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Flock CEO's Address Spread Online as Surveillance Backlash Explodes
- elmer2 2mo ago[flagged]
- toomuchtodo 2mo agoI believe the folks cutting down Flock cameras and voting out reps who won't have them removed are well within their rights. Fundamentally, Flock Safety is incompatible with US constitutional rights, their enterprise value can drain slowly, or quickly. We're just arguing time horizon. Flock Camera CEO Asks Americans to “Compromise” on Privacy After Growing Backlash - https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/flock-camera-ceo-asks-americans-132811636.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/flock-camera-ceo-asks... - August 27th, 2026 Flock CEO calls for ‘compromise’ as surveillance company faces growing backlash - https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/23/flock-ceo-calls-for-compromise-as-surveillance-company-faces-growing-backlash/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/23/flock-ceo-calls-for-compro... - August 23rd, 2026 Flock Safety CEO calls for national 'compromise' amid camera sabotage and public revolt - https://www.foxnews.com/media/flock-safety-ceo-calls-national-compromise-amid-camera-sabotage-public-revolt https://www.foxnews.com/media/flock-safety-ceo-calls-nationa... - August 22nd, 2026 > If you want violence, you better be prepared for it. You just can't complain when someone doesn't like what you are doing and comes right to your door. I don't condone violence in this context, and besides perhaps a few individuals (humans are tricky), I haven't seen anyone else loudly or overtly calling for it (provide sources if I am wrong). My assumption is his address is being shared to demonstrate the asymmetry and hypocrisy. "If you have nothing to hide" argument. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument (but you know, its the usual authoritarian tech bro "I wanna get rich and have control while the plebs get stuck with the harm and externalities" story)
- ramon156 2mo agoas always it entirely depends on context. rationality is out the door when tbe power is out of your hands. its pretty clear flock wont take your criticism seriously
- big_youth 2mo agoOur founding fathers addressed this: "What country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
- legitster 2mo agoFounding father. Singular. I can appreciate Jefferson as much as the next guy but thank goodness his voice just one amongst many.
- spl757 2mo agoThe CEO of a company that spies on people, and now detects signals from your phone to connect the car to a driver, got scared and had Google blur his house. That is the height of hypocrisy. His home address is also public information, available from the City Clerks office for free. People won't need to find the exact address, just look for the only blurred house on his street. It's all utterly ridiculous. Clearly the citizens of the USA do not want flock in their communities so the CEO of the company isn't going to be popular, but he could fix that by removing flock from the communities that ban it.
- whateveracct 2mo agoCEOs aren't just people. They can have fun dealing with it :)
- Computer0 2mo agoCEO's aren't people. When you pretend they are, you allow them to live normal lives where they seem deserving of the same social protections we all enjoy.
- testing22321 2mo agoWho said violence? We just need a ton of people to film his house and whereabouts 24x7 for a while so he gets a taste of his own medicine. It would be horrible if he didn’t like it. Note celebrities have to put up with the paparazzi. At this point he’s a celebrity.
- barbazoo 2mo agoI would imagine that the worst thing the vast majority of people have done is probably orders of magnitude less bad than what this guy has enabled and profited from. So it'd probably be safe under that regime.
- rc5150 2mo agoYou're talking about violence like its some imaginary thing that isn't already being amplified by the government against its citizenry. The violence is already here and the surveillance state exacerbates it.
- randycupertino 2mo agoI noticed he requested to hide his house street view on google maps.
- morkalork 2mo agoSounds like he doesn't want to compromise his privacy in the name of safety
- mullingitover 2mo agoI worry that Flock is going to take the fall, and some other bad actor with political connections (my money would be on Palantir) will just quietly pick up where they left off while everyone's patting themselves on the back for defeating Flock. The stuff Flock is doing is going to be standard AI-driven surveillance in the future, and unless the actual practices are made into political third rails and made into criminal code violations, they will absolutely be legalized on some party line vote in the middle of the night. Don't make it 'stop Flock,' make it 'criminalize AI-driven surveillance.' Denounce 'conspiracy to implement ai-driven surveillance' as an inherently immoral activity punishable by prison time.
