3 ms·
The question is, why should they care at all? Will this hurt their business?
by wat10000 24d ago
The question is, why should they care at all? Will this hurt their business?
- ryandrake 24d ago[dead]
- fn-mote 24d agoWould the DNC in the last US national election count?
- thereforegrin 22d agowas there really any meaningful fallout though?
- afavour 24d agoQuite potentially, yes. Their name is already mud among many voters, if they're shown to be treating data insecurely then that's another reason why local governments might consider terminating contracts with them.
- NichoPaolucci 24d agoAny breach of security on a system like this is a big flashing red-alert to me. If it could lead an attacker to get ANY of their data... Persons, places, events, etc is pretty damning stuff to be exfiltrated. Stalking/Domestic Violence, blackmail, timed robberies, you name it... That data shouldn't really be in anyone's hands in my opinion, but in anyone's hands (good guys / bad guys) it's pretty powerful.
- sixothree 24d agoApparently police are accessing the network via their personal devices. I highly doubt their security practices online are any better than this. I wouldn't be surprised either to see things that chinese manufacturers do such as intentional back doors. Overall this goes from disappointing to fairly repugnant.
- iAMkenough 24d agoAllegedly you can buy credentials on the darkweb to perform national searches. Might explain why some of the logged reasons for recent searches were “LMAO”
- DANmode 24d agoThe normal explanation is plenty, unless you’ve never met, read about, or heard anyone talk about, law enforcement officers (who are human beings - for better and for worse).
- wat10000 24d agoHow many of us have had coworkers who put something like that into a commit message? And that's a message that's at least notionally supposed to be helpful to you or your coworkers, rather than existing purely for the purposes of oversight you don't want in the first place.
- iAMkenough 23d agoI would expect law enforcement coworkers to understand the law, department procedure, and public requests for their data. That’s expecting too much from the academy, I guess. Those that fail to meet standards should be fired to spare the taxpayers from the lawsuits coming from AI-assisted complainants. It’s also too much for Flock’s YC-funded technology to implement a field filter that rejects “LMAO” as a valid request. At the very least, your local staff’s nationwide stalking credentials being harvested by phishing and abused by others should carry criminal negligence penalties. Governments should pass that liability onto this YC-funded startup company.
- DANmode 23d agoIt’s a federally protected right to skip over law enforcement officers candidates because they rank too high on an aptitude or IQ test. Reasonable people would expect what you expect. We are not reasonable people.
- wat10000 24d agoThat's why you or I would care, but that doesn't answer the question of why they would. Large companies tend to be amoral. Unless it affects them monetarily (possibly indirectly) they're not going to care. Given what they do to make money, I don't see any of these things hurting them.
- overfeed 24d agoGetting persistent access to Flock's internal network is a high-priority item for every US adversary, who doesn't want free intel collection on the movements of persons of interest? Knowing who the FBI and local cops are monitoring in is the counter-counter-intelligence cherry on top of a self-inflicted dragnet surveillance cake. Any entity with access to flock servers can virtually stake-out anyone/everyone driving past Flock camera to monitor their movements. In a hot war, this would provide actionable data to support assassination via road-side bomb/drone strikes.
- mistrial9 24d ago.. with friends like these, who needs enemies
- ajsnigrutin 23d agoI mean... currently any cop can do that, and it's a lot easier to bribe a single cop than to break into flock network. https://edition.cnn.com/2026/08/26/us/flock-kentucky-police-officer-arrest https://edition.cnn.com/2026/08/26/us/flock-kentucky-police-... A single cop can do it 2000 times it seems before they get caught And it's not a lone case: 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...
- fapjacks 24d agoMany moons ago, I was involved in the technical side of volunteer work for domestic violence victims escaping abusive relationships with e.g. law enforcement (cops), who even fifteen years ago had sweeping powers to track and stalk their victims. Things like actual anonymous burner phones and the ability to e.g. create new email accounts without government identification were critical to the process of getting these people out safely, or alive, without fear of retaliation. I can't even imagine how difficult this job must be nowadays, with bullshit like Flock spanning hundreds of police departments participating in their nationally-linked database. I have zero sources for what I'm about to say, but my instinct is that the political machines (expanding powers hidden behind "think of the children") behind how technology is evolving today has gotten people killed.
- thesuitonym 24d agoIt's a red-alert to you and me, but Flock won't care. People already don't want these cameras in their cities, but police departments buy them anyway. What does it matter if there's one more reason you don't want them?
- MattDaEskimo 24d agoFeels like their purpose is to test the boundaries, take the hits, and eventually sell off
- darksim905 24d agoThey want the good, bad and ugly to flock to them as it were and vaporize them so Axon and Motorola Solutions can just pick up right where they left off. And people will just ignore or forget it because it's not the same company.