4 ms·

news like this is only coming out because Flock very recently rolled out a system that tracks usage and flags possible abuses: https://www.wsbtv.com/news/trendi

by paimapi 2mo ago

news like this is only coming out because Flock very recently rolled out a system that tracks usage and flags possible abuses: https://www.wsbtv.com/news/trending/flock-updates-safeguards-after-reports-improper-use-cameras/OCCVIF7E5BFCHOXO5EM5ZPIFRQ/ https://www.wsbtv.com/news/trending/flock-updates-safeguards... the problem is that usage of this system with enforcement is not law. Police Departments opt-in and are the ones responsible for whether or not individuals are charged, fired, or simply disciplined, and they also choose whether or not to disclose this to the public. and the other problem is that it's not just Flock - other companies are stepping in like Axon and Motorola and are essentially eating the cake that is Flock's recent public infamy [0] and law enforcement skirting of accountability is essentially a legalized thing now under legal mechanisms like qualified immunity. not to mention the boy's club that are police unions - my FIL is a former sergeant and has many stories of how he was blackballed by his union because he wouldn't cover for bad cops to the extent that they were pursuing taking away his pension and insurance coverage until just a few years ago [0] https://www.atlasofsurveillance.org/search?location=&technologies%5Bautomated-license-plate-readers%5D=on&technologies%5Bface-recognition%5D=on&technologies%5Bpredictive-policing%5D=on&technologies%5Bvideo-analytics%5D=on&sort= https://www.atlasofsurveillance.org/search?location=&technol...

