You'd think from the response that this was like the VP/Sales of Flock Safety. But it's just some installer dude probably making $65k/year to climb poles and fasten cameras. I guess that's praxis for you though.
I think this is just a ragebait piece.
There's pretty clearly a vibe on this thread that calling 911 is itself a use of coercive force. It is not. 911 is how you're ordinarily supposed to reach the police. In my neighborhood, it's how you'd report a stolen bicycle. It's the job of the police to handle those calls appropriately, and I don't see any indication that the call was handled inappropriately here.
The story doesn't want to give you that context because their goal isn't to inform you, it's to get your blood pumping.
Calling the police, especially in America, can 100% be a coercive use of force. That’s why people threaten to call the cops/DHS/ICE all the time during arguments, and why things like SWATing are as big of a problem as they are. When the behavior of many policy officers is escalate first, ask questions second if at all, it does become a genuine threat.
I know that in Summer 2020 there was a fashion for saying any call to the police was ipso facto a deployment of coercive force, but I'm rejecting that argument out of hand while also pointing out that in many regions 911 is exactly the thing you're supposed to do when you have uncertainty. It is simply not a demand for violence; it's a demand to have a trained authority come and resolve a situation, rather than having two private citizens with no training at all in the law confront each other and hope for the best.
The technician was in public, bearing a company logo, performing an activity in which there is widespread public interest, and identified himself to law enforcement as an agent of Flock Safety. He is entitled to be unnerved but has no reasonable expectation of privacy here.
I find it hard to be persuaded by the salary idea. A hitman who works for $100 is just as bad as one who works for $10,000.
In fact other immoral activities work the opposite, bizarrely (a whore who works for $100 is worse than one who works for $10,000)
It’s not true. You can go find something worthwhile to do instead.
Should other law enforcement contractors also be subject to the same higher standard? For instance, should dell get extra flak if one of their contractors called 911, because they were installing PCs for a police department? If not, this just seems like a way of applying a double standard, just because you hate flock. It's fine to hate flock, but it should be actually justified reasons (eg. "they're enabling mass surveillance" or whatever), not spurious ones like "they did a bad that's vaguely common, but we're gonna admonish them extra hard for it because we hate them")
You are really trying to contort yourself into some very uninteresting twists.
Seems like the installer was calling because he thought he was being harassed?
>As Keefe began to shoot video, the installer saw him and immediately packed up his equipment and drove away, so Keefe also returned to his car and followed several cars behind, hoping to document the next stop.
>...
>“I work with Flock Safety. And I called originally because I’m getting followed,” the installer can be heard telling a dispatcher after being transferred. “I was getting harassed, pretty much. Taking videos and pictures. And now, the same vehicle that pulled over where I was working at has been following me.”
Sure, you can try to equate "flock setting up a surveillance network" to "physically following flock employees", but what's the implication here? That anyone working for flock should be fair game as a stalking target? What about someone working for NSA? Should it be fine to look through their emails?
Isn't that exactly what Flock are doing to tens of thousands of people a day? So why the double-standard.
I actually agree it is unnerving, I just don't agree that one should be held to a different standard than the other.
harassing a worker is not the way to fix the problem. The worker has no agency to affect the changes desired by the harasser. It's an issue with the gov't, and needs civic procedures to change.
This behaviour is the same as harassing hospitality staff for bad prices. Harassers would be considered borderline committing terrorism if they go further.
Do they even have their own technicians? I believe there have been Dish Network technicians seen working on and setting up flock cameras and even those technicians are contractors of Dish network.
https://www.ontechsmartservices.com/
I noticed a more prominently branded "OnTech" van roaming around my rural slice of life that had a smaller Dish brand logo on it that seemed to be more of that side of the business.
This isn't how world works.
You do unpopular things, you gotta expect to be an unpopular person.
Sophisticated, educated types might understand that parking wardens are just doing their jobs, and they didn't make the policy they're enforcing. But to 70% of the population, the person putting a ticket on their car is an asshole.
But Flock itself should not be spared . They are building things that are going against widely accepted values.
Since when Americans are okay with that level of erosion of their privacy?
Same thing with Meta building pervert glasses.
