully served. I live in Nyc and visit other cities often.
- tchalla 4mo agoAmazing innovation and dynamism.
- hombre_fatal 4mo agoMeanwhile in Texas we can’t even have red light cameras to automatically ticket people willing to kill you just to catch a light.
- fc417fc802 4mo agoHonestly I like that policy. What's the legality of flock in Texas?
- Spooky23 4mo agoTotally 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.
- bertt 4mo agoYou're mistaken if you think the community is still the same percentage of humans.
- Spooky23 4mo agoThat’s a fair point that I didn’t consider, thank you.
- pixl97 4mo agoThe last 20 years has burned privacy into the ground for a large part of the population.
- ButlerianJihad 4mo ago[flagged]
- aquir 4mo agoI don't get why any of these devices are still intact...
- inquirerGeneral 4mo ago[dead]
- EA-3167 4mo agoAre you willing to potentially be prosecuted to make a point that will ultimately come down to, "The cameras you destroyed are replaced with newly purchased units"? The way to beat this isn't vandalism, it's getting them banned from every municipality and county in the country, while fighting at state levels for more bans. It's also silly talk from kids online, just like "Don't vote, burn your local Wal-Mart" is only meant to impress other online children. The rest of us know that you'll neither vote, nor burn down the Wal-Mart.
- microgpt 4mo agoYou get to sacrifice your life one or zero times in your life. Surely there are some terminally ill people who would do it?
- EA-3167 4mo agoI can't speak for anyone else, but I suspect most terminally ill people want to spend time with the people they love, not breaking cameras and working their way through the legal system.
- microgpt 4mo agoWhen I'm terminally ill one day I will find some good thing to do similar to vandalizing Flock cameras. If they arrest me, I won't care too much.
- AstroNutt 4mo agoRight? The installers conveniently made them within baseball bat range. Luckily, we don't have them where I live (small West Texas town).
- fithisux 4mo agoAs a voter and taxpayer, I never asked for this.
- infecto 4mo agoThat’s not how voting and paying taxes work.
- goatlover 4mo agoImagine representatives who did what voters actually wanted. There's probably a name for that. Representative democracy or something. As opposed to corporate representation.
- infecto 4mo agoImagine what I really meant was that in those areas people largely approve of these cameras and it’s the minority that don’t. Now of course your narrative is rude and more entertaining but sadly far from the mark. Saying “that’s not what I paid for” is all fine and dandy but it’s cuts both ways.
- kennywinker 4mo ago> in those areas people largely approve of these cameras How sure of that are you? I’m thinking it’s mostly a mix of indifference and ignorance. Has anywhere you know of voted specifically on these cameras?
- infecto 4mo ago[flagged]
- goatlover 4mo agoAlright, but in those areas did the politicians run on having those cameras installed everywhere? Were the voters given a proposition to approve? Data centers seem to be widely unpopular on both the left and right, so I'm wonder where the representative democracy comes into play. More often than not local politicians approve these projects despite there being majority opposition from the public.
- therobots927 4mo agoThey owe George orwell’s estate a royalty for this idea.
- crises-luff-6b 4mo ago[dead]
- abalashov 4mo agoThese horrific things are multiplying exponentially in my (rural GA) environs. There are a dozen of them along every conceivable cycling route I could take, and far more if I drive somewhere. If you think this is a city thing meant to deter urban crime, the explosive proliferation of Flock cameras in quite rural and suburban areas may shock you. I find them in the darndest of places, near but not on county lines, adjacent to minor bridges, etc. And next time I go through there, there are more. They seem to be procreating. As others have pointed out, they're not just ALPRs or traffic cameras, and their use-cases, official and unofficial, are extremely dynamic and expanding fast. They are not the only thing of their kind, but they justly earned the lightning rod status for their conspicuous cooperation with the administration's immigration thuggery and the douchy--but highly consequential--pronouncements of their CEO. Moreover, there's a ticker tape of daily news about police misuse of Flock's database, mainly for stalking exes and things like that. This _is_ a stop on the way to a Chinese-style surveillance state, and there's nothing inevitable about it. But it will happen if we allow it to happen. Ben Johnson's video on the security vulnerabilities, linked in the article, always deserves an explicit shout-out. It's likely to intrigue the tinkerers here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY
- shwaj 4mo agoBenn Jordan, you mean. Good video.
- abalashov 4mo agoWhoops. Yeah.