binarymax 2mo ago
I started watching the Snowden (2016) movie the other day, and got to the point about explanation of XKEYSCORE. The whole time I was thinking “how quaint, that this was such a shockingly abusive system at the time”. We’ve crossed the threshold long ago. We’re so far gone that it’s just taken for granted that we’re always being watched, everywhere. I stopped watching the film because it was really bumming me out. There’s nothing we can do about it and it’s so very sad.
- synkarius 2mo ago
  It is sad, but there is not nothing we can do about it.
  - doctorpangloss 2mo ago
    Flock cameras can be easily defeated with a long stick. They're a terrible technology.
    - mingus88 2mo ago
      I don’t think that’s going to get us very far. As a society we either loudly reject this or we tacitly accept it If Snowden wasn’t enough to cause heads to roll with a generation outrage then flock is small beans in comparison and we are stuck with it
      - __MatrixMan__ 2mo ago
        Nothing about the Snowden revelations presented such an easy target. There was no obvious action against it for juries to nullify. If there were companies whose bottom lines we could target, it's not clear which companies they were. This feels different.
      - deleted 2mo ago
        [deleted]
  - krogenx 2mo ago
    You can use juggalo face paint. https://consequence.net/2019/07/juggalo-makeup-facial-recognition/ https://consequence.net/2019/07/juggalo-makeup-facial-recogn...
  - conartist6 2mo ago
    Not with that attitude! The best way to complain is to build things
- dataf3l 2mo ago
  we use communication systems. we can for example encrypt our comms. interestingly, most messaging platforms become owners of 'our identity' and the friend mesh. if we start decentralizing the idea of identity and friend mesh, and it becomes privately managed, and not externally managed, perhaps we can hop from messaging system to messaging system with more ease, and if so, perhaps we can become more free as a society. losing the equivalent of a 'facebook' account should be a minor inconvenience, not a tragic event. we should encourage people we communicate with, to become more aware and more deeply conscious of privacy, encryption, identity, and to have some healthy distrust for the potential abuses of the state.
  - binarymax 2mo ago
    I agree with everything you say, but we are a small minority in society and shifting the public off of the centralized hubs onto decentralized private secure mesh is an insurmountable task. The public simply won't budge. If I can't get my immediate family to switch, that is a good indicator of the likelihood of everyone else switching.
jimt1234 2mo ago
Piling on. My friend worked for a Midwestern city, maintaining the water and sewer systems. Once, while in the field, 2 dudes ran across the street, one chasing the other, both in plain clothes. The chaser had a gun and was shooting indiscriminately. One bullet hit my friend's work truck, missing him by inches. He had to submit a report because of the bullet holes in his truck. His report said the chaser did the shooting, not the person being chased. He had no idea the chaser was an undercover cop. His report (about the truck) contradicted the police report of the event regarding who did the shooting. The next day at work my friend was told to resubmit his report, and to identify the person being chased as the shooter. He said no, because it wasn't true. He was then told there was a call from the police union to the head of his department, saying that if the report wasn't changed, the police would no longer support his department (police are often needed to help secure an area where repairs are being done). My friend was told if he didn't change his report, he would be fired and his pension would be in jeopardy. He ended up cashing out his pension and quitting. The police know how to protect their own.
- mohamedkoubaa 2mo ago
  Was your friend part of a union as well? If so, did they offer any protection at all?
- KennyBlanken 2mo ago
  I'm going to go out on a limb and guess this is the police department that was placed under federal supervision. Good on him for cashing out. For anyone else: if you run across something like this, collect what evidence you can without endangering yourself, if you can legally and safely record some conversations do so, and then call the FBI hotline, possibly from a friend's phone if you suspect the police might be monitoring your call log. The FBI (well, in normal times...) does not fuck around when it comes to serious color of law violations like this. They're also very happy to get reports of local small town incidents where a town or county police department, judges, town leaders, etc are acting like they have a fiefdom.
mcmcmc 2mo ago
There should really be platform bans for abuses like this. If Flock is aware it’s being abused against its own policies and the legal system they should be liable if they continue to let that person abuse the system, even if they get fired from one PD and given a job and a Flock login at another
- FireBeyond 2mo ago
  Flock will not disable features that are illegal to use in a state when selling to an agency in that state. It's "not their problem". They will offer training on said features to said agency if they ask, because again, "not our problem". They knowingly facilitate the nudge nudge wink wink.
  - paimapi 2mo ago
    their competitors are Clearview and Motorola, neither of which are what you would call unimpeachable from a corporate ethics standpoint [0] [1] [2] [3] [4] companies will only do better if their clientele wants it. if the police don't want accountability processes then that's just tech debt for a future roadmap some other team will handle [0] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/society-equity/clearview-ai-faces-criminal-complaint-austria-suspected-privacy-violations-2025-10-28/ https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/society-equity/clearv... [1] https://www.edpb.europa.eu/news/dutch-supervisory-authority-imposes-a-fine-on-clearview-because-of-illegal-data-collection-for_en https://www.edpb.europa.eu/news/dutch-supervisory-authority-... [2] https://www.aclu.org/cases/aclu-v-clearview-ai https://www.aclu.org/cases/aclu-v-clearview-ai [3] https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/motorola-solutions-replies-to-allegations-of-lacking-sufficient-measures-to-prevent-abuse-of-its-surveillance-products/ https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/motorola... [4] https://classactionu.org/our-news/motorola-solutions-faces-privacy-class-action-over-mass-vehicle-surveillance-and-illegal-data-sharing/ https://classactionu.org/our-news/motorola-solutions-faces-p...
  - mcmcmc 2mo ago
    Right… by “There should be” I meant there should be federal legislation on these kinds of tools and actual enforcement. Flock’s not going to do anything that could hurt their bottom line without being forced to.
naikrovek 2mo ago
[dead]
1-more 2mo ago
