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Flock wanted to tap dashcams in rideshare vechicles to add to surveillance data
- anymouse123456 2mo agoPretty sure this is the same person who made "your flowing data" many years ago. Assuming it is, that was a really cool project! You could follow their twitter account and DM semi-structured messages at it. He would generate personalized charts and tables from the message you sent. Looks like it's the same account, but that service seems down at the moment. https://x.com/yfd https://x.com/yfd Really great demonstration that created value from semi-structured data streams.
- LadyCailin 2mo agoI’m not convinced that there’s any solution to this besides direct government regulation and an enshrinement of privacy rights into the law. Cities stop paying for flock access? Other cities still will. Regulations preventing public property from being used for cameras? Private companies will allow it. Vigilantes destroying cameras? Start using mobile drones or something. It’s a losing battle, and everything done so far to fight it is just causes an escalation. Constitutional right to privacy (from government and private companies) is probably the only durable solution.
- soco 2mo ago[dead]
- steviewonderbre 2mo ago[dead]
- tamimio 2mo agoFitting the typical stereotype of a villain company, the greed with no ethics isn’t surprising, what’s surprising that it’s backed by “hacker” news.. shouldn’t HN be backing the counter efforts against such company not the other way around?
- WalterGR 2mo agoFlock is a Y Combinator alumnus. It’s not backed by Hacker News, scare quotes or no.
- flockingbird 2mo agoWhy is it surprising? YC is a billionaire led organization whose founder has written openly about the virtue of discriminating against women and parents, and more recently has written bad faith responses to criticisms of billionaires. This site is a Safe Space to promote those investments, regardless of societal impact. edit: to be fair, pg walked back some of his pro-bigotry-against-parents shit once he became a parent. But that's the kind of sociopathic cunt who runs this place...
- s1artibartfast 2mo agoAre we living on the same planet? Almost i see on HN is hate and vitriol about flock. Im genuinely perplexed how someone could come to this conclusion.
- 0xbadcafebee 2mo agoThe CEO of Flock said his mission is to "completely eliminate and eradicate crime in America". I think I saw that movie, it was called Minority Report.
- flockingbird 2mo agoTo eliminate only very specific types of crime, to be clear.
- rc5150 2mo agopoor people crime, and of course the crime of being poor in and of itself.
- JohnFen 2mo agoAnd the crime of just living a normal life without the constant surveillance threat and constant threat of inappropriate police attention. In my view, these systems are themselves a very large threat to the public.
- hypercube33 2mo agoSumaritan from Person of Interest is more like what they are aiming for I think.
- downrightmike 2mo agoWith the final movie in the series being Saving Private Ryan.
- fearmerchant 2mo agoFor an Amber Alert that could be really helpful.
- edot 2mo agoKidnapping like how you’re thinking of it (stranger grabbing your kid from the park) is a myth. Non-family abductions are 1% of cases. Straight from the horse’s mouth: https://www.missingkids.org/theissues/nonfamily https://www.missingkids.org/theissues/nonfamily
- s1artibartfast 2mo agoStill should be helpful for family abductions, right?
- edot 2mo agoSure but is that worth the rest of us giving up our rights? Also, historically, dictatorial governments do the most child abductions by orders of magnitude. These cameras are a Stasi or NKVD wet dream.
- fearmerchant 2mo agoWhat right are you referring to? We don't have a right to privacy on a public roadway. My Tesla is filming you.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- jsrozner 2mo agoHighly anti social people (flock executives, mark zuckerberg, other surveillance capitalists, etc.) should simply be expelled from society to a separate island to fight each other for scarce resources.
- nullorempty 2mo agoHm, two questions: - Who is paying for surveillance? - To whose benefit is it used?
- bigbuppo 2mo agoPolice departments until the constitutional aspects are settled, then they'll be cut down en masse.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 2mo agoIf the constitutional aspects are settled in favor of people, but current SCOTUS suggests this be unlikely. But.. even it were, then police departments would just buy the data second hand instead via direct contracts.
- bigbuppo 2mo agoFlock has already made their billions. They'll pivot to something else, probably budget gunshot tracking cameras that also accidentally eavesdrops on all conversations near by and sends it to the cloud for analysis.
- joering2 2mo ago> but current SCOTUS suggests this be unlikely Are you referring to "temporary inconvenience" or some other decision I'm not aware of? The phrase "temporary inconvenience" refers to a statement by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in his September 2025 concurrence in [Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo]. Defending an order allowing immigration enforcement stops based partly on apparent ethnicity or workplace, Kavanaugh wrote that questioning of legal residents or U.S. citizens would be "typically brief" and a minor inconvenience.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 2mo agoI'm referring to the pattern of SCOTUS making up whatever justification they want to achieve the result they want. That and the pattern of being pro-corporation.
- tptacek 2mo agoPart of the backstory here I think is that ALPR cameras are a commodity technology. They're not defensible by themselves medium term; the market will go to whoever ships the cheapest most reliable cameras with the best pre-sales team, which is a tough space to compete in. For Flock to defend a growth-stage startup valuation, it needs to come up with value-adds. For a while it looked like that was going to take the form of single-pane-of-glass fusion products (think: Grafana for public safety orgs), but post-AI that seems pretty hard to defend too; Axon doesn't need deep roots in SFBA tech culture to compete on that anymore. So I guess expect a lot of wacky ideas.
- rconti 2mo agoDon't they have network effects? Let the locals search the next few towns over? Obviously this diminishes with distance; there's not a lot of benefit to Denver sharing with Minneapolis.
- tptacek 2mo agoThey do, but it's unclear how defensible they are. You don't have to operate Flock cameras to get access to Flock data (or Axon date) from neighboring municipalities; Flock even operates (last I checked) a subscription product for doing queries on their sharing network without their cameras installed.
- 0xbadcafebee 2mo agoI don't think Flock is going to care that much about profit and growth. Their CEO seems to be a true believer, as opposed to the typical SVer whose god is cash. And at this point they need to win hearts and minds a lot more than they need new installs. Data is the real product (the whole point of this is having a large network of correlated data, not just putting one security cam in an office), so at some point the Ring<->Flock combo may be proposed again, probably as Flock acquiring Ring (if they get the cash together). Ring was un-ironically marketed as "pre-crime", which is basically Flock for doorbells.
- driverdan 2mo agoThis is blogspam of https://www.404media.co/flock-wants-to-partner-with-consumer-dashcam-company-that-takes-trillions-of-images-a-month/ https://www.404media.co/flock-wants-to-partner-with-consumer...