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Buyer cancels showing after Deflock shows two cameras utilized by the HOA
- skinfaxi 2mo agoWould be a great angle as a buyer's agent to proactively show clients flock camera locations. At the same time, would be an interesting way to hinder the sale of a property by falsely reporting flock cameras where none are.
- skinfaxi 2mo agoFound a link to the original reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/realtors/comments/1von5bt/just_had_a_buyer_cancel_a_showing_because_hoa_has/ https://www.reddit.com/r/realtors/comments/1von5bt/just_had_...
- Jerrylui 2mo agoThanks, HN linking to X linking to Reddit..
- jmyeet 2mo agoBeside the mass surveillance issues that are very real, let me just add that HOAs need to be made illegal except for condo buildings that obviously need to maintain and manage that building. There is absolutely no reason why a single family house needs to be in a mandatory HOA. We've all heard or experienced the silly rules about how your house must look and the fines associated with it. None of that should be legal. The one thing HOAs do is trash pickup but that should be a municipal government function. It is it everywhere else in the developed world. And why do they exist? If you find yourself asking that about anything uniquely American the answer is almost always "systemic racism". And that's the case here. HOAs became popularized in the 20th century with racially restrictive covenants (ie to prevent the owner selling to black people) [1]. So where are we now? Instead of the HOA president spending their day driving past "problem" houses to look for any rules violations, are we going to have them doing that with Flock cameras instead? What a dystopian nightmare. [1]: https://www.bostonfairhousing.org/timeline/1920s1948-Restrictive-Covenants.html https://www.bostonfairhousing.org/timeline/1920s1948-Restric...
- thedougd 2mo agoWhat about an HOA for the management of roads and rainwater runoff (ponds, etc)?
- lumost 2mo agoThe answer is likely that it makes sense for maintenance purposes, but the legal authority granted to an HOA is overly broad.
- thedougd 2mo agoIt's certainly overly broad in many circumstances. I've lived in a townhome community with overly aggressive management. However, "There is absolutely no reason why a single family house needs to be in a mandatory HOA" is easy to refute. HOA's provide a way for managing shared infrastructure that would not be feasible for a single home owner. Common examples of basic infrastructure include roads, storm water management, lighting, and even community wells. I would argue that is the primary purpose. Not all neighborhoods are in a municipality either.
- em-bee 2mo agoNot all neighborhoods are in a municipality either. why is that? and why is the county or state government not taking over the responsibility then? for example in germany a democratic local government is guaranteed by basic law, so a neighborhood outside of a municipality is practically not possible and considered a violation of basic law.
- pandaman 2mo agoMunicipalities in the US are the same type of institution as HOA, self-organized to maintain property. Just like you may not have an HOA you may not have a municipality of any kind. Counties and states are usually not equipped to do maintenance work, same as the federal government. I also don't understand the preference of city government over HOA - it's not like cities don't have codes and you can do whatever you want with your property. It's subdued now but couple years ago we had anti-zoning posts as frequently as we have anti-Flock. Who creates zoning? The city does.
- 3dsnano 2mo agodon’t forget!!! Y Combinator invested in Flock Safety in 2017.
- k12sosse 2mo agoFor the love of money
- vrganj 2mo ago> You're thinking Chinese surveillance > US-based surveillance helps victims and prevents more victims https://x.com/garrytan/status/1963310592615485955?lang=en https://x.com/garrytan/status/1963310592615485955?lang=en Brought to you by the king of double standards, Garry Tan, CEO of YCombinator.
- micromacrofoot 2mo agothe sad thing about american propagandists is that they willingly participate completely free of pressure from their government
- close04 2mo agoDon't generalize. You have "principle propagandists" who just prosternate for free and become someone else's mouthpiece because their propagandist upbringing taught them so. But what you're replying to is nothing like that, it's the propagandist who does it for personal (and massive) financial gain.
- micromacrofoot 2mo agoI suppose maybe I'm giving him too much credit with the assumption that he could make money without parroting propaganda mindlessly
- vrganj 2mo agoThat's a very charitable take. My take is that his objection to a Chinese repressive regime isn't the repressive nature, it's that he's not part of the class doing the repressing.
- flkiwi 2mo agoCompletely frivolous comment: people who insist on capitalizing “realtor” are hilarious. I know “Realtor” is a registered trademark, but that just makes it funnier to me. On topic, we’ve stopped going to a popular pizza place near us because the owner put a Flock camera up.
- atq2119 2mo agoI suspect it's a similar phenomenon as people capitalizing visa when the topic is international travel / migration instead of payment networks.
- fhdkweig 2mo agoOr using title case for acronyms like "Nasa" particularly on government and news websites who should know better.