> Flock very recently rolled out a system that tracks usage and flags possible abuses I asked one of my nurse friends if they can see gory (figurative or literal) medical details for anyone who has been in their hospital or parent medical system. She said that in Epic, access is logged and audited so it would become a problem if you were just searching for local celebrities. Just as a warrant canary is a good thing to have as an early commit in your social network, "who saw what and when" is a feature that needs to exist early in any tool for authority figures.
- shigawire 2mo ago
  If you look up a family member or coworker (without medical necessity) an automated process will flag that and you may be fired or face other disciplinary action.
  - antonymoose 2mo ago
    Of course this is due to HIPPA - no such law exists to nuke bad cops from orbit for similar misuse.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- petesergeant 2mo ago
  I worked at an e-commerce clothing store in 2011 that made it abundantly clear you would get your ass handed to you if you went poking around in customer records you had no business looking at for curiosity's sake. I currently work with an online game where I will get asked difficult questions if I can't justify why I'm looking at the in-game actions a player took without clear justification, and we have barely any PII on most players beyond IP address. It would seem reasonable to squarely blame Flock for not absolutely centering this feature.
  - paimapi 2mo ago
    I came from an email marketing company where this was not the case. celebrity accounts were accessible to everyone down to the level of first-line support which eventually resulted in someone getting fired because they were able to add a self-promo into a large account's public communique. it took years before basic access controls were implemented and even then that was only because we were acquired and our parent company was very unhappy with our current state which isn't to say that Flock isn't at fault - they very much are and they made it simple for cops to stalk people at will and with very little visibility until recently. pair it with a very nominal reason to investigate, say, community organizing and it becomes (or, really, has already become) a way to stifle dissent [0] [0] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/internal-atlanta-police-records-reveal-monitoring-cop-city-opponents https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/inte...
cogman10 2mo ago
> qualified immunity Qualified immunity gets thrown around a lot, but it's not iron clad. Cops can still be prosecuted for behavior that is a constitutional violation and outside the scope of what a normal cop would consider reasonable. The real reason cops face no accountability is 2 fold. 1. Prosecutors refuse to prosecute cops because they need a working relationship with the department. 2. Police unions make any sort of accountability nearly impossible to enforce as they stop all tracking of misdeeds. (As you touch on). "Defund the police" was an unpopular slogan but it's what we should actually do. We should stop paying this criminal organization and instead do a different public policing structure. Ideally you don't have the same people responding to a domestic dispute as you have responding to a robbery. As it currently stands, police departments are where the government goes to violate civil rights.
- petesergeant 2mo ago
  > We should stop paying this criminal organization Arguably much of the issue is that it's not a singular organization. It's 18,000 separate law-enforcement organizations. The police in the rest of the wealthy Anglosphere have their own issues, but American policing seems uniquely bad in comparison to them, before even getting on to lethal force.
  - paimapi 2mo ago
    I think this has much to do with the history of policing in the US which originated in the South as re-enslavement patrols and in the North as strikebreakers [0]. these institutions were built to be oppressive towards a population that was heterogeneous. this is unlike the ethnic homogeneity in Europe with the recent waves of immigration into EU states, you're now also seeing some of the same tactics in use by those 'better' policing institutions (eg France's prison population [1]) plus the rise of reactionary, far-right political parties [2] my guess is that these are just the natural outcomes from us organizing ourselves as nation states ruled by ethnic and economic elites. carve up borders along sociocultural lines like shared language, religion, and phenotypes and you will always have a ruling majority (at least in the beginning). any changes to that status quo means someone has to relinquish power and some people will do everything, even deliberately antisocial, societally harmful things to preserve that hold [3] until we move past this kind of organization, I don't see any other possible outcome. given the mass migrations that will occur due to climate change, I expect we'll reach a breaking point within a century and the only path forward that isn't regressive will need to be revolutionary rather than evolutionary [0] https://sandratrappen.com/2018/11/18/private-police-forces-the-pinkertons/ https://sandratrappen.com/2018/11/18/private-police-forces-t... [1] https://www.antoniocasella.eu/nume/France_prison_MUSLIM_2008.htm https://www.antoniocasella.eu/nume/France_prison_MUSLIM_2008... [2] https://www.dw.com/en/far-right-populists-eu-germany-afd/a-72888389 https://www.dw.com/en/far-right-populists-eu-germany-afd/a-7... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
danesparza 2mo ago
Yeah - I agree. I'm not sure the problem is Flock (because it will just be replaced with another camera system eventually). That police officers just don't get successfully prosecuted for this because of qualified immunity: that should be the big takeaway here. Flock is just the whipping boy of the hour.
- fragmede 2mo ago
  Flock chose not to implement the system with safeguards in the first place though. A more competent camera company would have started with it, and said no one is allowed to snoop on their ex's, with the force of law making it a fireable offense. Hence the whipping. If there was no such abuse of the system, we'd be hearing positive stories about how it recovered stolen cars, kidnapped children, and stopped crime. Which becomes harder to fight because some people will willingly choose to give up liberty for safety. It's possible the next company will be similarly incompetent, but after having Flock tarred and feathered, they'll probably do a better job of it.
- preg_match 2mo ago
  It’s not just qualified immunity, that’s the tip of the iceberg. The union ensures cops are never found in trouble of almost anything. They systematically dismantle controls and visibility into police behavior. Investigations just don’t happen, and when they do they’re rubber-stamped or sabotaged due to lack of evidence. But even if you DID have clear evidence of misconduct and leadership is willing to push it, and the police union is willing to push it, it doesn’t matter. The prosecutors won’t prosecute, they have a symbiotic relationship with the police. And even if they did prosecute, it still doesn’t matter. The judge and jury will go easy on the cops.

