Although I oppose the surveillance state, it's important to understand the motivations and incentives involved in the move toward Flock (and its eventual successors); until those are resolved, governments are going to be implementing Flock style programs with relatively tepid opposition.
Police departments are seriously understaffed in many major cities, and officers are much less efficient than they used to be. This has led to the decline of the beat cop, who provided a kind of ambient authority that helped create, both a sense and reality, of public order. People really want the sense (even more than the reality!) of public order; without that, they will jump to faddish solutions that promise it, regardless of the data for or against it.
The best counter to Flock is to provide alternatives to it, not just reject it while keeping the status quo going. We need a new, vitalized police culture, that shares mutual trust and engagement with the community.
I agree with everything you say; my "police departments are understaffed" is too generic, and might be better stated as "too few resources are devoted to traditional beat policing." Which isn't to say that the other things are unnecessary or pointless, but it's a different set of skills.
Police departments aren’t understaffed. It’s a priority problem not a lack of resources problem. I live in a tech heavy, wealthy city. It’s small. No violent crime. Barely any crime at all. There’s occasional break ins and car break ins. When this happens it’s a big deal.
We had one last year. Everyone around has cameras. The cops refused to do anything about it. They refused to get recordings. The neighbor went door to door and gathered it herself. Cops refused to do anything even though you can see the car and the plates from multiple videos, multiple angles.
Guess what the cops always have resources for? Hiding behind bushes and trees to ticket people going 5 over. Or at turns where they know they’ll get people before people see the cop car.
Our HOA came together and asked the police department about this. They gave us bullshit about how custody of evidence etc is hard and even if they put people in jail, the lenient judges will let them go anyway. It was fucked up.
Our HOA was going in hard about installing floc cameras everywhere. I had to fight hard not to get that done. One of the reasons I won wasn’t because privacy, it was because the cops literally were like unless we can directly pull video feeds from cameras, we won’t do much. And that access wasn’t available to those police department. At least at the time.
There have been many other such stories I’ve personally witnessed in the cities I’ve lived in.
Cops seem to have plenty of resources to bully people of color, seize assets and hide behind trees and bushes to ticket people, reduce the period of orange lights so people get more tickets etc. but never enough to actually do their jobs.
I agree that police department staffing is less of a real issue than people claim it is, and that many departments have target staffing levels that are artificially elevated. But I'm struck by your comment about cops "hiding behind bushes to ticket people going 5 over", because in the ultra-ultra-progressive inner-ring Chicago suburb in which I live, one of the chief complaints about policing over the last couple years has been the lack of traffic enforcement.
To add to some of what others are saying, another problem is the measurement problem.
DAs and police in general are almost universally evaluated based on arrest numbers. Only very rarely on actual crime rates, and never on something as abstract as quality of life or local revenues or property values.
Gauging how good law enforcement is just by looking at arrest numbers is probably the wrong dial to be looking at.
I've noted this in the age verification debate, and in the Android developer verification debate as well.
Just denying the tradeoffs isn't productive, if tradeoffs affect others, just pushing your position disregarding the tradeoffs as fake or not important is divisive. In actuality I think that both parties become incentivized to solve the problems of the other group of people too, but as a centrist that position often gets pushback from both sides who seem to collaborate only indirectly from a place of adversarial competition and good vs evil framing, which I think is less productive than just recognizing the conflict and negotiating, but perhaps it's more engaging...
You’re not going to get nuanced law enforcement discussion on this site considering the commentary here is Reddit tier these days. I agree with you though - the mayor and city council here in Minneapolis continuously defunding the police and refusing to give them resources predictably led to sharp increases in crime. It’s baffling to me large liberal cities have demonized the police and gaslit their base into thinking everything is just fine.
I don't want to stop Flock the company. I want to stop Flock the business model, along with all the other mass surveillance, and the data brokers. If the business models can't be made illegal, it should at least come with liabilities so high that no sane business would want to hold data that is essentially toxic waste.
Without that, we are quickly spiraling into the dystopia where privacy is gone, and when the wrong person gets access to the data, entire populations are threatened.
I followed the shooting at Brown University last year very closely. Brown's leadership was heavily criticized for having camera blind spots and not being able to track the shooter's exact movements through campus. I can understand why people with stewardship over the safety of their students/customers/constituents would make decisions to err on the side of tracking. I'm not saying I agree with it, but I understand it.
We need a law that says if you hold any data about a person, they must be notified when anyone accesses it, including law enforcement.