- cucumber3732842 4mo agoThese things proliferate where people trust the government or see the government as a means to the end of getting one over on whoever is bad for them. So the Nth generation group of townies that run any given rural shithole will happily slap them up, the government represents them as far as they're concerned. And meanwhile in some snooty inner ring Chicago suburb that fancies themselves "progressive" (but in what direction?) they slap up the same damn cameras because they see it as a means to make more efficient the enforcement of the myriad of rules on which their enclave depends and they are wealthy and well represented so they have no fear of it being used against them. Rural Georgia probably has a little of column A, little of column B going on.
- dev1ycan 4mo agoIf a certain group of people think that it should be their right to take others rights away and turn society into a dystopia for perceived security, then for the same reason it should be other individuals rights to assert that their rights should be protected by taking the first group's rights away to install or do whatever they think they can do for convenience/security's sake. This includes "ancestry tests", security cameras with AI in them, upload IDs to "verify", and even social media where you are allowed to upload pictures with others in them. And since we "supposedly" live in a democracy, we should be allowed to have a vote to decide on this, the group that wins is the majority, right? I don't understand why we're allowing our rights to erode before we have an informed election about this, in democracies.
- inquirerGeneral 4mo ago[dead]
- Manuel_D 4mo agoWhat right is being taken away? Nobody ever had the right to not be recorded in public. Furthermore surveillance isn't just an all or nothing thing. For example, the government can record your activities in public without a warrant, but they can't subpoena your phone calls without a warrant. That degree of surveillance has more checks and balances. How you somehow try to go from recording people in public to "ancestry tests" is a pretty nonsensical argument. > And since we "supposedly" live in a democracy, we should be allowed to have a vote to decide on this, the group that wins is the majority, right? No, you'd have to win much more than the majority to change the constitution, which defines a lot of privacy rights. But if you have enough votes, then sure you could change the constitution.
- davisr 4mo agoYour 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".
- crises-luff-6b 4mo agoThere is no expectation of privacy in public. It's really that simple.
- Cider9986 4mo agoActually, the supreme court ruled that police have to get a warrant to view cell tracking data and attach a location tracking device to cars. Flock is a clever workaround that should be illegal, but before that can happens we can get them removed at the city council level.
- Manuel_D 4mo agoBoth 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?
- dualvariable 4mo agoThere should be.
- thechao 4mo agoI have strong expectations, in fact; I need the state to respect that.
- anigbrowl 4mo agoThere should be. Other countries have one and they seem no worse off for it.
- afh1 4mo agoThere may be no expectation of privacy in the sense someone may see you and take your picture. There is an expectation you are not constantly tracked everywhere you go by a nationwide surveillance apparatus, that your location is not constantly monitored, indexed and shared. Unless you expect to live in an Orwellian distopia.
- joering2 4mo agoGot these installed all over local parking lots for wallmart, home depot, ross, every exit solar panel and camera. Was wondering if there is some sort of quickly blinking infrared light or something that would make it visible to a naked eye of a cop, but not to a recording camera. I bet you would sell millions of those license plate holders in a heartbeat.
- deepsquirrelnet 4mo agoCan anybody find trustworthy stats that these actually reduce crime? All I see are occasional anecdotes about how they were used to find one person one time. Skeptical me seriously doubts this is an effective solution for crime. But maybe that's because this country has a history of being willing to do a million expensive and privacy violating things, and only if it's a punitive measure.
- sublinear 4mo agoI don't have stats, but most police have made it pretty clear that they're used for investigations that would otherwise have very little to go on. I don't think anyone other than the manufacturers have made claims of cameras reducing crime. You can put all the AI bells and whistles on them, but they're still just cameras. They're a fallback option, not a dragnet. The police are generally reactive to reports of crime, not proactively trying to piece together the details of everyone's lives and nail them the moment their dog poops on the sidewalk. No AI can even do that anyway and it would be a waste of money. There are two vocal camps of people on these threads that are eroding HN: fearmongerers and grifters. I don't understand how it got this bad, but that's the real crisis here.
- microgpt 4mo agoIf they don't reduce crimes what do they do? Oh right they track inconvenient people
- therealdrag0 4mo agoSolving crime is still valuable even if it doesn’t reduce crime.
- deepsquirrelnet 4mo agoBingo. Value is the operative word here. Money and privacy are valuable too, and I'm assuming that there must be some pitch deck somewhere that is presumably good and selling city councils on this. Where is it? What is the value we're supposed to get from this?
