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Flock Safety's controversial CEO just got a taste of his own medicine
- ChrisArchitect 1mo agoDiscussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49483052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49483052
- CqtGLRGcukpy 1mo agoNon-cloudflare link that basically says the same thing: https://mstdn.social/@stux/117186158784673388 https://mstdn.social/@stux/117186158784673388
- totallymike 1mo agoWhy is cloudflare a problem?
- zbrozek 1mo agoBecause they slow down and often block access to websites, particularly for people that try to avoid being fingerprinted or otherwise tracked. Pretty evil behavior.
- esseph 1mo ago> Because they slow down and often block access to websites, particularly for people that try to avoid being fingerprinted or otherwise tracked. Pretty evil behavior. Bots and scrapers and hackers also try and avoid being tracked, which is by far a bigger problem for them and most websites than the 15 of us using tons of antifingerprinting techniques. Evil? No, that's silly.
- nickff 1mo agoIt is very challenging to distinguish individuals interested in privacy from bots acting maliciously or with reckless indifference. If you devise a way to do this more effectively than Cloudflare, you should start a business to sell this as a service.
- lynx97 1mo agoSure, I am practicing understanding for the tyranny around me everyday when I wake up, as a meditation exercise. Answers like yours kill the little remaining faith I have in people. This same argument has been used to defend sloppily implemented CAPTCHAS destroying accessibility since what, 20 years.
- nickff 1mo agoMy employer is a small business that has an e-commerce website that is attacked by fraudsters trying to validate stolen credit cards or obtain customer information hundreds of times per day. Operations like CloudFlare are the only way to foil these actors. Just trusting you is not a viable strategy.
- karmakurtisaani 1mo agoThe people who downvote could propose how to solve the fraudster problem instead of shooting the messenger.
- gib444 1mo agoThat isn't the done thing here, lamentably. Downvote is a de facto disagree button
- lynx97 1mo ago"We removed the wheelchair ramp because it was used by rodents to enter our building." "Don't shoot the messenger!" Security can't be a reason for discrimination.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- karmakurtisaani 1mo agoSo keep the ramp then. Now your business is full of rats and even the disabled don't want to shop there. What do you do now? Edit: The downvotes have spoken! This view is simply wrong with no justification!
- webdoodle 1mo agoDon't listen to these hecklers, you have every right to your privacy, and should demand it. Anonymity is paramount if people want to be able to talk without repercussions. Gaslighting, heckling and other forms of harassment are to convince you to self censor. Don't take the bait. Ignore them.
- neya 1mo ago"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
- polotics 1mo agowell in my experience mostly you get either: - stupidity - stupidity and malice
- salawat 1mo agoHanlon's Razor is especially effective at getting Good people to put out their own eyes to keep them nice and soft targets for the malicious. I'll take being a harder to find likable by people I have no desire to be liked by to make myself a harder mark. The honest ones will understand. The malicious were never worth being close with, and I'm doing the world a service by getting the borderline enlightened. Sufficiently advanced stupidity being indistinguishable from malice is also something to keep in mind.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- JohnFen 1mo agoCloudflare doesn't reliably let me through.
- dlcarrier 1mo agoIt regularly blocks me too. I've begun search Google for: what does [url] say about [search query] It'll make a Gemini summary of the page, and can be prompted for more details. It's really the only use for Gemini I've found reliable. I'd still rather directly view the output of the scraper bot, though. If anyone knows a good scraping bot that lets you view the output directly, without running it through an LLM, please let me know.
- pibaker 1mo agoGetting past cloudflare can be a problem if you are from a less reputable country or a VPN or if you use a less conventional browser. There is also a larger problem of a private entity being the MITM for a large portion of internet traffic. But i don't think this is the point GP was trying to make.
- ranger_danger 1mo agoMost CF sites I try to visit only give me an endless captcha loop, so I cannot visit them at all. I suspect it's simply because my ISP regularly rotates IPs, and so I unfortunately have to share "reputation" with other users who can't behave online.
- artisinal 1mo agoIn the USA, is it really that easy to find the home address of a business owner? The EU briefly had a similar registry but that got shut down quickly.
- hattmall 1mo agoNot really, it looks like this guy originally registered the business at his personal residence which is not really common. Kinda surprised if he still lives there considering how FLOCK has expanded.
- lotsofpulp 1mo agoLand records are public in most US locales. You can type in almost any residential address on homes.com and it will show you who owned it when and with what loan terms.
