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#cameras#flock#crime#camera#access#doesn#demo#footage#why#person

Discussion (61 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

john_strinlai•about 3 hours ago
>“The city of Dunwoody is one city in our demo partner program,” a Flock spokesperson told 404 Media. “The cities involved in this program have authorized select Flock employees to demonstrate new products and features as we develop them in partnership with the city.

the two things i still dont understand are:

1) why is there not a dedicated demo environment for demos, like practically every other software? i cant think of any reason why they need live data for a demonstration. (this might be addressed in the article, but the paragraph where it looks like it might be mentioned is also where the article is cut off)

2) is the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta (MCJCCA) city-owned? if not, the city should not be able to give permission to use the cameras. if so, was the MJCCA notified that the cameras would be used for demo purposes? were the parents notified?

heironimus•about 1 hour ago
I’ve seen dozens of these types of demos and it’s always live footage from a semi public place like this.

It’s much easier to just show live footage rather than rig up canned looping footage.

It’s pretty astonishing how no one watching the demo with me seems to care. No one asking “Hey, will you just be able to do this with our video if we buy from you?”

mulmen•21 minutes ago
Does this mean there is no testing environment?
chneu•about 2 hours ago
Answer to 1 is simple and obvious based on Flocks previous actions: they have no idea what they are doing and are reacting instead of planning.
PunchyHamster•24 minutes ago
or they have exact idea what they are doing and don't give a shit
ToucanLoucan•about 1 hour ago
mOvE fAsT aNd bReAk tHinGs
exe34•about 1 hour ago
If it really has to be a live system, they could just set one up in a broom closet at hq?
throwway120385•about 1 hour ago
I would put it in the lobby or outside the HQ building.
heironimus•about 1 hour ago
That does not demo well at all.
pornel•about 1 hour ago
Yeah, the kids didn't like the broom closet.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF•about 1 hour ago
The employees were concerned about the lack of privacy setting it up at the entrance.
driverdan•about 3 hours ago
Meanwhile YC President Garry Tan continues to support and defend Flock. I'm curious how he'd spin this as a good thing.
bogzz•about 1 hour ago
That little man has eroded any respect that he might have been a priori granted with his publicly documented descent into a vibecoding mania. I'm still in disbelief that the very silly photographer guy is the CEO of ycombinator. Ah well, it was a good era.
nailer•about 1 hour ago
He's using AI assistants and excited about it. So is Linux Torvalds, and all my other programming friends.
toraway•7 minutes ago
To the best of my knowledge Linus Torvalds isn't posting walls of text to Github breathlessly announcing he's 810Xed [1] his "logical lines/day" compared to 2013.

And, lest you think generating "600,000 lines of production code on 60 days" [2] is potentially problematic, has also fully solved the primary failure modes of AI coding identified by Karpathy, once and for all: "Karpathy's four failure modes? Already covered." [1]

As someone who has experienced mania, including with a programming bent specifically, it's hard not to raise an eyebrow to the idiosyncratic human-y bits of ideas floating throughout the sea of em-dashes and it's not X it's Y in his manifestos.

(Also volunteering this in am interview)

  >  “I sleep, like, four hours a night right now,” he told his interviewer, fellow VC Bill Gurley, during an onstage interview Saturday. “I have cyber psychosis, but I think a third of the CEOs that I know have it as well,” he joked about his current AI obsession. (Tan’s assistant confirmed to us that he was joking. ...)

  > It’s like I was able to re-create my startup that took $10 million in VC capital and 10 people, and I worked on that for two years, and I took anti-narcoleptics — I remember, you know, sort of being on modafinil

[1] https://github.com/garrytan/gstack

[2] https://github.com/garrytan/gstack/blob/main/docs/ON_THE_LOC...

pesus•about 3 hours ago
It's it anything like the comments I see on here defending Flock, it'll just be a bunch of attempting to scare people with the idea of crime, and disparaging anyone in favor of privacy as being pro-crime.
mrhottakes•about 3 hours ago
Probably something like "but imagine how much money a few people are making from it!"
fragmede•about 2 hours ago
If a school shooter was in your children's daycare, wouldn't you want there to be cameras so you knew where they were?

