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Discussion (93 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Y Combinator invested in Flock Safety in 2017.
> 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.
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.
On topic, we’ve stopped going to a popular pizza place near us because the owner put a Flock camera up.
I’m only now becoming aware of it, and feel like I’m out of the loop on key aspects.
Tracking people by their smartphones? Voters get smartphones out of it, and the state supposedly needs a warrant to track them (except when they don't). And they can always just not get one.
Tracking people's every purchase? Voters get credit cards, cashback, purchase protection and online shopping out of it. And they can always just use cash.
Tracking people's media consumption? Voters get free/super cheap ad supported media, the widest selection the world has ever seen. And they can still buy in stores with cash if they want.
Access to people's photos, no warrants required? Voters get great quality cameras on their phones, and free basic cloud backup in case their phones are ever damaged or lost. And you can always disable it.
An always-on microphone in every home? Voters get huge, incredibly cheap TVs with 4K netflix/Disney/whatever, incredibly cheap smart speakers etc. And the microphone only turns on when it hears certain things.
Flock's problem is they've done the big power transfer without providing the corresponding payoff, and too quickly.
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.
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”?
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.
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.
> 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.
1: https://www.wvtf.org/news/2026-08-14/flock-cameras-trigger-p...
Really shouldn't have clicked the link or signed in to this cesspool...
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...
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.
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.
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.
Would accepting these cameras be easier if you all paid $25 a month for it?
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.
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.
Do you actually get thieves or have you worked yourself up over nothing?
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.
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.
I don't live-stream my phone's camera to people with guns empowered to shoot people?
The phone is fine anyways; Google/Apple knows what's best for me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://www.kcra.com/article/new-bedford-police-officer-on-l...
I don't get this argument. Police aren't perfect therefore police shouldn't be granted the ability to do their job?
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.
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.
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 personally have an NVR that isn’t connected to the internet and I encourage others to do the same if they want cameras.
Find me some evidence that Flock ever helped catch a criminal.
Benjamin Franklin, Philadelphia, 1756.
John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1689)
But then this happened in my county:
https://www.lakemchenryscanner.com/2026/06/19/prosecutors-sa...