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A handful of cities have replaced Flock with Axon
- SoftTalker 2mo agoPrediction: Flock acquires Axon.
- echelon 2mo agoThey're a public company with a $50B market cap. That's not going to happen. The direction would be the other way around. Axon is showing that they want the market, that they can build the tech themselves, and that they can leverage their extensive existing relationships with law enforcement and municipal governments as sales channels.
- throwawayZ151 2mo agoCorrect directional analysis - but Axon already has competing products and is demonstrating here that they don’t need to acquire Flock to take market share. I am very doubtful of an acquisition.
- mrexroad 2mo agoMy city has a contract with Flock, but the rest of their tech “stack” is Axon based. I’ll be surprised if they don’t change ALPR to Axon at first chance.
- SoftTalker 2mo agoIn fact they are probably already using Axon ALPR in their police vehicles. That technology has existed for a while, even before Flock's fixed cameras became widespread. I find it slightly less objectionable, as the chances that I drive by Flock's cameras every day are nearly 100% but the chances that I'm within visual range of a police car are much lower and more random.
- cdrnsf 2mo agoSoon: Flock branded tasers.
- andrei_says_ 2mo agoEven better: see Wim Wenders’ The End of Violence.
- tamimio 2mo agoPTZ tasers!
- eth0up 2mo agoPrediction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49053193 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49053193 Axon just replaces Flock in some places. But I forgot to say that it probably doesn't matter much, and that whatever anyone resents about the whole thing, will just get worse.
- Cider9986 2mo agoThese are literally city councils in many places. They're not our overlords.
- eth0up 2mo agoThat's fine too. I didn't intend to create a point of dispute. That's just my writing style which lends itself to selective interpretation. Understood. The masses, or 'other' population, whoever it is that protests this variety of surveillance; the angry minority/ineffectual-majority, the misguided few/many that don't embrace the panopticon, etc. Regardless, it's not going away. From here onward, whatever form of surveillance or control it is, it's not going away. Eternal whackamole, eternal malcontent, we can hate it and spray-paint it all we want, but the only means to stop it is the one most people are either not capable of, or do not believe they are capable of, and it does not involve vandalism, feeble expressions of frothing contempt or anything but serious organized and unfortunately, legal methodology. Everything else is mostly symbolic, in a time when public opinion is less valuable than ever, and symbols offer little more than forensic evidence and fuel for long-term counter strategy. Flock, Axon, ARGUS-IS, Xfinity CSI multi-AP WiFi sensing fusion, evil smartphones -- it's all here to stay, and evolve, and get pushed in our lives. Might is Right. However terribly wrong it might be. And might is especially right when society divests from the primary tool capable of making it wrong. And I think, largely, that is what we've done. A city council is a minority. Whether it represents the majority, is, I think, not always consistent.
- advisedwang 2mo agoAxon is a public company with market cap of $50B. It is an incumbent with a huge business in bodycams and tasers with a huge number of US police departments. Flock has a $7.5B valuation at it's last funding round, and is the new comer. More likely for Axon to acquire flock than the other way around.
- yieldcrv 2mo agohalf cash, half stock
- dave78 2mo agoVendor doesn't matter. The same issues will exist. Public safety is all about aggregating data to "operationalize" it now, so all vendors will be collecting data and sharing it with all customers just like Flock. The only benefit is that for the moment, other vendors' networks are small compared to Flock.
- cyanydeez 2mo agorepublicans got their government small enough that business and religion can drown it.
- ihsw 2mo ago[dead]
- dave78 2mo agoFlock cameras are everywhere all over my very blue area in a blue state with new ones appearing every day. I really don't think this is a Republican/Democrat issue. And I think as people are learning about it, they are outraged across the political spectrum; perhaps we should capitalized on that instead of trying to turn it into a red/blue thing.
- cyanydeez 2mo agoOh I'm aware of the unmitigated disaster that is the fight between corporate 1 and corporate 2. One sees people as customers and the other sees them as cattle.