...is how I imagine that one goes.

cyberax•about 2 hours ago
So you can then watch the shooting in nice graphic details, right? Or do you want cameras integrated with remote-controlled machine guns?
nailer•about 1 hour ago
The current school shooting response systems have 70 drones with capsicain.
subscribed•about 2 hours ago
Cameras would get shot first. Come on.
aleksiy123•about 4 hours ago
While I think this isn’t great.

Why is the camera there in the first place??

Presumably there are people that have access to it. And if you are demoing software that connects to cameras, then someone gave the sales guy access to those cameras.

I’m also assuming those probably weren’t the only cameras…

KaiserPro•about 3 hours ago
> Why is the camera there in the first place??

I imagine its for security. Ie if there are reports of robbery, you can find who did it. I know its not that popular in the states but its common elsewhere, but with better controls. (well, "better" as in controlled by shitty IoT devices)

I think the thing with flock is just how poorly put together everything is. They are obviously insecure, and the entire network has massive holes in it. Yet its still being rolled out.

ses1984•about 2 hours ago
Why would a gymnastics gym get robbed? It’s just a bunch of smelly equipment that’s hard to sell and probably very little cash.
jjmarr•about 2 hours ago
It's the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta.

Jewish Community Centers are targeted more for attacks than a YMCA.

tedggh•about 2 hours ago
Looting is done for fun too. It must suck to have kids show up for practice in the morning and some of the essential gear is gone. It doesn’t matter if it is inexpensive to replace, you still have to cancel class and take a day or two up replace it, file a police report, etc
RandallBrown•about 2 hours ago
Robbery may not be the main reason for a camera. Having a video of any incident that happens (broken equipment leading to injury, angry parent, etc.) would be valuable.
Symbiote•about 2 hours ago
Possibly as a deterrent to a child (or adult) going through clothing/bags and stealing mobile phones while the owners are exercising.
KaiserPro•about 2 hours ago
here its mostly mobile phones.
bluGill•about 2 hours ago
Any sane business that has lots of random people coming in will have cameras recording (except in bathrooms/locker rooms). There is too much opportunity for crime, and a camera is cheap. If something happens you pull up the feed from the last month and give the interesting parts to the police; most often you just delete everything after a month. More than one crime has been solved this way.

That said, if there wasn't a crime the camera footage should be deleted.

l72•about 2 hours ago
The problem isn't having cameras. Its that these cameras should be closed circuit with data residing locally, not being sent to a 3rd party that has full access to the video streams, and who processes them, combines them with other parties, resells data from them, or hands them over without a warrant!
NonHyloMorph•41 minutes ago
This
themafia•about 2 hours ago
> There is too much opportunity for crime, and a camera is cheap.

The camera doesn't prevent crime. It just displaces it. Even when it doesn't it will not prevent the crime from happening. It _may_ provide you an opportunity to prosecute the person who committed it.

In reality the only real reason to have one is to reduce your insurance premiums.

> crime has been solved

A perpetrator was potentially caught and now has to be tried or negotiated into a plea. I understand we use the term "solve" as a term of art but it's a particularly poor one. It speaks to the need of police to clear their books of negative indicators and not to any first order desirable social outcome.

> That said

That said, if during a demo, you access another customers equipment, I will _never_ do business with you. That's just extremely unprofessional behavior.

SauntSolaire•about 2 hours ago
> The camera doesn't prevent crime. It just displaces it.

That's why I periodically leave a bunch of bicycles with cheap locks downtown. They act like a kind of criminal sacrificial anode, reducing crime in the rest of the city.

mschuster91•about 1 hour ago
> The camera doesn't prevent crime. It just displaces it. Even when it doesn't it will not prevent the crime from happening. It _may_ provide you an opportunity to prosecute the person who committed it.

And that is worth something in itself, at least in areas where disputes between people are the norm. Gyms in particular suffer from theft to sexual harassment.

rcoder•about 3 hours ago
In many cases the people deploying these cameras have no idea the feeds are being resold to Flock. It’s not like they have a consumer brand and people are saying, “oh yeah, Flock, they’re the license plate camera folks…I definitely want one of those in my locker room.”
aleksiy123•about 3 hours ago
I feel like I’m missing something.

There is someone that is making the decision right?

Or are you just saying the person placing the cameras is decoupled from the person making the decision to aggregate them all.

