Musician-turning-tech anarchist (?) Benn Jordan is making a very interesting series of videos about Flock cameras, their poor safety, and their gray-area interfacing with local governments:
Benn's videos along with this one from a very chill middle-aged engineer/state rep made the difference in swaying our town to discontinue its Flock contract: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwbE5ks7dFg
seemaze 1 hours ago [-]
Those were great to watch, thanks!
Also, I can't help but feel like I'm watching a young Dr. Emmett Brown.. Great Scott!!
devin 1 hours ago [-]
Benn is the best. His most recent video is about Ring cameras.
boriskourt 2 hours ago [-]
Super worth a watch. Lots of technical tidbits also.
AndrewKemendo 2 hours ago [-]
Wow thank you for sharing this I had no idea this guy existed!
There’s more of us techno anarchists out there apparently!
It is very clearly because YouTube has a higher reach than any other platform in that space.
komali2 2 hours ago [-]
During the KMT military dictatorship in Taiwan, the KMT used the radio to spread its anti-democratic propaganda and disparage pro-democracy activists. Activists meanwhile spread their messages via pirate radio.
pc86 9 minutes ago [-]
Cool, what does that have to do with anything?
diogenes_atx 1 hours ago [-]
It seems like this article buried the best lede of the story on paragraph ten, which explains Flock's new business of surveillance drones launched in response to 911 calls (and also presumably triggered by other alerts configured by police and private businesses).
> Flock has recently expanded into other technologies... Most concerning are the latest Flock drones equipped with high-powered cameras. Flock's "Drone as First Responder" platform automates drone operations, including launching them in response to 911 calls or gunfire. Flock's drones, which reach speeds up to 60 mph, can follow vehicles or people and provide information to law enforcement.
jonas21 21 minutes ago [-]
This is much less concerning to me than mass surveillance. If someone calls 911 and you need to send a first responder, why not send a drone to get there faster while a person is on their way?
sheiyei 10 minutes ago [-]
As a concept, first responder drones are a good idea. But I wouldn't want public services having anything to do with that company.
wiether 8 minutes ago [-]
At least their current cameras are fixed to a single point.
With their drones they now have cameras roaming freely everywhere.
zoklet-enjoyer 8 minutes ago [-]
And then what? Hover over me as I'm dying?
jeffbee 9 minutes ago [-]
Yeah this doesn't bother me in any way, shape, or form. We already have manned aircraft that respond to such things, unmanned aircraft are a strictly better solution. It makes sense for police and it makes even more sense for fire. An aircraft can arrive at the site of a reported fire while firemen are still buckling their pants.
mullingitover 3 minutes ago [-]
In Southern California we have eye-wateringly expensive (and loud) police aircraft flying 24x7.
I’m not a fan of Flock but I would welcome anything that knocks out some of the ghetto birds’ budget.
roughly 9 minutes ago [-]
They do more than that - our local PD gave a presentation on what Flock’s pitching - ALPRs, fixed pan/tilt cameras, “citizen cameras,” drones, and a whole “sensor fusion” software suite that lets you stitch in everything along with data from surrounding precincts which also have Flock (think Palantir for local cops). We were pretty shocked at the scale.
SoftTalker 45 minutes ago [-]
Hunter-Killers not far behind.
Forgeties79 38 minutes ago [-]
Code 8-style cop drone drops incoming
jmuguy 3 hours ago [-]
I'm surprised Garrett Langley still has a job, he seems wildly out of touch. For instance he really believes that his Panopticon as a service is the reason crime is down in cities, conveniently ignoring crime rates prior to COVID.
Zigurd 3 hours ago [-]
"Garrett Langley" sounds like what they renamed the villain in Le Mis for an American audience.
doctorpangloss 30 minutes ago [-]
Another POV is, they didn't invent cameras or drones, they aren't philosophers / employ any great or influential thinkers, nobody at Flock has won an election, all they really have done is sell some stuff that is easily defeated by a guy with a hammer or spray paint. I'm not sure he has another chance at a big Pay Day in his life, so in such desperate circumstances it will take something really criminal (or souring with VCs) to end this appearance in public life.
thinkingtoilet 3 hours ago [-]
Does he really believe it or is it his job to say he really believes it?
everdrive 3 hours ago [-]
Could he tell the difference?
therobots927 3 hours ago [-]
He won’t for long. The backlash is just getting started. Left or right, no one wants their whereabouts subject to constant surveillance.
His only advantage is that the cops are on his side and won’t let go of these cameras without a fight.
delecti 2 hours ago [-]
> no one wants their whereabouts subject to constant surveillance
But sadly lots of people want everyone else subject to it, and some are willing to submit to it themselves to get it. It's not a foregone conclusion.
Corrado 1 hours ago [-]
I was recently at a "town hall" meeting in my community and spoke with a older woman about Flock cameras. Initially she was not concerned about it and was generally in favor of the idea.
I agreed that there could be benefits but that the downside is that they know when and where you go to church, or the grocery, or where you get your hair done, or even when you go on vacation. Her eyes lit up and I she replied that she would have to think about that a bit.
