Don'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.
Completely 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.
I find this unsettling. When a private entity buys Flock, how do they _use_ it? Are they sharing the data with the network and offer it to the police? Can they watch footage?
Would 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.
Most people do not want to be surveilled all the time. Most police departments would like to surveil everyone all the time. City governments tend to do what the police department wants unless a lot of people get mad.
Because it's one of the actually visible bricks of the modern end of privacy, people are mad about it and there's multiple actions against them but it's all useless as they're here to stay and multiply. There's so many other bricks way worse and insidious, we the people simply can't fight every single brick these people are paid to develop.
Flock has had a a number of security issues where people have demonstrated that the cameras could be accessed easily by anyone because of (IIRC) the use of default passwords.
Flock have said that they weren't doing this or that (I don't recall the exact details, I think initially they may have said it was just recording license plates), but then people found out they were doing a lot more than that.
Flock and police departments have been found to have been doing way more than using the cameras to investigate crime, including stalking friends and lovers and exes, and in one case one of the guys was found to have been regularly watching a young girls gymnastics gym a lot.
A 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.
I 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.
Not 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.
A 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.
I 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?
I 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.
Beside 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.
It'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.
There are a few exceptions, I live in an odd neighborhood where a group got together and rehabbed a bunch of dilapidated homes facing an alley. They got permission from the city to make the alley a pedestrian mall and green space. Our HOA exists to maintain the pedestrian mall that is essentially our front yard.
You’re gonna run into a little bit of resistance on principles with that argument. For context, I would have absolutely no interest in living in an HOA neighborhood and I don’t support them at all.
But we do have a fairly strong precedent for freedom of association in this country and the freedom for people to join into groups and figure out how they want to live.
Not sure how you could write a law that would get rid of the kind of HOA’s. You don’t like without running straight into things like religious colonies, and a variety of other living arrangements.
Seems to me the current approach where you’ve been certain kinds of discrimination and so on is a little more sound. I could think of other reforms as well, for example perhaps a time limit on HOA‘s or the requirement of some sort of super majority or consensus to be taken at intervals to prevent automatic dissolution and restrictions on size structure.
> 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.
This actually very much understates the problems. HOAs are no longer small organizations where the local biddies gather to feel like they are back in high school because they have nothing better to do with their time. They've become defacto governments.
True story I at one point bought in a development that had an HOA the rules of the development were that for the first 5 years or until have the development was done then developer would be in charge of the HOA and then it would revert to the homeowners at 4 years 6 months the HOA board (who was the developers) voted to merge with another HOA to a that ran a dozen other developments and complexes throughout the state.
HOAs are now massive multi-million dollar corporations that controls vast swathes of land, and rule over their tenants without any of the checks or balances or recourse one has available against the government.
For those who say "just buy in a non-HOA area" the problem is that almost all new builds have HOAs built in from the start as part of the developers plan and so the options for those not wanting to deal with an HOA are increasingly limited.
In short abolish HOAs. If people want to get together to form groups of homeowners that's fine but there is no world in which someone should be able to take your house because your grass is too long.
> 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.
There 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.
If they put up a fake camera, what happens when an incident occurs and the footage is requested? Does it just become an internal secret that it’s not a real camera?
On the other hand, installing a real camera means costs associated with monitoring so you also need to convince everyone it’s worth that cost.
When 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.
Not an epidemic but serious enough to plan for. When I was a kid my family lost most of our valuables in a burglary when we when we were on vacation. It is still a live issue for me.
We 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.
In 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.
- camera mostly offline unless something is happening
- recording time is usually short and focused on that thing happening right now, not everywhere
- the point of view is usually close to ground, aka less things to capture
- mostly if not always is done with a human carrying it, so you are aware of that recording
- not connected to any analytical AI software that fingerprints everything passing by
Flock:
- cameras are always online
- recording is always on 24/7 and on a wide angle
- usually at high elevation so it exposes more (like a swimming pool in your house)
- stealthy compared to a human holding a cam, just another pole in the street.
- and most importantly, that differentiate flock from even other CCTV let alone smartphones, is the network and the AI analysis that are also directly connected to law enforcement who happen to abuse it.
