I suppose we can start with all Blink, Ring and Nest Cams. Then we will continue with dash cam owners.
The stuff Flock is doing is going to be standard AI-driven surveillance in the future, and unless the actual practices are made into political third rails and made into criminal code violations, they will absolutely be legalized on some party line vote in the middle of the night.
Don't make it 'stop Flock,' make it 'criminalize AI-driven surveillance.' Denounce 'conspiracy to implement ai-driven surveillance' as an inherently immoral activity punishable by prison time.
https://www.npr.org/2026/08/22/nx-s1-5931446/flock-fallout-c...
The word “Flock” is quickly becoming toxic, in the future we’ll be able to use it as a shorthand for all companies of this type. e.g. if I call something a cleanex everyone knows what I’m talking about regardless of whether Cleanex the company actually made the item being referred to. Similarly we’ll be able to just say “flock camera” and everyone will know what it is regardless of who makes the camera.
What would be legalized? You realize that recording people in public is already legal, right? I'm puzzled where people are getting the idea that Flock is doing something illegal.
Honestly the nuance isn't that intellectually taxing and having to explain it to people in the tech space is tiresome.
Or they'll be legalized piecemeal and you'll get sneered at by the useful idiots for opposing each incremental step based on principal.
and then before you know it the state has implemented its mass surveillance apparatus across the entire country. And we though china's social credits were bad? just IMAGINE what those predatory tech bros are cookin up.
Not as far fetched as it sounds even. Plenty of not-quite-a-crime things they could track if desired.
“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work together for the benefit of all.” —- John Maynard Keynes
Guardrails because we cannot trust the human.
> The order came as The Texas Tribune was preparing to publish an investigation detailing how a state agency has devoted at least $30 million to building the state’s Flock surveillance network.
Lawmakers added $1 to Texans’ car insurance policies. That money paid for thousands of Flock cameras. - https://www.texastribune.org/2026/08/28/texas-flock-cameras-... - August 28th, 2026
Pennsylvania state senator planning bill to ban Flock, ALPR cameras - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49482256 - August 2026
https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/pa-state-senato...
However, if we lived in such a society, we wouldn't want tools like Flock to begin with.
edit: to be clear, we are far too corrupt a society to have things like Flock. The point of my comment was this irony.
In utopia, we would also not need Flock.
Privacy should be a human right.
I feel like the best solution is very tightly regulating and auditing this technology so it can only be used to benefit society.
We live in a world that is most corrupt and above the law, at the very top. Why would anyone trust that world? Trust is required for this technology to be willingly adopted.
If you want violence, you better be prepared for it. You just can't complain when someone doesn't like what you are doing and comes right to your door.
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
I can appreciate Jefferson as much as the next guy but thank goodness his voice just one amongst many.
We just need a ton of people to film his house and whereabouts 24x7 for a while so he gets a taste of his own medicine.
It would be horrible if he didn’t like it.
Note celebrities have to put up with the paparazzi. At this point he’s a celebrity.
Flock Camera CEO Asks Americans to “Compromise” on Privacy After Growing Backlash - https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/flock-camera-ceo-asks... - August 27th, 2026
Flock CEO calls for ‘compromise’ as surveillance company faces growing backlash - https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/23/flock-ceo-calls-for-compro... - August 23rd, 2026
Flock Safety CEO calls for national 'compromise' amid camera sabotage and public revolt - https://www.foxnews.com/media/flock-safety-ceo-calls-nationa... - August 22nd, 2026
> If you want violence, you better be prepared for it. You just can't complain when someone doesn't like what you are doing and comes right to your door.
I don't condone violence in this context, and besides perhaps a few individuals (humans are tricky), I haven't seen anyone else loudly or overtly calling for it (provide sources if I am wrong). My assumption is his address is being shared to demonstrate the asymmetry and hypocrisy. "If you have nothing to hide" argument.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument
(but you know, its the usual authoritarian tech bro "I wanna get rich and have control while the plebs get stuck with the harm and externalities" story)
A license plate is specifically a tracking number to identify a registered vehicle on a public road. The 4th Amendment gives you privacy inside of your car, but your car is not itself guaranteed privacy. Before Flock, police departments already had informally aggregated data from speed cameras, red light cameras, and toll booths. The distinction being that any evidence collected in such a way is purely circumstantial and still requires a warrant to investigate.
The big irony though of Flock plate readers is that because they're just tracking license plates, they're not actually that useful at solving meaningful crime. Realistically there are a small number of hit-and-runs that could be solved, and they can make certain investigations a bit shorter. And most of what we read about is officer directed stalking or harassment activities.
It's all of Flock's other advertised services that should really freak people out. The facial recognition, the audio scanners, the individual-level tracking databases - right now they're a fancy VIN lookup service. It's all the other stuff they're trying to sell departments on that are getting into really egregious 4th Amendment violations.
> Another prompt instructs the system to list everyone arrested more than twice in two years for “any offense,” exempting only narcotics arrests, and then says to map where those people live, retrieve the calls for service at their homes, and “do a workup on the top three individuals.” The prompt begins with everyone in the area who has an arrest record and ends with dossiers on three of them, chosen by the software.
> A “workup,” in Flock’s terminology, is a one-command background check. It starts with a name and a date of birth and returns what the department’s records and commercial data hold: vehicles, prior listings as a suspect, and, on a second screen, relatives, phone numbers, and online accounts.
This stuff is beyond the wildest fantasies of East Germany's Stasi, and it's going to be a whack-a-mole game dealing with all the baby Flocks that spring up if Flock itself can be shut down.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/flock-safety-os-investigate/
The potential for abuse is obviously massive, but the benefit to society is too.
I feel like that's a bit of a false equivalency. The soviet secret police had surprisingly little hard evidence on anyone - part of the terror of these regimes is that they could act decisively with little more than a rumor or gossip and be free from scrutiny for any mistakes.
My thinking is if we can stop pervasive AI-driven surveillance we might be saved from a totalitarian regime who views The Handmaid's Tale as an instruction manual, and instead be able to settle for a run-of-the-mill corrupt authoritarian one.
Purely statistically, this is a good first-pass filter if you are looking for perps. Chance a random adult is arrested in a 8-year window: ~5%. Chance a former convict gets arrested in an 8-year window: ~49%. So, it is ~10x the rate. Makes sense, statistically, to start there.
https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/recidivism-am...