- frenchtoast8 2mo agoDo you mean like what the BBC does? > However, our style is to use lower case with an initial cap for acronyms where you would normally pronounce the set of letters as a word (eg Maga, Sars, Aids, Nasa, Opec, Apec). https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsstyleguide/all/ https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsstyleguide/all/ It’s a matter of style, not something someone “should know better.”
- fhdkweig 2mo agoNot to start a whole flamewar over this, but it adds to confusion when it would look like another word like "Aids". Even their own final rule says not to do that. > There are a few exceptions: > Seasonal Affective Disorder becomes SAD ("Sad" would be confusing) > Where a capped-down acronym risks being misunderstood as a word. And when I say "should know better", a news organization, especially a place as respected as the BBC, should try to reduce confusion wherever possible. And as a matter of politeness, when it is an organization/person's name, it should probably cased the way they chose to name it, like "NASA" or "e e cummings".
- panny 2mo agoI know most of these flock cameras are going up in low income black neighborhoods [1] to "protect" them, but don't these wealthy neighborhoods need "protection" too? 1: https://www.wvtf.org/news/2026-08-14/flock-cameras-trigger-pushback-in-rural-and-urban-communities https://www.wvtf.org/news/2026-08-14/flock-cameras-trigger-p...
- stevecoalbear 2mo agoWealthy neighbourhoods get actual protection, rather than protection-as-an-excuse-for-surveillance.
- panny 2mo ago[dead]
- bko 2mo agoCan someone explain to me why you wouldn't want a camera accessible to police monitoring the comings and goings of your residence? Seems it would make it trivial to catch any criminal behavior. And the pool makes sense as well as pools are incredibly dangerous. If children are regularly breaking in and swimming at night, which has been known to happen, it's a huge liability to residents not to mention the possibility of someone drowning I guess it could be private effort (everyone I know has a ring or Google home type system monitoring their residence 24/7), but I think the hysterics around Flock is mostly an online phenomenon.
- ceejayoz 2mo ago> Can someone explain to me why you wouldn't want a camera accessible to police monitoring the comings and goings of your residence? You can't be serious. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/08/02/how-police-officers-used-vast-network-cameras-spy-their-exes/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/08/02/how-pol... "Flock’s array of license-plate cameras was built to fight crime. But at least 50 law enforcement officers were charged with or accused of misusing it and other systems." They're stalking people with them.
- bko 2mo ago[flagged]
- iamnothere 2mo agoYou don’t buy it? Do you think the charges were fabricated?
- lightedman 2mo ago"I just don't buy it." Literally there are ARRESTS AND CHARGES against these cops and you 'just don't buy it.' Do you see what's wrong with your statement? You're being 100% disingenuous.
- digi59404 2mo agoDrops in crime are not related to Flock and Policing. The crime statistics have been dropping for a long time. Since its peak in the early 1990s. This has been occurring since before smartphones, before flock, hell before DVDs became mainstream. Crime is cultural. The US’s culture has changed significantly since the 1990s and continues to do so. Flock and Police are not crime prevention; they are crime reaction. The police in the US do not exist to “stop crime” despite the public marketing they do so. That’s literally marketing and salesmanship on their part. Police have no legal requirement to protect individuals nor their property. A police officer could watch someone be murdered infront of them, do nothing, and they would suffer no legal consequences. Infact they might get fired, then sue for back pay and early retirement. It’s happened. Multiple times. Going back to crime - Again, it’s cultural. The US has adopted a culture since the 1990s that “crime doesn’t pay” and that crime isn’t ok. The US has also changed its stance on drugs and addictive substances offering treatment instead of punishment in many cases. Weed is legal now, it wasn’t then. Flock and Policing tactics have very little to do with the drop in crime.
- swarnie 2mo agoFrom the original thread: > Why would you want to live in an area that has that creepy of a tech product facing the pool? I wouldn’t want the hoa or an enterprising creep of a cop spying on my kids or myself either. You've all spent two decades strapping microphone/camera/gps combos to the side of your head and filling your homes/cars/tvs/fridges with big tech cameras and microphones but this is the line apparently. I'm not well versed in American privacy expectations but it seems kind of arbitrary from an outsiders perspective.
- Tepix 2mo agoReally, the standard argument "There's a X% loss of privacy, why expect any privacy at all?"
- swarnie 2mo agoIt wasn't lost or even taken, people voluntarily paid to have it taken away. Would accepting these cameras be easier if you all paid $25 a month for it?
- iamnothere 2mo agoI don’t know what you’ve been doing, but I have spent the last decade continuously reducing my exposure.
