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.
A massive network of surveillance cameras is not a consumer product. For most people, it's an abstract potential benefit of crime reduction weighed against an abstract definite harm to privacy. Definite usually wins against potential.
Their problem is they believed their own bullshit and thought they were offering people a good deal that basically amounted to "the government 1984s you more than they already do but your package thief gets arrested for it".
Ignoring the fact that that deal is not necessarily good, if they had been slightly scummier, not given two shits about actually reducing petty crimes against the people and instead set out to help municipalities collect civil fines they probably could have gotten away without scrutiny for a very long time and gotten their systems deeply entrenched. The useful idiots would've eaten it right up with the flimsiest of pretexts so long as each segment of useful idiots was peddled to individually.
People who get angry enough to tear down the Flock cameras in their area get rounded up and classified by the Feds as "leftist terrorists".
Axon gets a major boost to it's revenue by landing fat .gov contracts for it's own version of 24/7 surveillance.
Government employees who approve the contracts get rich on insider trading.
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.
So it does mean quite a bit, then. Especially since the topic is flock, which is only relevant to the states.
Flock isn't just a private mass surveillance corporation that leases cameras and infra to police departments. We've had that since digital cameras and the internet.
What Flock sells as its core product is "AI" surveillance and policing. What that actually means is that Flock trains their own statistical models on the data their cameras passively collect. Flock sells access to those models as a "one click" crime solver.
The result is not only the massive expansion of public surveillance, but the replacement of actual detective work with statistical modeling. By using a statistical model to "solve crime", police departments get to launder their responsibility away to the magic AI black box.
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.
Really shouldn't have clicked the link or signed in to this cesspool...
1: https://www.wvtf.org/news/2026-08-14/flock-cameras-trigger-p...
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...
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.
you make HOAs be part of the government and follow democratic rules like any government, ie. they are just a smaller form of a municipality, or a subdivision of one. you do not allow the government to delegate responsibilities to private organizations. you guarantee everyone inalienable rights regarding their property that no HOA is allowed to override.
for example, even if the whole neighborhood agrees to surveillance, the right to privacy in your home/property and in certain places (like public pools) should be absolute and it should not be possible to take it away.
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.
exactly, and they should be forced to operate like one, with democratic elections, and the same checks and balances like any other part of the government.
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.
why is that? and why is the county or state government not taking over the responsibility then? for example in germany a democratic local government is guaranteed by basic law, so a neighborhood outside of a municipality is practically not possible and considered a violation of basic law.
> 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.
However, I am perfectly fine with Flock (or other) cameras existing and providing services on behalf of government. If the tech exists to watch public spaces all the time and massively process the data, then so be it; who can stop it? So there are abuses: any system can be abused, so improve the controls and stop corruption at its root, not its symptoms.
I bet that most anti-Flock people lobby hard for bodycams on police, and they thrive on those amateur social-media videos that appear to depict "police brutality" or "ICE overreach" on the streets. It only seems fair, that if amateur video can be leveraged to whip the public into a righteous frenzy, that professional video networks should be in place as well.
Lastly, I don't mind the folks who are chopping down Flock trees. I think it's kind of adorable, actually. I believe that Flock should've used better care and highway safety standards to install the things, rather than hastily throwing them in any open space. You kids with your axes like President Washington's cherry trees! Power to the people!
Well of course you are, you also endorse torture!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49323719
Why anyone else should give a shit what you think, I don't know. Hey, chance for personal growth: maybe if a flock camera catches you near a crime scene you'll have a chance to enjoy the detention without trial and forced feeding that a lot of innocent migrants are being subjected to. I would love that for you.
Personally I see no worthwhile reason the state should be able to track the location of every person at any time. Phones make this bad enough, but at least that's warrant required and requires active intervention. Passive tracking of everybodies actions through total camera surveillance is a brutal thought, no?
While your premise is true, it's also true that if I have done something wrong then I have no problem being called out and brought to justice on those merits.
Someone who is doing wrong hopes to be disciplined. Many criminals secretly just hope to be caught so they can stop doing wrong. It seems nearly absurd that criminals who "have something to hide" continually just cover up more and more and act covertly, as if they could never be found out.
If I did something in public that was so egregious that a camera recorded me and it could be used as evidence against me, I hope that it would.
Likewise, if I were involved in any dispute or crime, as a witness or victim, and there were surveillance that indicated my role was innocence, bystander, or victimhood, I would hope that the evidence showed that as well.
I don't have any illusions, in the face of corruption and oppression, that surveillance will be entirely fair, but it can be widespread and equally applied, and it's only through its ubiquitousness that it will be ultimately effective.
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.
(it feels weird to be advocating a different centralized surveillance solution in a thread about Flock. So I'll just add Fuck Flock!)
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
> In 2026, the Supreme Court limited the application of the doctrine to digital location data as well. Chatrie v. United States held that law enforcement conducts a Fourth Amendment search when it compels Google to provide a user's historical location information, even though the data is held by a third-party techonology company.
And the police don't really care [1]. You could almost certainly do that audit nationwide and find huge portions of the police force breaking the law routinely.
That said, I'd certainly support legislation which forced these surveillance systems to require any who wants to use the system to present a search warrant. And to enforce the parameters of that warrant and not allow for searches exceeding it. But I imagine flock wouldn't like that. After all, their entire business model is providing fast and broad searches without requiring a warrant.
[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/georgia-cops-keep-get...
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.
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.
> Bukele’s government had previously negotiated with MS-13 and other violent gangs it publicly claimed to be cracking down on, El Faro found. Those negotiations, documents showed, involved offering privileges to gang leaders in prison, in exchange for a reduction in homicides and voter support in territories the gangs controlled.
Not sure that’s a great model to emulate.
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.
[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.
We should make sure police don't abuse their power. That's what auditing and strict access controls are for. If someone abuses it, they are held accountable.
But that doesn't mean you need a warrant for everything. It's much like police have guns and can use them at their discretion, but every time an officer draws a weapon of fires is brought under scrutiny. It works exactly the same way. Imagine if police had to go to a judge before they were able to draw their weapons!
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.
Find me some evidence that Flock ever helped catch a criminal.
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.
Benjamin Franklin, Philadelphia, 1756.
But then this happened in my county:
https://www.lakemchenryscanner.com/2026/06/19/prosecutors-sa...