- toomuchtodo 2mo agoLegislation guardrails around surveillance technology are a necessary component to defend against future corporate surveillance apparatus establishment and operation, as this surveillance could take many forms (video, audio, geolocation, RF signatures, etc). Flock and Axon today, whatever unsavory folks come along in the future. “Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work together for the benefit of all.” —- John Maynard Keynes Guardrails because we cannot trust the human.
- toomuchtodo 2mo agoGov. Abbott blocks state agencies from spending money on Flock cameras - https://www.texastribune.org/2026/08/28/texas-greg-abbott-flock-cameras-order-state-money/ https://www.texastribune.org/2026/08/28/texas-greg-abbott-fl... - August 28th, 2026 > The order came as The Texas Tribune was preparing to publish an investigation detailing how a state agency has devoted at least $30 million to building the state’s Flock surveillance network. Lawmakers added $1 to Texans’ car insurance policies. That money paid for thousands of Flock cameras. - https://www.texastribune.org/2026/08/28/texas-flock-cameras-auto-insurance-fee-mvcpa-grants/ https://www.texastribune.org/2026/08/28/texas-flock-cameras-... - August 28th, 2026 Pennsylvania state senator planning bill to ban Flock, ALPR cameras - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49482256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49482256 - August 2026 https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/pa-state-senator-planning-bill-191700709.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/pa-state-senato...
- nazgulsenpai 2mo agoOur local governments are enabling Flock. Get involved in your local politics. Find out who made the decisions to put these cameras in the neighborhoods and hold them accountable. Until that happens they will just find another vendor if Flock folds. Just like Flock will find a new CEO if theirs is forced to resignation.
- zaptheimpaler 2mo agoYou should see how the datacenter companies operate. They have massive teams of lawyers bigger than the entire city staff threatening all sorts of lawsuits and even pressure cities into signing NDAs against discussing their negotiations with any other city. They have buckets of money and perks waiting to bribe a defector or fund an election campaign. Any old scummy company with a couple of billion dollars is frequently more sophisticated and powerful than a piddly local government.
- legitster 2mo agoI know this is an extremely hot take, but it's not the license plate reading service that bothers me. A license plate is specifically a tracking number to identify a registered vehicle on a public road. The 4th Amendment gives you privacy inside of your car, but your car is not itself guaranteed privacy. Before Flock, police departments already had informally aggregated data from speed cameras, red light cameras, and toll booths. The distinction being that any evidence collected in such a way is purely circumstantial and still requires a warrant to investigate. The big irony though of Flock plate readers is that because they're just tracking license plates, they're not actually that useful at solving meaningful crime. Realistically there are a small number of hit-and-runs that could be solved, and they can make certain investigations a bit shorter. And most of what we read about is officer directed stalking or harassment activities. It's all of Flock's other advertised services that should really freak people out. The facial recognition, the audio scanners, the individual-level tracking databases - right now they're a fancy VIN lookup service. It's all the other stuff they're trying to sell departments on that are getting into really egregious 4th Amendment violations.