by paimapi 2mo ago

binarymax 2mo ago

I started watching the Snowden (2016) movie the other day, and got to the point about explanation of XKEYSCORE. The whole time I was thinking “how quaint, that this was such a shockingly abusive system at the time”. We’ve crossed the threshold long ago. We’re so far gone that it’s just taken for granted that we’re always being watched, everywhere. I stopped watching the film because it was really bumming me out. There’s nothing we can do about it and it’s so very sad.

synkarius 2mo ago
It is sad, but there is not nothing we can do about it.
- doctorpangloss 2mo ago
  Flock cameras can be easily defeated with a long stick. They're a terrible technology.
  - mingus88 2mo ago
    I don’t think that’s going to get us very far. As a society we either loudly reject this or we tacitly accept it If Snowden wasn’t enough to cause heads to roll with a generation outrage then flock is small beans in comparison and we are stuck with it
    - __MatrixMan__ 2mo ago
      Nothing about the Snowden revelations presented such an easy target. There was no obvious action against it for juries to nullify. If there were companies whose bottom lines we could target, it's not clear which companies they were. This feels different.
    - deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
- krogenx 2mo ago
  You can use juggalo face paint. https://consequence.net/2019/07/juggalo-makeup-facial-recognition/ https://consequence.net/2019/07/juggalo-makeup-facial-recogn...
- conartist6 2mo ago
  Not with that attitude! The best way to complain is to build things
dataf3l 2mo ago
we use communication systems. we can for example encrypt our comms. interestingly, most messaging platforms become owners of 'our identity' and the friend mesh. if we start decentralizing the idea of identity and friend mesh, and it becomes privately managed, and not externally managed, perhaps we can hop from messaging system to messaging system with more ease, and if so, perhaps we can become more free as a society. losing the equivalent of a 'facebook' account should be a minor inconvenience, not a tragic event. we should encourage people we communicate with, to become more aware and more deeply conscious of privacy, encryption, identity, and to have some healthy distrust for the potential abuses of the state.
- binarymax 2mo ago
  I agree with everything you say, but we are a small minority in society and shifting the public off of the centralized hubs onto decentralized private secure mesh is an insurmountable task. The public simply won't budge. If I can't get my immediate family to switch, that is a good indicator of the likelihood of everyone else switching.

jimt1234 2mo ago

Piling on. My friend worked for a Midwestern city, maintaining the water and sewer systems. Once, while in the field, 2 dudes ran across the street, one chasing the other, both in plain clothes. The chaser had a gun and was shooting indiscriminately. One bullet hit my friend's work truck, missing him by inches. He had to submit a report because of the bullet holes in his truck. His report said the chaser did the shooting, not the person being chased. He had no idea the chaser was an undercover cop. His report (about the truck) contradicted the police report of the event regarding who did the shooting. The next day at work my friend was told to resubmit his report, and to identify the person being chased as the shooter. He said no, because it wasn't true. He was then told there was a call from the police union to the head of his department, saying that if the report wasn't changed, the police would no longer support his department (police are often needed to help secure an area where repairs are being done). My friend was told if he didn't change his report, he would be fired and his pension would be in jeopardy. He ended up cashing out his pension and quitting. The police know how to protect their own.