But I still feel like the accountability is on who is giving the access to sensitive cameras.

l72•about 2 hours ago
We are opening up a wellness clinic and we were planning to use a managed service company for internet, network, and security. I was appalled by the managed services suggestions. Privacy of our patients and their data is critical, and the managed service company wants to send all of our feeds to third parties and give third parties direct access to our network.

We decided this was a privacy and security risk, and have gone in a completely different direction, but it would not surprise me if most businesses used one of these companies and just went with whatever they suggested without understanding at all what is at stake or who has access to the data.

bluGill•about 2 hours ago
Most often the business hires a security contractor to take care of it, and signs the contract without understanding the terms. You should be able to trust your suppliers enough that you can do the above, they are the experts in the thing (cameras in this thing, but could be things like plumbing or accounting) and you have your own business to run. "Should" is key though, all too often someone doesn't do right by their clients.
cogman10•about 2 hours ago
> Or are you just saying the person placing the cameras is decoupled from the person making the decision to aggregate them all.

That's exactly what's happening.

People are buying webcams which are cheap and have in their ToS something to the effect of "we get to sell everything the camera can see". Which, in turn, allows them to partner with Flock and sell video footage directly to them.

Consider the fact that at one point, Amazon partnered with Flock to sell their ring camera footage to Flock. [1] It only got botched because of the creepy superbowl commercial selling the spying as "finding lost puppies".

[1] https://apnews.com/article/amazon-flock-super-bowl-surveilla...

throw848tjfj•about 3 hours ago
> Why is the camera there in the first place??

I was attacked by "a good dog" and then blamed for provoking the dog (like that is valid excuse for starting an attack). I defended myself, and dog owner joined the attacked together with their dog!

After that, I have cameras everywhere, I even record many interactions on my phone. I refuse to be at mercy of random beasts and their "owners". If people start using leashes and muzzles, I may consider taking down cameras!

collingreen•about 1 hour ago
What does this have to do with cameras covering little kids doing gymnastics?

I'm sorry you had a bad experience and using cameras to protect yourself is a thing but filming kids doing gymnastics seems very very far from purely defensive.

throw848tjfj•about 1 hour ago
Because predators are even at schools! Our school gym park is used as a toilet by dog owners!

I want to have video evidence, if some crazy person blames kid for provoking the attack!

nout•about 3 hours ago
So there are people sitting in cubicles in various companies/orgs that flock sells the access to and they are watching your children on a screen.

Usually the government is trying to wrap the spying/privacy breaches by "save the children", but this time if you want to save your children from some older dude watching them on a screen, you actually have to be against this privacy nightmare.

californical•about 3 hours ago
The crazy thing is that this isn’t even a hypothetical. Some random dude was watching your kids from an office building with spy cameras
momentmaker•about 3 hours ago
There is also another movement to stop Flock. And a discussion [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47772012

jmward01•about 3 hours ago
Isolated information isn't a problem. If it takes effort to access information then mass information abuse doesn't scale, it is free of cost, and consequence, access that is the issue here. Flock is attempting to destroy barriers to access around real time surveillance. There is a clear distinction between someone having a business surveillance system that points at the street that the police can get access to with some sort of device specific request and no-requirement needed brows the world access that Flock is pushing. This is different. This is evil.
throwway120385•36 minutes ago
IOW, Flock is building the Telescreen from 1984.
Bender•about 4 hours ago
One of the previous discussions [1]

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47784045

tptacek•about 2 hours ago
This story is a duplicate of a well-attended thread, without Significant New Information (SNI):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47784045

chaqchase•about 1 hour ago
If a demo environment isn't tightly scoped and audited, it's production in practice. The demo label doesn't matter.
goolz•about 2 hours ago
I swear it is like we stumbled into a real life PKD book.
righthand•about 2 hours ago
Probably A Scanner Darkly but I’m also sure parts of The Three Stigmata of Eldritch Palmer will come true too.
givemeethekeys•about 1 hour ago
All Flock footage should be subject to FOIA requests.
SpaceL10n•about 1 hour ago
Just broadcast all the cameras everywhere on the internet all the time. The panopticon is coming.
hoppyhoppy2•44 minutes ago
Including the footage from Flock cameras placed by private businesses on their own property?
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