- Cider9986 4mo agoThey're also getting banned fast. The city level should be the most accessible government for change. There's been over 70[1] documented wins. Don't feel like this is a lost cause, it clearly isn't. If everyone who was going to comment on this thread instead or additionally got involved by going to a city council meeting and explaining the problems to friends/family, many more cities could reject them. [1] https://deflock.org/council/#wins https://deflock.org/council/#wins
- 15155 4mo agoThis list isn't exactly describing "bans," this is a city contract rejection list - otherwise known as a "just deploy in commercial parking lots abutting major thoroughfares" restriction.
- tptacek 4mo agoThey're not getting banned fast, and regulation isn't a lost cause. Flock, in particular, is getting contracts cancelled primarily in ultra-liberal municipalities, and that's in large part because of their public relationship with the current federal administration. But ALPRs are going up everywhere; they're a commodity technology. We canceled our Flock contract (I wasn't psyched about that) and we're ringed by munis that use ALPRs from vendors that haven't made themselves political flashpoints. I'm fond of pointing out on HN that the muni I live in is likely one of the 10 most progressive-leaning in the country (it's the most progressive-leaning municipality in Chicagoland). Even here, Flock had an ardent cheering section, of 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.
- guelo 4mo agoI 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.
- tptacek 4mo agoThe thing that Flock does that's alarming is that it provides operators with a search engine for arbitrary vehicle descriptions which include but are not limited to license plates, with history stretching back; misuse scenarios are obvious, the search histories allow you to track the movements of specific people with fine granularity. The thing that Flock does that is actually immediately problematic is that it operationalizes BOLO/hotlist databases that weren't intended to be used in real-time. Our deployment of Flock curbed more innocent vehicles than actual stolen cars, because Illinois LEADS isn't reliably updated, and so pings on vehicles that were reported stolen (whether or not they actually turned out to have been stolen as opposed to borrowed by a family member or something) weeks ago and recovered.
- microgpt 4mo agoIt's legal for any random citizen to build one of these surveillance networks, right?
- tiahura 4mo agoOnly in free countries. Many authoritarian regimes don’t let people take pictures in public.
- nilamo 4mo agoThat's a great point. We should build a network that tracks all cops to make sure they don't get up to no good while off duty.
- assimpleaspossi 4mo agoAre you one of those guys who hates the cops until you need one? Do you also forget that cops are people, too?
- microgpt 4mo agoI used to hate the cops until I needed one, and then they were horrible to me and didn't solve my problem and actually started a reverse investigation against me for the thing I reported someone else doing, so now I hate the cops even when I need one.
- Terr_ 4mo agoHow backwards. Parent poster is talking about treating cops closer to how regular people are being treated. If you're really committed to fairness, you'll take away the off-duty/unofficial privileges and immunities that they have which are not shared with "people too."
- neilv 4mo agoThe 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.
- nekomi 4mo ago"Security" will be redefined.
- warumdarum 4mo agoIs there such a crime as creating false positives for the panopticon?
- downrightmike 4mo agotypically the state finds it has to pay out millions to those wrongly imprisoned. These cameras are not quite as good as flipping a coin in accuracy, so the tax payers are already on the hook
- ryanmcbride 4mo agoEveryone should do their best to take down or disable every one they see in my opinion.
- assimpleaspossi 4mo ago>there has been widespread public backlash to cameras that track everyone, whether or not they've been suspected of a crime. Well, duh. It doesn't know your plate from anyone elses so your plate gets recorded along with everyone else. If you go about a normal person's business then there is no harm and nothing happens. I'm sure someone will decide harm is being done even when nothing happens.
- CircuitSeuss 4mo agoSeeing commenters defending privatized mass surveillance tech in 2026 is crazy.
- LNSY 4mo ago[dead]
- antonvs 4mo agoIt's more like the CNS of the golden-handcuffed wage slaves of the capital class.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- ibejoeb 4mo agoFlock is a YC company, right? https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety
- explodes 4mo agoHow many people here are YC people? Using Google doesn't make you a Google employee.
- abalashov 4mo agoI think the intended point is that there's going to be a certain amount of natural partisanship--from at least some users--to YC companies in a YC-run forum with a YC origin story, and that YC and those aligned with YC in a fiduciary way certainly aren't going to militate against Flock.