mohamedkoubaa 2mo ago
Was your friend part of a union as well? If so, did they offer any protection at all?
KennyBlanken 2mo ago
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess this is the police department that was placed under federal supervision. Good on him for cashing out. For anyone else: if you run across something like this, collect what evidence you can without endangering yourself, if you can legally and safely record some conversations do so, and then call the FBI hotline, possibly from a friend's phone if you suspect the police might be monitoring your call log. The FBI (well, in normal times...) does not fuck around when it comes to serious color of law violations like this. They're also very happy to get reports of local small town incidents where a town or county police department, judges, town leaders, etc are acting like they have a fiefdom.

mcmcmc 2mo ago

There should really be platform bans for abuses like this. If Flock is aware it’s being abused against its own policies and the legal system they should be liable if they continue to let that person abuse the system, even if they get fired from one PD and given a job and a Flock login at another

FireBeyond 2mo ago
Flock will not disable features that are illegal to use in a state when selling to an agency in that state. It's "not their problem". They will offer training on said features to said agency if they ask, because again, "not our problem". They knowingly facilitate the nudge nudge wink wink.
- paimapi 2mo ago
  their competitors are Clearview and Motorola, neither of which are what you would call unimpeachable from a corporate ethics standpoint [0] [1] [2] [3] [4] companies will only do better if their clientele wants it. if the police don't want accountability processes then that's just tech debt for a future roadmap some other team will handle [0] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/society-equity/clearview-ai-faces-criminal-complaint-austria-suspected-privacy-violations-2025-10-28/ https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/society-equity/clearv... [1] https://www.edpb.europa.eu/news/dutch-supervisory-authority-imposes-a-fine-on-clearview-because-of-illegal-data-collection-for_en https://www.edpb.europa.eu/news/dutch-supervisory-authority-... [2] https://www.aclu.org/cases/aclu-v-clearview-ai https://www.aclu.org/cases/aclu-v-clearview-ai [3] https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/motorola-solutions-replies-to-allegations-of-lacking-sufficient-measures-to-prevent-abuse-of-its-surveillance-products/ https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/motorola... [4] https://classactionu.org/our-news/motorola-solutions-faces-privacy-class-action-over-mass-vehicle-surveillance-and-illegal-data-sharing/ https://classactionu.org/our-news/motorola-solutions-faces-p...
- mcmcmc 2mo ago
  Right… by “There should be” I meant there should be federal legislation on these kinds of tools and actual enforcement. Flock’s not going to do anything that could hurt their bottom line without being forced to.

naikrovek 2mo ago

[dead]

1-more 2mo ago

> Flock very recently rolled out a system that tracks usage and flags possible abuses I asked one of my nurse friends if they can see gory (figurative or literal) medical details for anyone who has been in their hospital or parent medical system. She said that in Epic, access is logged and audited so it would become a problem if you were just searching for local celebrities. Just as a warrant canary is a good thing to have as an early commit in your social network, "who saw what and when" is a feature that needs to exist early in any tool for authority figures.

shigawire 2mo ago
If you look up a family member or coworker (without medical necessity) an automated process will flag that and you may be fired or face other disciplinary action.
- antonymoose 2mo ago
  Of course this is due to HIPPA - no such law exists to nuke bad cops from orbit for similar misuse.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
petesergeant 2mo ago
I worked at an e-commerce clothing store in 2011 that made it abundantly clear you would get your ass handed to you if you went poking around in customer records you had no business looking at for curiosity's sake. I currently work with an online game where I will get asked difficult questions if I can't justify why I'm looking at the in-game actions a player took without clear justification, and we have barely any PII on most players beyond IP address. It would seem reasonable to squarely blame Flock for not absolutely centering this feature.
- paimapi 2mo ago
  I came from an email marketing company where this was not the case. celebrity accounts were accessible to everyone down to the level of first-line support which eventually resulted in someone getting fired because they were able to add a self-promo into a large account's public communique. it took years before basic access controls were implemented and even then that was only because we were acquired and our parent company was very unhappy with our current state which isn't to say that Flock isn't at fault - they very much are and they made it simple for cops to stalk people at will and with very little visibility until recently. pair it with a very nominal reason to investigate, say, community organizing and it becomes (or, really, has already become) a way to stifle dissent [0] [0] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/internal-atlanta-police-records-reveal-monitoring-cop-city-opponents https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/inte...