I used to work in criminal investigations. I understand how this might make investigation of real crime more difficult. But so does the fact that you need a warrant to enter someone's home, and yet we manage to investigate crime anyway.
Your data should be an extension of your home, even if it's held by another company. It should require a warrant and notification. You could even make the notification be 24 hours after the fact. But it should be required.
I’m all for mass surveillance of roadways, but I want to see results. Every day I see and hear people breaking laws with their vehicles in ways that make life worse for others around them.
What might be more productive is to suggest legal ways law enforcement can prevent and enforce the problems this was designed to stop. It will help you see where the laws are limited, what needs to be updated so you can balance the risk of privacy vs. the need to enforce laws (or the need for new laws all together). Right now we're osilcating between gaps criminals exploit and infringing on fundemental privacy rights.
I’m curious if there were some consortium of all private businesses with their own surveillance cams deciding to aggregate their footage could it be stopped?
As much as I dislike flock. There's definitely a case to be made for the business model where first responder companies can generate huge amounts of taxpayer funded ARR in "sanctuary cities" due to criminals never getting actually serving sentences. If criminals are stuck in the:
"Commit crime -> brief retention period -> activist judge lets you go" loop, then you can definitely build a business model that just capitalizes on the fact that there's no consequences to committing a crime, and local/state governments have to waste copious amount of money due to the incredibly inflated demand of first responder services.
Here's a modest proposal: what if we made it a serious crime for anyone to retain automatically-recorded surveillance footage, or data derived from it, for longer than some limited period of time (say, 7 days) unless said footage is released to the public within that timeframe?
That is, you can put up cameras wherever you want, but you can't gain any kind of competitive advantage by doing so.
I think the public would be more alert to the dangers of mass surveillance if the magnitude of that surveillance was more obvious. And if everyone was watching everyone, at least it wouldn't as easily abused for purposes such as selective prosecution or blackmail.
For the Canadians sitting at home, tut tutting more American foolishness that could never happen up here... Flock started their expansion into Ontario this very month[1].
Why do people consistently and falsely believe that they have privacy in public settings? You are literally out in public. If you don't want your behavior in public to be observed, then either don't behave in such a way that you wouldn't want observed, or stay home.
UPDATE: don't conflate stalking with observation. These are not the same. You can observe, but you cannot intimidate.
Lawmakers won't care until it is them and their kids that are being tracked by "hackers". Flock API's are poorly protected and the individual cameras are hackable as shown by Benn Jordan in multiple YouTube videos.
This movement reminds me of the "protecting democracy" message that was run on the national stage that pailed against the backdrop of rising inflation.
Privacy is important just as democracy is important, but crime and lawlessness feel more immediate and will always take center stage.
Any message to try to address the spread of flock and flock-like business models have to address what replaces it. If the only choice people are given is either having flock, or car break-ins, then I think we can probably guess what people would choose.
SFPD at least, has credited flock and flock-like tech for why property crime has dropped so much in recent years.
It's taxpayer-funded dragnet-warrantless surveillance, data harvesting, and stalking. And it is local elected officials' deliberate voluntary or bribed choice to invite Big Mommy into the lives of their constituents and people passing through. The anti-privacy doomers don't get to force their invasive anti-values on everyone else who wants respect for and to preserve their right to not be autonomously surveilled and monitored every single second when not in a business or organization premises.
I could be convinced to support public cameras if access to the footage was tightly controlled and only used for solving serious crimes, but government officials and flock themselves have repeatedly shown that they can’t be trusted to use them in a responsible manner. It’s too powerful of a tool to put in the hands of untrustworthy individuals
An academic study about the use of surveillance technology at the Los Angeles Police Department, the book documents the LAPD's use of data brokerage firms (e.g., Palantir) that collect and aggregate information from public records and private sources, as well as automatic license plate readers like Flock, and Suspicious Activity Reports generated by police and civilians, which include reports of mundane activities such as using binoculars, drawing diagrams, or taking pictures or "video footage with no apparent aesthetic value." All this data ultimately gets parked in Fusion Center facilities, built in the aftermath of 9/11, where federal, state and local law enforcement agencies collaborate to collect, aggregate, analyze and share information. As the author observes, "The use of data in law enforcement is not new. For almost a century, police have been gathering data, e.g., records of citations, collisions, warrants, incarcerations, sex offender and gang registries, etc. What is new and important about the current age of big data is the role in public policing of private capitalist firms who provide database systems with huge volumes of information about people, not just those in the criminal justice system."