You introduce a new problem, which is that eyewitness reports of crimes etc can’t identify the vehicles as easily, but that could be viewed as an acceptable loss. Or the problem could conceivably be solved with more technology if we can have dynamically changing license plates (which, again, require law enforcement keys to map back to a real identity for the vehicle).
The only other way I see is that we change laws so that a company like flock collecting this data and then offering it to the government is treated the same as if the government collected it itself. But now that the cat is out of that bag and there is big money behind it, I don’t really see it going back.
It seems that this is about a YouTuber stalking a Flock employee's vehicle through traffic for 10-15 minutes, which is why the police were called.
But what I really wanted to mention is that flock is not the government, and flock's services are not exclusively available to governments.
Same goes for their competitors.
A TV news crew filmed me when I was a freshman setting up my old travel trailer in a new university trailer park. I hated it, but it didn't last long. If they had continued following and filming indefinitely despite my protests, I would have wanted some kind of legal protection from them.
I don't think it's fair to cry harassment if you're getting filmed setting up the harassment machine.
If anything, Americans are being too nice to Flock. We're watching the villain and setup of a 1980s dystopian scifi horror, except there's no unlikely hero who can save the world by shooting a single weirdo in a suit on top of a skyscraper.
looks at you suspiciously
Are those… curtains?
Don’t you understand? He was just following orders.
We managed to swing a couple of the county commissioners who were in favor of it before and were not in favor of it after hearing about the constitutional issues as well as the cyber security issues that flock doesn't really care about.
Pasco county Florida is now removing all the cameras on the public right of ways at the end of this month.
> We managed to swing a couple of the county commissioners who were in favor of it before and were not in favor of it after hearing about the constitutional issues as well as the cyber security issues that flock doesn't really care about.
Do you not see the problem here?
Pasco County has a $2.2B annual budget. These county commissioners have the financial resources, organizational access to expertise, and time to focus on these problems.
Do they really need an under-resourced citizen to inform them about the constitutional issues after deployment? And then they just say “Aw shucks, whoopsies, now I see the light.”
I don’t think it’s fair to call this learned helplessness (a lingering belief after the threat has vanished) when we’re facing off against an active, persistent adversarial threat.
Your county commissioners didn’t make a “whoopsies” when they took a deliberate, informed action against your interests.
Furthermore, it’s unsustainable to require citizens to pour significant time and energy into forcing their representatives to faithfully represent them. That quite literally defeats the purpose of a representative governing body.
Regardless, I'd rather tailor my message to people who I fundamentally disagree with, and make a little bit of progress.
Edit: anyways, the point is that a group of less than 15 or 20 people can sway decisions.
There is no practical difference between the government hiring people to do something and the government hiring a corporation to do the same thing, and if you find yourself blaming Flock instead of the government who funds them, you’re being manipulated by this tactic.
Yellow vests knock out 60% of all speed cameras in France
The other states I’ve lived in haven’t been so straight forward.
On the flip side, let Axon, Motorola take some of the heat, paint your enemies as "defund the police", and stop being so obviously branded. Take a page out of Phillip Morris/Altria playbook and keep a lower profile.
Instead, they've managed to unite left and right in hatred. Clown show.
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 (which have basically no 4th-8th amendment protections these days) 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.
"The truck we saw carrying 2-tons of waste tires away from your tire shop is not owned by an entity on the state approved list, pay up"
"We saw you leaving home depot with a water heater but you didn't pull a permit, prove it didn't go into your house or pay the fine"
"we saw your 2004 Altima emit a puff of blue leaving a light. Per vehicle code XYZ any vehicle that emmits a visible cloud cannot pass emissions inspection, submit proof of passing withing 30d or your resigstration is revoked"
If they had done that a lot of people would have eaten it up and asked for more. But nope, they believed their own BS and built a system for "real" law enforcement. And of course that leads to a bunch of bad interactions with cops and the public doesn't like that.
also they are just putting 24/7 recorders now in police vehicles and even delivery services
so you can't just be anti-flock, you have to be anti-recording without policy for use and retention
your phone and even your watch may be recording your audio right now
Not recording on its own, but the linking of data with other cities and making it all searchable by those with access is where it becomes unprecedented mass surveillance.
You’re right that we have to be specific.