- mullingitover 2mo agoRecent WIRED[1] article goes in depth on this exact problem: > Another prompt instructs the system to list everyone arrested more than twice in two years for “any offense,” exempting only narcotics arrests, and then says to map where those people live, retrieve the calls for service at their homes, and “do a workup on the top three individuals.” The prompt begins with everyone in the area who has an arrest record and ends with dossiers on three of them, chosen by the software. > A “workup,” in Flock’s terminology, is a one-command background check. It starts with a name and a date of birth and returns what the department’s records and commercial data hold: vehicles, prior listings as a suspect, and, on a second screen, relatives, phone numbers, and online accounts. This stuff is beyond the wildest fantasies of East Germany's Stasi, and it's going to be a whack-a-mole game dealing with all the baby Flocks that spring up if Flock itself can be shut down. [1] https://www.wired.com/story/flock-safety-os-investigate/ https://www.wired.com/story/flock-safety-os-investigate/
- legitster 2mo ago
- ChrisArchitect 2mo agoRelated: Flock CEO gets his house blurred out on Google Maps and Zillow https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49467750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49467750
- senectus1 2mo agothis house? https://www.zumper.com/address/2588-winslow-dr-ne-atlanta-ga-30305-usa https://www.zumper.com/address/2588-winslow-dr-ne-atlanta-ga...
- consumer451 2mo agoI have to say, I wish we lived in a society where tools like Flock were not problematic, due to abuse and other factors. However, if we lived in such a society, we wouldn't want tools like Flock to begin with. edit: to be clear, we are far too corrupt a society to have things like Flock. The point of my comment was this irony.
- hightrix 2mo agoWe do not need Flock in this current iteration of society. In utopia, we would also not need Flock. Privacy should be a human right.
- consumer451 2mo agoAgreed. I now realize that my initial comment did not make my position clear.
- Gigachad 2mo agoWe don’t _need_ many things. But there are real problems that it solves and solves better than anything else. I feel like the best solution is very tightly regulating and auditing this technology so it can only be used to benefit society.
- consumer451 2mo agoWe are so far away from that even being a possibility. We live in a world that is most corrupt and above the law, at the very top. Why would anyone trust that world? Trust is required for this technology to be willingly adopted.
- queenkjuul 2mo ago> We don’t _need_ many things. But there are real problems that it solves and solves better than anything else. I really don't believe this, nor do i believe any amount of regulation will actually prevent dipshit US cops from abusing it
- georgemcbay 2mo ago
- m4ck_ 2mo agoDoxxing is bad of course but does "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" apply here? Or is that only for us working folk?
- folkrav 2mo agoI would typically agree with the statement, but I have a lot of trouble giving a flying shit about the people literally selling Doxxing-As-A-Service getting doxxed in return.
- amazingamazing 2mo agoDo you believe anyone with a surveillance camera should have the owners name and address published if in any way a “public” area is recorded? I suppose we can start with all Blink, Ring and Nest Cams. Then we will continue with dash cam owners.
- Refreeze5224 2mo agoI don't. But I do think the CEO of a company who sells spying as a service to cops should have a taste of his own medicine.
- amazingamazing 2mo agoSo much for privacy should be a human right lol.
- peterm4 2mo agoHuman rights are routinely revoked from those that impede on the rights of others. This is the premise that underpins prisons. Privacy being a human right still holds true.
- card_zero 2mo agoFrom which I conclude that prisons are wrong, but also if I don't like someone I can revoke his rights and push him downstairs.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- rdevilla 2mo ago[dead]
- eudamoniac 2mo agoWhen the mechanisms of government fail, violence is sometimes necessary and justified.
- CqtGLRGcukpy 2mo agoNon-cloudflare link that basically says the same thing: https://mstdn.social/@stux/117186158784673388 https://mstdn.social/@stux/117186158784673388
- stanfordkid 2mo agoI think Flock had good intentions. Most of their justifications make sense -- given that you trust power. But Trump has shown us exactly what the founding fathers feared: A tyrant that will abuse and misuse these technologies with no moral grounding whatsoever. As much as people love Obama he greatly grew the capabilities of the executive branch and is directly responsible for the issues we see now with Trump. Flock is much the same in my book: sure it is great to collate a dataset of everyone's location given you trust power -- but history has shown us that you seldom can. I think the onus should be opt-in, you can allow Flock to track you if you want the protections that the company might offer you. In general, we need a digital bill of rights -- tech has changed and exceeded what the software written by the founding fathers can handle.