So yeah it’s not it even close, if you see some stranger standing next to your house for few hours let alone with a smartphone recording your house and pool, sure hell you will report them or go and confront them, not the case with flock.
Can 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.
"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."
Is this net bad behaviour that was added due to Flock, or was it a bad actor who happened to use Flock?
Agreed that it's bad behaviour, and that we don't want police overstepping.
But I don't see how the use of Flock by police can't be monitored in a way, which catches or even eliminates this issue.
Drops 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.
Crime in cities has been going down globally for a long time. Is this because of Flock or not is an open question that I have not seen anyone unbiased comment on. (though honestly I don't think Flock has been around long enough for a proper study to be done - they need to figure out all the different confounding factors and how to control for them)
Nobody's taking away their ability to do their job. What we're trying to do is make sure that the police don't abuse their power, that their use of power is accountable, and that they can be held liable for it when they do abuse it.
Police have to get warrants for searches as well, and nobody seems to be saying that that stops them from being able to do their job.
Police already can't do their job because we select for sub-90 IQ cops.
Giving idiot cops abusable tools is PURE AND UTTER STUPIDITY. If you think otherwise, I can't wait for those same idiots to kick in your door despite you having done nothing wrong due to some false accusation by a clanker and show you the error of your mistaken train of thought.
If only everything worked perfectly as intended. In the real world there are unintended consequences of most things we do and we need to balance.
The question isn't what good can these do, the question is does the good outweigh the bad? At best we can say the jury is still out on that question - and we can only say that on the assumption that Flock and the law (likely both) does something about the ways the system can be abused.
I have neighbors and that’s good enough. We all think Flock is creepy and nobody wants to be listed in a database. At this point everyone’s had their PII leaked more than once, so everyone knows the risk.
I personally have an NVR that isn’t connected to the internet and I encourage others to do the same if they want cameras.
You're absolutely right! If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. That's why I installed a camera in your bathroom and made it publicly accessible to the internet. If somebody commits a crime in your bathroom, they'll be trivially caught.
Find me some evidence that Flock ever helped catch a criminal.
If it was just 2-4 weeks of camera footage archives accessible to local police with paper trail on an as-needed basis, I doubt there would be much opposition.
Found a link to the original reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/realtors/comments/1von5bt/just_had_...
Thanks, HN linking to X linking to Reddit..
don’t forget!!!
Y Combinator invested in Flock Safety in 2017.
> You're thinking Chinese surveillance
> US-based surveillance helps victims and prevents more victims
https://x.com/garrytan/status/1963310592615485955?lang=en
Brought to you by the king of double standards, Garry Tan, CEO of YCombinator.
the sad thing about american propagandists is that they willingly participate completely free of pressure from their government
That'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.
Don'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.
For the love of money
Completely 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.
I suspect it's a similar phenomenon as people capitalizing visa when the topic is international travel / migration instead of payment networks.
Or using title case for acronyms like "Nasa".
I find this unsettling. When a private entity buys Flock, how do they _use_ it? Are they sharing the data with the network and offer it to the police? Can they watch footage?
HOA and Flock. That is one hellish dystopia over there now.
Would 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.
HOA busybodies might be worse than spying cops.
Can 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.
Most people do not want to be surveilled all the time. Most police departments would like to surveil everyone all the time. City governments tend to do what the police department wants unless a lot of people get mad.
Because it's one of the actually visible bricks of the modern end of privacy, people are mad about it and there's multiple actions against them but it's all useless as they're here to stay and multiply. There's so many other bricks way worse and insidious, we the people simply can't fight every single brick these people are paid to develop.
Some things that people dislike about Flock:
Flock has had a a number of security issues where people have demonstrated that the cameras could be accessed easily by anyone because of (IIRC) the use of default passwords.
Flock have said that they weren't doing this or that (I don't recall the exact details, I think initially they may have said it was just recording license plates), but then people found out they were doing a lot more than that.
Flock and police departments have been found to have been doing way more than using the cameras to investigate crime, including stalking friends and lovers and exes, and in one case one of the guys was found to have been regularly watching a young girls gymnastics gym a lot.