> your phone may be recording
They are able to dodge these accusations by just selling voice command logs. “No we don’t record you or sell your audio data” and yet Siri’s AUL reads:
[PhraseSpotter] Detected wake word “Pepsi” with a score 0.942.
[com.apple.voiceactivation] Proceeding with full wake.
So no need to sell the audio, just the unrelated logs of some app that uses the AOP.
ICE, yes. At this point you cannot make an argument at all that you are going to join a fair-minded organisation that treats people decently while upholding a lawful function.
People who work for Flock should be considering their futures, but I suspect people who install Flock cameras are more in the TSA bracket: it is a job that will be near them that pays.
My take is that we like to hang out on PG's blog and make fun of his avarice. Is there a better place to do this?
Aside from "PG's blog" this is a community. People wish each other happy holidays, offer support to one another, challenge each other etc... In that sense it transcends both PG and YC. The internet is not what it used to be but HN is a real community to me and I am truly grateful for that. As such, I would like to make an effort to meet more people and hang out in real life.
One would think that these "geniuses" would understand that living in a society where lower class people do not live with constant existential threats would be a positive for them too...but I guess they find it easier to be hated by everyone and be forced to hire bodyguards, private armies, and live in gated communities and bunkers in fear of getting in touch with the real world.
Separate the nouveau robber barons from political power like we did the clergy?
The United States had campaign-finance laws to limit the political influence money can buy. The McCain–Feingold Act restricted “dark money”. The Supreme Court struck it down in Citizens United v. FEC.
These are dark days, but Flock and data centers are a couple of things that actually bring people together and take a united stand against something.
re: https://www.npr.org/2026/08/22/nx-s1-5931446/flock-fallout-c...
Which is to say our cops are pro-flock but they've gotten too much heat from them from a largely uneducated public.
Meanwhile I've recently seen a rural Tennessee sheriff drop their contract when they found they were lied to about the data sharing.
It's an echo chamber full of self-important piles of dogshit.
The real world is amazing... but this is a place for self-centered douche canoes like yourself to masturbate to your own imagined greatness. It's a place for assholes. It's a place for people whose fathers fucked up badly.
Sounds like you're contributing to your own narrative here. The only self-centered douche canoe of a comment I see in this thread is from you.
HN has its share of good & bad, but I've generally enjoyed talking to some of the people on this site; much more than sites like Reddit which imo fit your description much much better.
Also.... who hurt you?
New people who come here as novices now are given horribly bad to wrong advice constantly and even technically wrong examinations. And beyond that, now the same larping types here downvote real expertise.
It’s normal for forums so I can’t complain too much, but be aware as nice as this place is, it’s wildly uninformed.
Two things can be true at once.
The police want the capability. Flock just happens to temporarily have the better technology.
But this is pretty standard for this class of people. To get super rich you have to fuck people over, there’s simply no way to amass a billion ethically.
As opposed to all the new accounts (uncharitably: sockpuppet accounts) that are criticizing it?
10+ years of posting doesn't give you a pass to skirt the HN guidelines.
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
Please do better.
It's not like they control it, manage it, and what was pitched may be significantly different than what happened since then.
YC isn't perfect, but what words you use, and their order is important. And the way you're phrasing it, you make it sound as if they are a subsidiary of YC. Or as if YC is on the board.
If any of these things are true, you should plainly state them. Otherwise, what you're saying is incorrect.
"My cause is more important than honesty, and honesty could detract from the rage energy I need"
You see this is everywhere, and it (lack of rational discussion/reasoning) is soooo incredibly destructive to society.
We can stop Flock without having to make up lies. They do enough bad stuff that their is no need for deceit and conspiracy...
>Flock’s camera and accompanying software is geared towards private neighborhoods and neighborhood associations looking to decrease petty crime.[1]
[1]https://www.hypepotamus.com/flock-safety-funding-round-growt...
The scope is always the largest possible audience…
I've been on the internet too long to give credence to people who resort to conspiracy when data doesn't fit their desired narrative.
Founders own words
Unfortunately Google seems to have removed the ability to search only in specific time frames, but the original pitch I'm sure does exist out there.