- strathmeyer 4mo ago[dead]
- john-h-k 4mo ago
- drnick1 4mo agoSolution to the Flock problem: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/vandals-strike-cut-flock-cameras-in-goshen/ar-AA26sb6S https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/vandals-strike-cut-flock-c...
- motbus3 4mo agoBoth flck and pltr uses a loophole on the law that if no one holds data no one is doing anything wrong. This needs to be fixed. Holding information about people should have a maximum time limit and should be treated respectfully. Given it is impossible to make them stop, it should be easy to see what's on you and anything else is illegally obtained.
- matheusmoreira 4mo agoHolding information about people should be a massive liability. It should actively cost them money to know even a single bit of information about us. They should be scrambling to forget all about us the second the transaction's completed.
- motbus3 4mo agoTechnically it is. But they create companies that operates for months and close and then open a new one using a different person's name. You can't do anything because between you find them and sue them they are closed and the data is elsewhere. This is no child's play. The ads you see all around are designed for you not to click. They just want to inject more metadata to make you more identifiable. Once I followed one of those fake stories like "look what happen with this pregnant horse" and it was literally 50+ pages of a possibility ai generated story that never ended. If you just moved to the main site the story was hosted the content was completely different and no link to the thing you were reading. Why would anyone pay an ad for something like that? It needs to have a reason and I don't think it is to talk 52 pages about a horse who was pregnant
- thaumaturgy 4mo agoI kind of want to be able to see a Flock (YC S17)-related thread on HN without feeling obligated to participate, but, alas. Just for background: I was one of the ringleaders of a community effort that successfully kicked Flock out of Eugene and Springfield, Oregon, assisted a few other community efforts, went on to help draft some of the first state legislation for ALPRs in the country (Oregon SB1516, which passed, though I have some reservations about the resulting bill), and I am still working with other groups across the country. During the development of the legislation, my opponents included Flock Safety (YC S17) and Axon, and, later, others. I had a rather contentious meeting at one point with a legislator and several Flock (YC S17) C-levels. This has been eating a big part of my life for over a year now, so it's deeply, deeply disappointing to see some of the same talking points repeated on HN all this time later. 1. We've known for a year now that Flock (YC S17) captures more than just license plates. We decompiled some of their code on a legally-obtained device. That code very clearly included categories of interest for their onboard object detection software, and included, "cat", "dog", "person", "bicycle", among other vehicle-related things. 2. We also obtained, through public records requests, training materials from a local police department, and training materials from other police departments, that together showed that not only did the Flock (YC S17) interface provide search options for bicycles, but that police departments were sharing tactics for finding non-automobile objects in images. 3. Flock's (YC S17) own marketing materials have been advertising their ability to find "missing people" given a description of an individual's clothing for a long time now. See e.g.: https://www.flocksafety.com/products/flock-freeform https://www.flocksafety.com/products/flock-freeform 4. Newer devices are also running http://happytimesoft.com/products/rtsp-server/index.html http://happytimesoft.com/products/rtsp-server/index.html RTSP software but I can't speak publicly about how I know that. 5. These systems were immediately abused by police departments across the country for non-law enforcement purposes, or for purposes contrary to local or state laws. Proponents of surveillance keep trying to steer the conversation towards "but think of all the crime we can prevent!" while pointedly avoiding all of the plethora of abuses of this system. Flock (YC S17) could have anticipated this or, by now, put controls in place to at least appear to want to reduce these forms of abuse, but they have never cooperated with any of that. There is no other way to view this at this point than that Flock tacitly approves of abuse of their system and any efforts they do undertake only ever result in less public oversight. 6. It is very much not a lost cause to fight against this. You don't have to accept a venture-capital-funded, rapid-growth, your-data-is-our-value tech company rolling out surveillance in your community because they convinced a gullible and poorly-informed police department that it's in everyone's best interest. There are many headwinds against these fights, but they are being won, and the fact that they're happening in larger population centers (which tend to be a bit more liberal) is purely a consequence of the effort required to win. But, I've talked directly with a lot of community members across the country, and opposition to these systems cuts across political lines. Working to shut these down in your community is good work, and moreover, can help connect you to some other very decent people in your community. And also FWIW I've had an ongoing dialogue with a local police chief on how to do a better job of balancing public safety against other concerns. There is a spectrum of opinions on these systems within the law enforcement community as well. Flock (YC S17) has no place in a healthy society. "Hackers", of all people, should understand that in a way that the average member of the public wouldn't be expected to.