A 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.
Is it really? It seems that the fight against total surveillance is bipartisan.
"charged" doesn't mean polarized. And "bipartisan" doesn't mean anything except in the broken system of the states.
Why 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”?
I 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.
What would you have done if they said no?
Not 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.
A 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.
I 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-p...
Wealthy neighbourhoods need actual protection, not protection-as-an-excuse-for-surveillance.
The comments under the post are difficult to read.
Really shouldn't have clicked the link or signed in to this cesspool...
I 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.
Beside 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-Restric...
What about an HOA for the management of roads and rainwater runoff (ponds, etc)?
The answer is likely that it makes sense for maintenance purposes, but the legal authority granted to an HOA is overly broad.
It'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.
There are a few exceptions, I live in an odd neighborhood where a group got together and rehabbed a bunch of dilapidated homes facing an alley. They got permission from the city to make the alley a pedestrian mall and green space. Our HOA exists to maintain the pedestrian mall that is essentially our front yard.
You’re gonna run into a little bit of resistance on principles with that argument. For context, I would have absolutely no interest in living in an HOA neighborhood and I don’t support them at all.
But we do have a fairly strong precedent for freedom of association in this country and the freedom for people to join into groups and figure out how they want to live.
Not sure how you could write a law that would get rid of the kind of HOA’s. You don’t like without running straight into things like religious colonies, and a variety of other living arrangements.
Seems to me the current approach where you’ve been certain kinds of discrimination and so on is a little more sound. I could think of other reforms as well, for example perhaps a time limit on HOA‘s or the requirement of some sort of super majority or consensus to be taken at intervals to prevent automatic dissolution and restrictions on size structure.
See, that's the great thing about America. We can have neighborhoods with HOAs and those without. You get to choose!
In most cities it's illegal to build a new neighbourhood without an HOA
> 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.
This actually very much understates the problems. HOAs are no longer small organizations where the local biddies gather to feel like they are back in high school because they have nothing better to do with their time. They've become defacto governments.
True story I at one point bought in a development that had an HOA the rules of the development were that for the first 5 years or until have the development was done then developer would be in charge of the HOA and then it would revert to the homeowners at 4 years 6 months the HOA board (who was the developers) voted to merge with another HOA to a that ran a dozen other developments and complexes throughout the state.
HOAs are now massive multi-million dollar corporations that controls vast swathes of land, and rule over their tenants without any of the checks or balances or recourse one has available against the government.
For those who say "just buy in a non-HOA area" the problem is that almost all new builds have HOAs built in from the start as part of the developers plan and so the options for those not wanting to deal with an HOA are increasingly limited.
In short abolish HOAs. If people want to get together to form groups of homeowners that's fine but there is no world in which someone should be able to take your house because your grass is too long.
From 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.
I don’t know what you’ve been doing, but I have spent the last decade continuously reducing my exposure.
Really, the standard argument "There's a X% loss of privacy, why expect any privacy at all?"
There 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.
If they put up a fake camera, what happens when an incident occurs and the footage is requested? Does it just become an internal secret that it’s not a real camera?
On the other hand, installing a real camera means costs associated with monitoring so you also need to convince everyone it’s worth that cost.
> I've been lobbying the HOA members to support installing a prominent camera there to dissuade thieves.
Do you actually get thieves or have you worked yourself up over nothing?
When 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.
You get burglarized a lot?
A little. In the last one the culprit was caught on a game cam, the property was recovered, and the burglar did some jail time.
Is your community experiencing an epidemic of theft that needs dissuading? So much that you feel unsafe taking trips away from your home?
Not an epidemic but serious enough to plan for. When I was a kid my family lost most of our valuables in a burglary when we when we were on vacation. It is still a live issue for me.
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 understand the hatred for Flock. And I don't think the complainers see the irony of tweeting complaints about Flock from their iPhones.
We 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.
> 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?
And the police can't use my phone camera to track down where their ex-girlfriend has been going for the past two weeks.
In 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.
Because I get to (ideally) control when the camera records?