Live in a neighborhood that privately installed cameras. The city also installed cameras. Before the camera's cars used to come and raid houses and worker's trucks. It was quite common. The neighborhood has statistics and tracks how many stolen cars / plates drove through the neighborhood. All crime statistics dropped, police show up and arrest people. Saying its an illusion of safety is bullshit. It's all fake until you're a victim of a crime. We need our own way to fight back against gangs, etc. I'd rather have more cameras and less police. Also lets get some drones as well, they work fantastic in SF. The city owns the data its not getting sold. It gets erased unless a crime is reported.
I am somewhat skeptical that either the ACLU or EFF are effective organizations for this cause. The ACLU in particular have drifted significantly from a civil liberties focus, and EFF's privacy track-record for corporate run surveillance has never been the best and of late they seem to be following the ACLU away from civil liberties.
> Flock advertises a drop in crime, but the true cost is a culture of mistrust and preemptive suspicion. As the EFF warns, communities are being sold a false promise of safety - at the expense of civil rights* (EFF).
...
> True safety comes from healthy, empowered communities; not automated suspicion. Community-led safety initiatives have demonstrated significant results: North Lawndale saw a 58% decrease in gun violence after READI Chicago began implementing their program there. In cities nationwide, the presence of local nonprofits has been statistically linked to reductions in homicide, violent crime, and property crime (Brennan Center, The DePaulia, American Sociological Association).
These are incredibly weak arguments. I haven't personally looked into how good Flock cameras are at actually preventing crime and catching criminals, but if this is the best counterargument their detractors can come up with, it makes me suspect they're actually pretty good.
Crime is extremely bad. Mass surveillance is bad too, especially if abused, but being glib or dismissive about the real trade-offs is counterproductive.
Also, recording in public spaces (or private spaces that you own) is an important and fundamental right just like the right to privacy; simply banning this kind of surveillance would also infringe on civil liberties in a different way. I agree that laws and norms need adjusting in light of new technology, but that discussion needs more nuance than this.
Its worth checking out a recent interview with the Flock CEO on Cheeky Pint (Stripe's podcast with John Collison) [1]
As much as I fear the Orwellian future this could turn into, I think its important to recognize that the burden of preventing that is on lawmakers, not companies.
He explains in the interview that he would love for laws to be passed to create tighter controls over how these systems are used. The problem is that police departments don't want it! Perhaps they can elect to do it themselves, but then they expose themselves to competitors who have "more powerful features".
Something like 70% of homocides go unresolved! I think its cool that Flock is trying to help police departments fight crime. But it's time to yell at your lawmakers. Don't hate the player, hate the game!
I understand the privacy argument. There are a few questions though:
1) Suppose there will be another shooting. Don't you want to know what exactly has happened before you go to the protest? Suppose your child will be hurt. Wouldn't you do anything to capture the culprit? How exactly would you feel if the police would tell you that they couldn't get the video with culprits face, because watching it would be a violation of someone's privacy?
2) Everyone has a camera in their pocket. Someone is filming all the time. Police can seize this video. Isn't that a privacy risk? Should we ban cameras in smartphones?
3) Should we even be private in the public? Doesn't privacy in public spaces encourage crime? I will die on a battle to keep the privacy in my home, but in public? I personally prefer to be safe, than private, in public.
4) What about private cameras near homes filming 24/7? Are those risks for privacy?
5) People in power will always be corrupt, have bad intentions, will use public goods for personal gain. Should we disregard broader benefits because there will be isolated cases where those benefits will be exploited?
Boy would it just be terrible if someone hacked into the flock network and manipulated all the camera results ever so slightly. A letter here a number there, license plates or matches never quite lining up. It would take years for them to find the source of the “bugs”. Not saying I know anyone doing this or anything, just saying it would be oh soooooo terrible.
The "Take Action" section is missing the most obvious solution. Everyone just goes and takes down a camera. We as a society do not consent to this use of public space and simply have a national "Take out the trash day."
There is no way Flock could practically ramp up production or manpower to replace the entire fleet before failing to meet contractual requirements with their customers that keep money flowing in.
The best way to block Flock is probably to find a way to track billionaire celebs like Taylor Swift and Elon Musk.
If they were able to successfully change laws so they can fly anonymously they can probably change laws on cameras in public places, at least for them anyway.
Edit: not a low effort comment. This is something you should all read and demand the same of. I consternated on how not to call your regime moronic. It _is_ moronic that you don’t have these basic protections and we keep having to listen to you all whine about that.