There are over 350K HOAs in the US, so scaling to just HOAs would still be an undertaking
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety
> From the moment we started Flock Safety, we had an incredibly clear, boldly audacious mission ... We provide a life-or-death product, a mission-critical system for cities
"Yes, HOAs would honestly want plate readers.."
It started as license plate readers and expanded to include identifying people by clothing, body type, etc. storing it in a database that communicates with surveillance networks in other cities.
That is literally mass surveillance.
Me and the founding mission of flock when it got seed funding from HN in 2017.
Flocks original goal was private security for HOAs, nothing to do with police/government. Hence this whole debacle here in the comments.
> When Demo Day was over, after we had booked meetings with investors and were well on our way to our first fundraising round, YC set the tone for scaling Flock doggedly, purposefully, and with consistent velocity, for years to come.
Damn, its almost like YC really set the stage for mass AI surveillance from the founders own mouth
needs log scale to even see anything, really:
the claim having been the following, before it got flagged to nothingness:
> this site has become flocknews.com!
guy kept seeing some posts every now and then for the past few weeks == site is like, literally flock news only man!!!!
gotta love these reliable narrators
We forget US society was configured (imperfectly) to allow families to raise their children in stability and safety, with guardrails around both sides of liberty. Surveillance has a legit role in protecting communities and their families - especially the most vulnerable.
Willing to be most of the Flock hate crowd doesn't have kids walking to school in areas where bad things happen - many probably don't have kids.
The problem is the many stories we already have of misuses of this equipment, showing that people in power are not mentally capable of actually managing a surveillance system like this in a societally beneficial way.
If the use of the system was designated as only being allowed to stop heinous crimes and we had a track record and way to prove this was always the case, then I would be 100% in support. But given it has already proven to not be possible is likely why most people are against it.
I simply don't think Humans are capable of proper use of a system like this.
If these things were only ever used with the a valid search warrant, that would be a great step forward. But even that will only stop "honest" people from abusing the system.
The fed govt in the US has been doing questionable things on and off American soil for a long time: - bad analysis https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/09/09/the-cowboy-of-the-nsa - not to mention the massive surveillance state exposed by Edward Snowden
And then more specifically, Flock cameras:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/one-alpr-camera-hit-e... https://reason.com/2026/08/13/flock-cameras-and-license-plat... https://www.riaclu.org/news/flock-safety-image-led-to-false-... https://ij.org/dozens-of-innocent-motorists-have-been-pulled... https://ij.org/the-ij-database-of-alpr-abuse/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/08/02/how-pol... https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/26/us/flock-kentucky-police-offi... https://www.aol.com/articles/milwaukee-police-officer-charge... https://ij.org/police-have-reportedly-used-license-plate-rea...
Why do you suppose that stalking is illegal?
Before you write up any "clever" retorts, remember that many illegal activities (theft, kidnapping, murder, etc) are permitted when permission is obtained from a judge.
Sum up the number of kids harmed or murdered by random people (remember that, for example, non-family abductions are 1% of abductions).
Compare.
I guarantee you that an empowered state is worse for child welfare than random criminals.
Saying their ability to solve crimes is "limited to the humans using the tools" isn't much of an argument against the technology. That's true of fingerprints, DNA databases, radios, firearms databases, and virtually every other investigative tool.
A police officer can misuse a DMV database to stalk an ex. That means the officer should be prosecuted and access to the database tightly controlled. It doesn't demonstrate that DMV records have no legitimate investigative purpose. The same reasoning applies to LPRs.
By the way, that mom that was arrested? The kid was 5 years old, and was intentionally sent to a pond.
> Willing to [bet] most of the Flock hate crowd doesn't...
...have a reason at all to worry about LPR cameras tracking their car. Just "something something government."
The double standard demonstrated by Flock isn't the issue, they are the pieces of shit and of course they have no moral consistency.
But "He who fights with monsters should be careful, lest he thereby become a monster." I thought we were united that people have a reasonable sense of temporal privacy in public - that being in public is ephemeral and not some permanent record to be analyzed in perpetuity. We should not be fine stalking people and making them feel threatened, even those that want to build the panopticon state.
The point is that total surveillance is like the destruction of tolerance or in thie case privacy, and it makes watching the watchmen impossible. There's a point of no return and before that one is reached resistance IS allowed or else you lose everything.