The phone is fine anyways; Google/Apple knows what's best for me.
imo, just because something bad exists doesn't mean other bad things are now allowed to exist, but instead focusing on improving "bad thing".
Not really comparable between the two:
Smartphone:
- camera mostly offline unless something is happening
- recording time is usually short and focused on that thing happening right now, not everywhere
- the point of view is usually close to ground, aka less things to capture
- mostly if not always is done with a human carrying it, so you are aware of that recording
- not connected to any analytical AI software that fingerprints everything passing by
Flock:
- cameras are always online
- recording is always on 24/7 and on a wide angle
- usually at high elevation so it exposes more (like a swimming pool in your house)
- stealthy compared to a human holding a cam, just another pole in the street.
- and most importantly, that differentiate flock from even other CCTV let alone smartphones, is the network and the AI analysis that are also directly connected to law enforcement who happen to abuse it.
So yeah it’s not it even close, if you see some stranger standing next to your house for few hours let alone with a smartphone recording your house and pool, sure hell you will report them or go and confront them, not the case with flock.
Can 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.
> 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-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.
Is this net bad behaviour that was added due to Flock, or was it a bad actor who happened to use Flock?
Agreed that it's bad behaviour, and that we don't want police overstepping. But I don't see how the use of Flock by police can't be monitored in a way, which catches or even eliminates this issue.
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Drops 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.
Crime in cities has been going down globally for a long time. Is this because of Flock or not is an open question that I have not seen anyone unbiased comment on. (though honestly I don't think Flock has been around long enough for a proper study to be done - they need to figure out all the different confounding factors and how to control for them)
That's a heck of a correlation!
You don’t buy it? Do you think the charges were fabricated?
"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.
This assumes the police are always upstanding and never have ulterior motives. Which has proven not to be true. [0] and tons of others
[0] https://www.kcra.com/article/new-bedford-police-officer-on-l...
This assumes that the benefit of allowing police to effectively do their job outweighs instances of abuse of that power.
I don't get this argument. Police aren't perfect therefore police shouldn't be granted the ability to do their job?
Nobody's taking away their ability to do their job. What we're trying to do is make sure that the police don't abuse their power, that their use of power is accountable, and that they can be held liable for it when they do abuse it.
Police have to get warrants for searches as well, and nobody seems to be saying that that stops them from being able to do their job.
Police already can't do their job because we select for sub-90 IQ cops.
Giving idiot cops abusable tools is PURE AND UTTER STUPIDITY. If you think otherwise, I can't wait for those same idiots to kick in your door despite you having done nothing wrong due to some false accusation by a clanker and show you the error of your mistaken train of thought.
If only everything worked perfectly as intended. In the real world there are unintended consequences of most things we do and we need to balance.
The question isn't what good can these do, the question is does the good outweigh the bad? At best we can say the jury is still out on that question - and we can only say that on the assumption that Flock and the law (likely both) does something about the ways the system can be abused.
I have neighbors and that’s good enough. We all think Flock is creepy and nobody wants to be listed in a database. At this point everyone’s had their PII leaked more than once, so everyone knows the risk.
I personally have an NVR that isn’t connected to the internet and I encourage others to do the same if they want cameras.
You're absolutely right! If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. That's why I installed a camera in your bathroom and made it publicly accessible to the internet. If somebody commits a crime in your bathroom, they'll be trivially caught.
Find me some evidence that Flock ever helped catch a criminal.
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> You have no right to privacy entering my neighborhood.
You own the whole thing, huh?
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety
Benjamin Franklin, Philadelphia, 1756.
“Where there is no law, there is no freedom.”
John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1689)
Ah yes, laws, notoriously non-existent before the introduction of camera surveillance.
If it was just 2-4 weeks of camera footage archives accessible to local police with paper trail on an as-needed basis, I doubt there would be much opposition.
But then this happened in my county:
https://www.lakemchenryscanner.com/2026/06/19/prosecutors-sa...
Privacy. Controlling your own data.
The police aren't your friends
This isn't true. Most police are your friends. The problem is a few are not your friends and nobody can tell the difference until it is too late.
Have you seen American cops?