cogman10 2mo ago

> qualified immunity Qualified immunity gets thrown around a lot, but it's not iron clad. Cops can still be prosecuted for behavior that is a constitutional violation and outside the scope of what a normal cop would consider reasonable. The real reason cops face no accountability is 2 fold. 1. Prosecutors refuse to prosecute cops because they need a working relationship with the department. 2. Police unions make any sort of accountability nearly impossible to enforce as they stop all tracking of misdeeds. (As you touch on). "Defund the police" was an unpopular slogan but it's what we should actually do. We should stop paying this criminal organization and instead do a different public policing structure. Ideally you don't have the same people responding to a domestic dispute as you have responding to a robbery. As it currently stands, police departments are where the government goes to violate civil rights.

petesergeant 2mo ago
> We should stop paying this criminal organization Arguably much of the issue is that it's not a singular organization. It's 18,000 separate law-enforcement organizations. The police in the rest of the wealthy Anglosphere have their own issues, but American policing seems uniquely bad in comparison to them, before even getting on to lethal force.
- paimapi 2mo ago
  I think this has much to do with the history of policing in the US which originated in the South as re-enslavement patrols and in the North as strikebreakers [0]. these institutions were built to be oppressive towards a population that was heterogeneous. this is unlike the ethnic homogeneity in Europe with the recent waves of immigration into EU states, you're now also seeing some of the same tactics in use by those 'better' policing institutions (eg France's prison population [1]) plus the rise of reactionary, far-right political parties [2] my guess is that these are just the natural outcomes from us organizing ourselves as nation states ruled by ethnic and economic elites. carve up borders along sociocultural lines like shared language, religion, and phenotypes and you will always have a ruling majority (at least in the beginning). any changes to that status quo means someone has to relinquish power and some people will do everything, even deliberately antisocial, societally harmful things to preserve that hold [3] until we move past this kind of organization, I don't see any other possible outcome. given the mass migrations that will occur due to climate change, I expect we'll reach a breaking point within a century and the only path forward that isn't regressive will need to be revolutionary rather than evolutionary [0] https://sandratrappen.com/2018/11/18/private-police-forces-the-pinkertons/ https://sandratrappen.com/2018/11/18/private-police-forces-t... [1] https://www.antoniocasella.eu/nume/France_prison_MUSLIM_2008.htm https://www.antoniocasella.eu/nume/France_prison_MUSLIM_2008... [2] https://www.dw.com/en/far-right-populists-eu-germany-afd/a-72888389 https://www.dw.com/en/far-right-populists-eu-germany-afd/a-7... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

danesparza 2mo ago

Yeah - I agree. I'm not sure the problem is Flock (because it will just be replaced with another camera system eventually). That police officers just don't get successfully prosecuted for this because of qualified immunity: that should be the big takeaway here. Flock is just the whipping boy of the hour.

fragmede 2mo ago
Flock chose not to implement the system with safeguards in the first place though. A more competent camera company would have started with it, and said no one is allowed to snoop on their ex's, with the force of law making it a fireable offense. Hence the whipping. If there was no such abuse of the system, we'd be hearing positive stories about how it recovered stolen cars, kidnapped children, and stopped crime. Which becomes harder to fight because some people will willingly choose to give up liberty for safety. It's possible the next company will be similarly incompetent, but after having Flock tarred and feathered, they'll probably do a better job of it.
preg_match 2mo ago
It’s not just qualified immunity, that’s the tip of the iceberg. The union ensures cops are never found in trouble of almost anything. They systematically dismantle controls and visibility into police behavior. Investigations just don’t happen, and when they do they’re rubber-stamped or sabotaged due to lack of evidence. But even if you DID have clear evidence of misconduct and leadership is willing to push it, and the police union is willing to push it, it doesn’t matter. The prosecutors won’t prosecute, they have a symbiotic relationship with the police. And even if they did prosecute, it still doesn’t matter. The judge and jury will go easy on the cops.