- tiffanyh 2mo agoCan someone explain why Flock is such a politically charged topic. I’m only now becoming aware of it, and feel like I’m out of the loop on key aspects.
- Tepix 2mo agoIs it really? It seems that the fight against total surveillance is bipartisan.
- ghostly_s 2mo ago"charged" doesn't mean polarized. And "bipartisan" doesn't mean anything except in the broken system of the states.
- nozzlegear 2mo ago> And "bipartisan" doesn't mean anything except in the broken system of the states. So it does mean quite a bit, then. Especially since the topic is flock, which is only relevant to the states.
- nozzlegear 2mo agoYeah, anti-flock sentiment is one of the few things in our country that's bipartisan these days.
- preg_match 2mo agobipartisan among voters, bipartisan among politicians in the opposite directions. US politicians absolutely adore surveillance and always want more. The surveillance greed knows no bounds, and is supported by basically everyone at all levels of governance.
- hvs 2mo agoA private organization that is tied into governments and police departments across the country have cameras everywhere that can track license plates and have 24-hour video for tracking people and it is completely unregulated.
- delichon 2mo agoThere is pressure on both sides of the issue. A lot of people prioritize security over privacy. My subdivision has a single entrance. I've been lobbying the HOA members to support installing a prominent camera there to dissuade thieves. It's less important to me that it works then that it is visible. (I have one at my driveway entrance; the one at the subdivision entrance would help the whole community.) I would certainly not support a Flock camera wired into their network, but do support a camera limited to HOA control. It would make me feel a little easier about trips away. The potential loss of privacy in my comings and goings seems like a reasonable price to me.
- ghostly_s 2mo agoYou get burglarized a lot?
- delichon 2mo agoA little. In the last one the culprit was caught on a game cam, the property was recovered, and the burglar did some jail time.
- LiquidSky 2mo agoIs your community experiencing an epidemic of theft that needs dissuading? So much that you feel unsafe taking trips away from your home?
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- ekholm_e 2mo agoWhen my wife and I moved into our previous house (in a bit of a rough neighborhood), the owners before us had an ADT security system installed. We didn't re-up the contract, but we kept the sign.
- mindslight 2mo ago
- cryo32 2mo agoHOA and Flock. That is one hellish dystopia over there now.
- noaks 2mo agoImagine an HOA of 5,000 people that functions as a defacto city, surrounded itself with Flock, who has also successfully sued Google to remove itself from street view because it was private property and a privacy violation. The dissonance.
- majorchord 2mo agoUnless that Flock data is also easily publicly available with 2 clicks, how is this comparable to Street View?
- m463 2mo agoStreet view can be used to show the HOA president had non-conforming begonias all along.
- xnx 2mo agoHOA busybodies might be worse than spying cops.
- fg137 2mo agoThe comments under the post are difficult to read. Really shouldn't have clicked the link or signed in to this cesspool...
- solid_fuel 2mo agoIt's "X". The only people left there are either required to have an account for their jobs, or they love this fascist shit. Why else would anyone stay on that shit hole of a platform now that Musk is running it?
- amazingamazing 2mo agoWhy so much emphasis on Flock here? In manhattan i feel virtually every place has cameras. You will be hard pressed to find a block without them. What’s stopping a company from paying these people for their footage in return for “safety”?
- close04 2mo agoA network of cameras where everything they record everywhere is logged and searchable is exponentially more powerful and dangerous that a patchwork of individual, unrelated cameras. > What’s stopping a company from paying these people for their footage in return for “safety”? The complexity of dealing with 1000 different relationships, with individual contracts, negotiations, prices, etc. to collect the information, and then building a platform on which to make that information available to customers.
- hilariously 2mo agoNot much, but a decentralized system is often hard to exploit, and we're reaching points where we've established the surveillance state the populace is finally understanding the repercussions in a clear and poignant way. Assume that means the public camera technology in general will be called Flock cameras, and people will have a more default negative reaction going forward.
- ChoGGi 2mo agoI have cameras on my house; I asked my neighbours if they were okay with them beforehand. They're local storage only, no net access. I got them after my garage was broken into the second time. It's been a few years, haven't had a third break-in yet.
- seethishat 2mo agoWhy is it OK for everyone to carry a surveillance device (smart phone) everywhere they go, but installing a camera on a public roadway is not OK? I don't understand the hatred for Flock. And I don't think the complainers see the irony of tweeting complaints about Flock from their iPhones.
- ceejayoz 2mo ago> Why is it OK for everyone to carry a surveillance device (smart phone) everywhere they go, but installing a camera on a public roadway is not OK? I don't live-stream my phone's camera to people with guns empowered to shoot people?