- nullsanity 2mo ago[dead]
- crises-luff-6b 2mo ago[dead]
- Cider9986 2mo agoAlso Flock, in the past week: All of Winona Police Department's Flock cameras cut down and stolen https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49171656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49171656 257 comments Cops Used Flock to Track a Man Across State Lines for a Pretextual Weed Search https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49184190 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49184190 202 comments How Cops Are Trying to Hide Their Use of Flock https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49172076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49172076 10 comments Flock's CEO Faced Me After Its Cameras Led to My Wrongful Stop https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49156650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49156650 118 comments Flock – Chilling Effects: Long Island's Emerging Open-Air Prison https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49148541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49148541 40 comments Leaked Flock Guide Shows How It Teaches Cops to Promote Its Tech https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49158837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49158837 17 comments
- wxw 2mo ago> One key feature of Flock is its national lookup tool. > Axon, simply, does not have a national network. Meaning that it would not be possible for cops in one jurisdiction to search cameras across the country. [...] Police departments using Axon can enter into data sharing agreements with each other, though. > Denver, just like the City of Ferndale, explicitly mentioned this lack of this national network as part of its decision to ditch Flock for Axon. This (probably alongside all the bad press Flock has gotten) appears to be the crux of the switching. Ultimately, the tech actually being deployed seems similar. Also interesting: > One reason why journalists, activists, and residents have been able to learn so much about what police use Flock for is that the company has built auditing tools that the public can access through records requests.
- wolfi1 2mo agoit took Last Week Tonight years to get these records in one particular case
- Barbing 2mo agoProbably this from 3d ago: https://youtube.com/watch?v=lnBPhelCdWE https://youtube.com/watch?v=lnBPhelCdWE Generally, silly jokes but a very serious research and fact checking team.
- pphysch 2mo agoThis is a step in the right direction. Everyone hates public surveillance until they become the victim of a crime, but it's critical that the surveillance is owned and controlled fully on an appropriate level. You should fully own and control your home security cameras. Right now many homeowners are shipping their data to national datacenters. Municipalities should fully own and control their public security cameras, on municipal datacenter resources. Data sharing / federation should always be intentional and time-bound. It should be impossible for a small town cop to unilaterally access security records from a random city he has no jurisdiction in.
- RobotToaster 2mo agoOut of the frying pan...
- gilthelander 2mo ago[flagged]
- inigyou 2mo ago[flagged]
- crest 2mo agoThey really want people to get e-ink license plates don't they?
- gruez 2mo agoThe ones that are illegal to use and stick out like a sore thumb?
- xkcd-sucks 2mo ago> One reason why journalists, activists, and residents have been able to learn so much about what police use Flock for is that the company has built auditing tools that the public can access through records requests. ... It is not clear if the same granularity of data can be learned about Axon systems, although it does allow agencies to generate audit reports. > Axon’s documentation for its ALPR product, a “shared data” option “extends the query to partner-agency detections once a sharing relationship is active.” Axon develops a data marketplace to streamline so-called lawful sharing of data, or acquires it via Flock and rebrands the network name. Audit capabilities are removed to streamline operational efficiency and reduce political risk. The public is no better off than before.
- neura 2mo agoWorse off, if anything.
- mirmor23 2mo ago> Axon, for example, advertises AI-powered cameras that attach to an existing streetlamp and are designed to completely blend in with their surroundings, and also collects license plate data with cameras installed inside police officers’ patrol vehicles If anything this will make it go from bad to worse along all axes -- decentralized sharing, making it harder to track data request/usage, hide surveillance in an infrastructure that is considered essential, and host of other things..
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- josefritzishere 2mo agoMass surveillance under any brand name is horrible, and would be illegal in any sane universe.
- inigyou 2mo agoAxon is also known as Taser, the company that popularised these sometimes-lethal weapons but promises they are completely safe and never lethal, and now supplies most of America's electronic police equipment.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- kbrannigan 2mo ago[dead]