308 comments
Police departments are seriously understaffed in many major cities, and officers are much less efficient than they used to be. This has led to the decline of the beat cop, who provided a kind of ambient authority that helped create, both a sense and reality, of public order. People really want the sense (even more than the reality!) of public order; without that, they will jump to faddish solutions that promise it, regardless of the data for or against it.
The best counter to Flock is to provide alternatives to it, not just reject it while keeping the status quo going. We need a new, vitalized police culture, that shares mutual trust and engagement with the community.
We simply aren't getting effective policing, and technology isn't the solution.
Reality is cops have become police report writers, traffic accident helpers, and domestic abuse arbiters, that is over half the job.
We had one last year. Everyone around has cameras. The cops refused to do anything about it. They refused to get recordings. The neighbor went door to door and gathered it herself. Cops refused to do anything even though you can see the car and the plates from multiple videos, multiple angles.
Guess what the cops always have resources for? Hiding behind bushes and trees to ticket people going 5 over. Or at turns where they know they’ll get people before people see the cop car.
Our HOA came together and asked the police department about this. They gave us bullshit about how custody of evidence etc is hard and even if they put people in jail, the lenient judges will let them go anyway. It was fucked up.
Our HOA was going in hard about installing floc cameras everywhere. I had to fight hard not to get that done. One of the reasons I won wasn’t because privacy, it was because the cops literally were like unless we can directly pull video feeds from cameras, we won’t do much. And that access wasn’t available to those police department. At least at the time.
There have been many other such stories I’ve personally witnessed in the cities I’ve lived in.
Cops seem to have plenty of resources to bully people of color, seize assets and hide behind trees and bushes to ticket people, reduce the period of orange lights so people get more tickets etc. but never enough to actually do their jobs.
> I live in a tech heavy, wealthy city. It’s small. No violent crime. Barely any crime at all.
Compare to e.g. Oakland, which recently approved a Flock expansion:
https://oaklandside.org/2025/12/17/oakland-flock-safety-coun...
Why?
https://sfstandard.com/2023/06/09/oakland-crime-police-respo...
https://oaklandside.org/2025/10/08/oakland-watchdog-audit-po...
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/oakland-police-off...
Now, will Flock help with this? No. But the visceral lack of safety people feel makes them more likely to see it as a necessary evil, not snake oil.
DAs and police in general are almost universally evaluated based on arrest numbers. Only very rarely on actual crime rates, and never on something as abstract as quality of life or local revenues or property values.
Gauging how good law enforcement is just by looking at arrest numbers is probably the wrong dial to be looking at.
I've noted this in the age verification debate, and in the Android developer verification debate as well.
Just denying the tradeoffs isn't productive, if tradeoffs affect others, just pushing your position disregarding the tradeoffs as fake or not important is divisive. In actuality I think that both parties become incentivized to solve the problems of the other group of people too, but as a centrist that position often gets pushback from both sides who seem to collaborate only indirectly from a place of adversarial competition and good vs evil framing, which I think is less productive than just recognizing the conflict and negotiating, but perhaps it's more engaging...
Without that, we are quickly spiraling into the dystopia where privacy is gone, and when the wrong person gets access to the data, entire populations are threatened.
I used to work in criminal investigations. I understand how this might make investigation of real crime more difficult. But so does the fact that you need a warrant to enter someone's home, and yet we manage to investigate crime anyway.
Your data should be an extension of your home, even if it's held by another company. It should require a warrant and notification. You could even make the notification be 24 hours after the fact. But it should be required.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-193593234
Why does the VP of strategic relations need to watch the kids gymnastics class?
Deflock: https://deflock.org/
Also: https://haveibeenflocked.com/
"Commit crime -> brief retention period -> activist judge lets you go" loop, then you can definitely build a business model that just capitalizes on the fact that there's no consequences to committing a crime, and local/state governments have to waste copious amount of money due to the incredibly inflated demand of first responder services.
That is, you can put up cameras wherever you want, but you can't gain any kind of competitive advantage by doing so.
I think the public would be more alert to the dangers of mass surveillance if the magnitude of that surveillance was more obvious. And if everyone was watching everyone, at least it wouldn't as easily abused for purposes such as selective prosecution or blackmail.
We should probably oppose this.
_________
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/07/toronto-r...
UPDATE: don't conflate stalking with observation. These are not the same. You can observe, but you cannot intimidate.
Privacy is important just as democracy is important, but crime and lawlessness feel more immediate and will always take center stage.
Any message to try to address the spread of flock and flock-like business models have to address what replaces it. If the only choice people are given is either having flock, or car break-ins, then I think we can probably guess what people would choose.