- pavel_lishin 2mo agoAnd the police can't use my phone camera to track down where their ex-girlfriend has been going for the past two weeks.
- ChoGGi 2mo agoBecause I get to (ideally) control when the camera records? The phone is fine anyways; Google/Apple knows what's best for me.
- fhdkweig 2mo agoIn theory, the phone camera (and microphone) are not supposed to be on 24/7 and sending that info to a 3rd party. Whether that can be known for sure is probably known only to the hardware/software manufacturers. Supposedly, the Russian app Max randomly switches on the camera (can't find a citation for that now), so you can use that as an example of how far it could go.
- cogman10 2mo agoWe have protections for smart phones which limit when a police department can search for them. Further, it's harder for police departments to get at the contents of a phone. Flock cameras provide no barrier for police departments to use them (hence the police using them to track their exes). It provides cops with the ability to target and ruin the day of someone they don't like for whatever reason they like. But further, these cameras are coordinated and the system is designed for easy access of the data for the entire network. Your cellphone and other's cellphones only track them. There is no easy access network that anyone could use (except for maybe apple/google) and the main information they'd get is location data, not footage. And critically, I can turn my cell phone off. It gets further messed up in that flock can grant access to their surveillance system to private individuals, where there is absolutely no legal barrier to what they can look up. That means if they want to start building advertising profiles, make hiring decisions, or just want to stalk their exes, they can. I don't really have a problem with a CCTV system. I have a problem with a giant network of cameras recording everything which is built for easy access and tracking of individuals. Cellphones aren't that. But to the extent they could become that, I oppose that as well.
- thedougd 2mo agoI find this unsettling. When a private entity buys Flock, how do they _use_ it? Is it more than ALPR? Are they sharing the data with the network and offer it to the police? Can they watch footage?
- csoups14 2mo agoKnowing the types that gravitate towards HOA boards and the like, I take the least charitable view possible. Simply a system that is ripe for abuse and it's hard to justify any of the use cases as necessary. We've ceded control of our lives entirely to tyrants both small and large.
- josefritzishere 2mo agoI would never want to buy a house near Flock cameras. That's worse than having an HOA. That one has both! That's a special kind of dystopian hellscape.
- JohnFen 2mo agoI would have to. (Well, I wouldn't even bother looking further into the property once I learned it involved an HOA, but for the sake of argument...) The presence of these cameras is wholly and entirely objectionable.
- ButlerianJihad 2mo agoFirst off, I don't enjoy the intense kind of Internet surveillance we have today; the advertiser tracking and logging of everywhere we go and everything we see. I think most sessions should be kept private, just between me, my ISP, and Google/Microsoft. However, I am perfectly fine with Flock (or other) cameras existing and providing services on behalf of government. If the tech exists to watch public spaces all the time and massively process the data, then so be it; who can stop it? So there are abuses: any system can be abused, so improve the controls and stop corruption at its root, not its symptoms. I bet that most anti-Flock people lobby hard for bodycams on police, and they thrive on those amateur social-media videos that appear to depict "police brutality" or "ICE overreach" on the streets. It only seems fair, that if amateur video can be leveraged to whip the public into a righteous frenzy, that professional video networks should be in place as well. Lastly, I don't mind the folks who are chopping down Flock trees. I think it's kind of adorable, actually. I believe that Flock should've used better care and highway safety standards to install the things, rather than hastily throwing them in any open space. You kids with your axes like President Washington's cherry trees! Power to the people!
- ozlikethewizard 2mo agoIf you've done nothing wrong you've got nothing to hide, right? Personally I see no worthwhile reason the state should be able to track the location of every person at any time. Phones make this bad enough, but at least that's warrant required and requires active intervention. Passive tracking of everybodies actions through total camera surveillance is a brutal thought, no?
- ButlerianJihad 2mo agoNo, actually it's more than that. While your premise is true, it's also true that if I have done something wrong then I have no problem being called out and brought to justice on those merits. Someone who is doing wrong hopes to be disciplined. Many criminals secretly just hope to be caught so they can stop doing wrong. It seems nearly absurd that criminals who "have something to hide" continually just cover up more and more and act covertly, as if they could never be found out. If I did something in public that was so egregious that a camera recorded me and it could be used as evidence against me, I hope that it would. Likewise, if I were involved in any dispute or crime, as a witness or victim, and there were surveillance that indicated my role was innocence, bystander, or victimhood, I would hope that the evidence showed that as well. I don't have any illusions, in the face of corruption and oppression, that surveillance will be entirely fair, but it can be widespread and equally applied, and it's only through its ubiquitousness that it will be ultimately effective.