- stingrae 1mo agoBasically yes. There are a large number of public repositories of data that can dox a persons address. Like property tax rolls, company filings etc. some of these are actually required by Europe (https://developer.apple.com/help/app-store-connect/manage-compliance-information/manage-european-union-digital-services-act-trader-requirements/ https://developer.apple.com/help/app-store-connect/manage-co..., which I do not appreciate)
- dlcarrier 1mo agoYes, but only for the business directly owned. In the US, it's perfectly legal to run things through shell companies that make things much more difficult. E.g. instead of directly owning the company, he could put his share in fully-owned shell company, based in a country that doesn't report the owner.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- webdoodle 1mo agoIronically most of the people reading this are doing so on an always connected phone with a fused battery, that they can't trust, because they don't control it. It also has significantly more capabilities that a flock camera, and they likely pay for it too.
- ethanwillis 1mo agoIt's called choice. Maybe a dumb choice, but a choice!
- HDBaseT 1mo agofalse equivalence.
- kadoban 1mo agoThat's not ironic, that's _hey, look over there!_
- yonran 1mo agoThe article is very one sided, implying without evidence that Flock is for recreational tracking of individuals. With San Francisco SFPD’s ALPR cameras at least, this would be an abuse of the cameras according to the policy linked from https://transparency.flocksafety.com/san-francisco-ca-pd https://transparency.flocksafety.com/san-francisco-ca-pd. Here are the Authorized purposes: Locate stolen, wanted, and or other vehicles that are the subject of investigation To apprehend wanted persons subject to arrest warrants or who are otherwise lawfully sought by law enforcement. To locate victims, witnesses, suspects, missing children, adults, and/or elderly individuals, including in response to Amber Alerts and Silver Alerts and others associated with a law enforcement investigation. To assist with criminal investigations initiated by local, state and regional public safety departments by identifying vehicles associated with targets of criminal investigations. Counter-terrorism: Identify potential threats to critical infrastructure sites. For other law enforcement purposes as authorized by law: Investigations of major crimes. Which of these uses do people not like? Or which other policies are people concerned with in other jurisdictions?
- defrost 1mo agoNot on the list, but documented: * Live monitoring of teenagers in gyms for sales purposes, * Multiple counts of stalking by LEOs, * Instances of unsecured access, * Multiple erroneous plate matching directly leading to "swatting" of women and children on day to day shopping trips.
- yonran 1mo agoThe Dunwoody MJCC monitoring seems the worst incident in that Flock never issued a postmortem on how the terms of the sharing were violated. Abuses in violation of policy are a problem like in any organization that can be reduced through auditing, discipline, etc. And it seems that the ones that have been caught (Jarmarus Brown of Orange City, FL; Asad Zahir of Shively, KY; Emily Pacheco of New Bedford, MA) have been disciplined and/or charged. Insufficient security of devices is a problem but does not have to do with my comment about the intended uses. Officers have to be trained about OCR errors, just like we have to know when to trust an LLM. The SFPD policy I linked says officers shall “Visually verify the alphanumeric characters on the plate” before stopping a car identified by ALPR. And like LLM hallucinations OCR errors will go down over time.
- cocacola1 1mo agoIt’s been interesting to see this vitriol towards Flock increase over the past couple of months or so.
- bamboozled 1mo agoWhat is interesting about it ?
- camillomiller 1mo agoI think they spelled satisfying wrong
- alexjplant 1mo agoBecause Flock is the first company to so brazenly violate the post-2011 social contract: if you're going to track somebody you need to give them coupons and content as compensation. They have failed to provide the people whose privacy they are violating with internet drama and buttcheeks videos. Other companies with many times greater reach and market cap collect GPS, cell tower, and 802.11 ESSID data to observe their users' movements; they track them across web sites and apps without explicit consent to serve personalized advertisements and adjust prices for durable goods and services depending upon user behavior. They do this with impunity because people enjoy short-form videos and image macros and will readily trade their privacy for easy access to them. Flock has nothing to offer in this regard. This is why they are shunned whereas other companies that understand how this game is played are forgiven for equivalent or worse sins.
- aceazzameen 1mo agoI agree with the post, despite the sarcasm. But the one thing it's missing is how Flock uses AI to pass user data directly to law enforcement without a warrant. At least (most?) of other companies that comply with the said social contract wait for the warrant.
- cocacola1 1mo agoThe speed of the surge + people feeling strongly enough about it that they destroy the cameras + events like the grand jury that refused the indictment. I usually just see this kind of vitriol remain online. That it’s crossed into the real world like this is interesting to see.
- platesmead 1mo ago"Doxxing is bad except when it's against people I dislike"? If people don't want CCTV, campaign to make it illegal.
- beAbU 1mo agoFlock is not CCTV though. There's nothing 'closed circuit' about it at all, and that's the problem.
- platesmead 1mo agoOkay, reading car plates. Again, campaign to make it illegal.
- Simulacra 1mo agoThe irony is over the top with this guy. He says that Americans need to "compromise" on their privacy, but then absolutely loses it when the Panopticon is turned on him.