SFPD at least, has credited flock and flock-like tech for why property crime has dropped so much in recent years.
I'll step in and add a voice. Ultimately, Flock is solving a real problem with crime. This is why police departments when them.
Stopping Flock doesn't address the need that got police departments to use them. If you want to "stop flock", you need to address that need better.
Sarah Brayne (2020) Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing, Oxford University Press
https://www.amazon.com/Predict-Surveil-Discretion-Future-Pol...
An academic study about the use of surveillance technology at the Los Angeles Police Department, the book documents the LAPD's use of data brokerage firms (e.g., Palantir) that collect and aggregate information from public records and private sources, as well as automatic license plate readers like Flock, and Suspicious Activity Reports generated by police and civilians, which include reports of mundane activities such as using binoculars, drawing diagrams, or taking pictures or "video footage with no apparent aesthetic value." All this data ultimately gets parked in Fusion Center facilities, built in the aftermath of 9/11, where federal, state and local law enforcement agencies collaborate to collect, aggregate, analyze and share information. As the author observes, "The use of data in law enforcement is not new. For almost a century, police have been gathering data, e.g., records of citations, collisions, warrants, incarcerations, sex offender and gang registries, etc. What is new and important about the current age of big data is the role in public policing of private capitalist firms who provide database systems with huge volumes of information about people, not just those in the criminal justice system."
> The Illusion of Security
> Flock advertises a drop in crime, but the true cost is a culture of mistrust and preemptive suspicion. As the EFF warns, communities are being sold a false promise of safety - at the expense of civil rights* (EFF).
...
> True safety comes from healthy, empowered communities; not automated suspicion. Community-led safety initiatives have demonstrated significant results: North Lawndale saw a 58% decrease in gun violence after READI Chicago began implementing their program there. In cities nationwide, the presence of local nonprofits has been statistically linked to reductions in homicide, violent crime, and property crime (Brennan Center, The DePaulia, American Sociological Association).
These are incredibly weak arguments. I haven't personally looked into how good Flock cameras are at actually preventing crime and catching criminals, but if this is the best counterargument their detractors can come up with, it makes me suspect they're actually pretty good.
Crime is extremely bad. Mass surveillance is bad too, especially if abused, but being glib or dismissive about the real trade-offs is counterproductive.
Also, recording in public spaces (or private spaces that you own) is an important and fundamental right just like the right to privacy; simply banning this kind of surveillance would also infringe on civil liberties in a different way. I agree that laws and norms need adjusting in light of new technology, but that discussion needs more nuance than this.
As much as I fear the Orwellian future this could turn into, I think its important to recognize that the burden of preventing that is on lawmakers, not companies.
He explains in the interview that he would love for laws to be passed to create tighter controls over how these systems are used. The problem is that police departments don't want it! Perhaps they can elect to do it themselves, but then they expose themselves to competitors who have "more powerful features".
Something like 70% of homocides go unresolved! I think its cool that Flock is trying to help police departments fight crime. But it's time to yell at your lawmakers. Don't hate the player, hate the game!
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYm2nXFDaB0
1) Suppose there will be another shooting. Don't you want to know what exactly has happened before you go to the protest? Suppose your child will be hurt. Wouldn't you do anything to capture the culprit? How exactly would you feel if the police would tell you that they couldn't get the video with culprits face, because watching it would be a violation of someone's privacy?
2) Everyone has a camera in their pocket. Someone is filming all the time. Police can seize this video. Isn't that a privacy risk? Should we ban cameras in smartphones?
3) Should we even be private in the public? Doesn't privacy in public spaces encourage crime? I will die on a battle to keep the privacy in my home, but in public? I personally prefer to be safe, than private, in public.
4) What about private cameras near homes filming 24/7? Are those risks for privacy?
5) People in power will always be corrupt, have bad intentions, will use public goods for personal gain. Should we disregard broader benefits because there will be isolated cases where those benefits will be exploited?
Happy downvoting.
There is no way Flock could practically ramp up production or manpower to replace the entire fleet before failing to meet contractual requirements with their customers that keep money flowing in.
If they were able to successfully change laws so they can fly anonymously they can probably change laws on cameras in public places, at least for them anyway.
Privacy for the special people.
https://gizmodo.com/taylor-swift-and-elon-can-finally-fly-pr...
Edit: not a low effort comment. This is something you should all read and demand the same of. I consternated on how not to call your regime moronic. It _is_ moronic that you don’t have these basic protections and we keep having to listen to you all whine about that.