I'm not saying that I changed her mind, but that bringing the consequences down to something she could understand was much better than yelling from the rooftops. Mentioning church is especially impactful with a lot of older folks.
jkestner 45 minutes ago [-]
In talking with many of the older people in my community about Flock, they initially defer to what our police department says it needs. A few things made them reconsider:
- This is not about our police. This is about all the outside organizations that can watch us.
- Focusing on Flock specifically. Once the cameras are given a name, people can start to form a better opinion fueled by the readily available bad press Flock is producing.
- With the focus on Flock, the YouTube videos elsewhere in this topic do a great job of explaining how crappy their security is and how they're lying to their customers about it. Which brings it back to, this isn't about our local police — it's about the company that's an unworthy partner.
Good job talking to your community. The first step is that people are aware of the cameras - for my neighbors, most did not know about them, and immediately found it creepy.
whimsicalism 2 hours ago [-]
I'm very in favor of speed & redlight cameras and don't have a particular problem with license plate trackers. I think we partisan-ize far too many things nowadays, unfortunately.
oooyay 2 hours ago [-]
Both of these camera systems also usually come with a kangaroo civil court of sorts. Last time I looked at red light camera distribution in Texas it was also fairly obvious that they were only installing them in poorer areas.
These systems were largely disliked bipartisanly because of those factors.
piperswe 12 minutes ago [-]
Aren’t red light cameras unenforceable in Texas?
SoftTalker 38 minutes ago [-]
They install them where the data show that people are running red lights.
ceejayoz 27 minutes ago [-]
Where the data shows people are getting caught running red lights.
Which isn't necessarily where the most incidents are.
banannaise 18 minutes ago [-]
Any dataset involving police actions will show high concentrations in poor areas because that's where police patrol the most and where they're most likely to crack down on behaviors that might be allowed to slide elsewhere (in part due to the racial demographics of those areas).
whimsicalism 5 minutes ago [-]
Usually allocation decisions are related to actual car/pedestrian fatality/injury counts + trial placements and measurements. Either way, wouldn't you be in favor of measures that remove police from overpoliced poor neighborhoods in favor of a technology focusing on traffic safety enforcement?
you think speed cameras violate the 4th amendment?
mothballed 2 hours ago [-]
No but license plate requirements pretty clearly violate the 4th and/or 1st amendment, IMO. And without being required to have your license plate searched (registration 'papers' forced to be displayed) at all times without even an officer presenting RAS or PC of a crime, these cameras become a lot less useful.
I don't see how removing the cameras is compatible with the first amendment, but if you have the right of "speech" to record me in public chasing every place I go in a manner that is the envy of any stalker, I ought to have the right of "speech" not to "say anything" (compelled speech of showing my plate).
nemomarx 2 hours ago [-]
It really doesn't seem like the courts agree that you have a right to travel via car without a visible plate.
> The government's warrantless acquisition of Carpenter's cell-site records violated his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures. Chief Justice John Roberts authored the opinion for the 5-4 majority. The majority first acknowledged that the Fourth Amendment protects not only property interests, but also reasonable expectations of privacy. Expectations of privacy in this age of digital data do not fit neatly into existing precedents, but tracking person's movements and location through extensive cell-site records is far more intrusive than the precedents might have anticipated.
> Although the case was ultimately decided on trespass principles, five Justices agreed that “longer term GPS monitoring . . . impinges on expectations of privacy.” See id. at 430 (Alito, J., concurring); id. at 415 (Sotomayor, J., concurring). Based on “[t]raditional surveillance” capacity “[i]n the precomputer age,” the Justices reasoned that “society’s expectation” was that police would not “secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period.”
It seems clear these cameras can hit some kind of threshold where they're common enough and interlinked enough to amount to unconstitutional surveilance. We don't know exactly where that threshold is yet.
_DeadFred_ 11 minutes ago [-]
The courts made polygraphs submittable legal evidence used to convict people, and still use them on people under supervision (because lesser standards apply).
Precedent is often crap and wrong until someone can find a good case paired with good lawyers to rectify.
mothballed 2 hours ago [-]
The courts have been wrong about many things, sometimes for centuries before they've fixed it. Some things they think they've interpreted correctly now that they'll turn around and interpret some other way later.
Trying to interpret viewing and recording the plate as speech but not displaying it as speech is trying to have your cake and eat it too. If the camera can stalk my car everywhere and record it under auspices of 'speech', it's only logical I can hide it as 'speech.'
nemomarx 1 hours ago [-]
Is the law obligated to be logical like that? As you note it already doesn't have to be consistent over time, there's no particular reason it must be consistent in who it applies to.
You shouldn't pin your ideals on anything as flawed as the Constitution of the US. It was barely a workable system to begin with, and who knows how long it can last now.
mlinhares 3 hours ago [-]
Nah, he's just missing a good PR campaign, there's a 30% of the population that will eat whatever their supreme leaders say they should, I'm sure they can sanewash these cameras as well.
therobots927 2 hours ago [-]
America is pretty polarized around privacy as demonstrated by reactions to the Snowden leaks. So I think that’s a fair point.
hrimfaxi 2 hours ago [-]
That was over a decade ago. I wonder if it has gotten better or worse since.
zulux 2 hours ago [-]
It's gotten worse: I'm so tired of rampant crime that I'm up for a little surveillance. And I used to donate to the ACLU before they went crazy.
estebank 2 hours ago [-]
> And I used to donate to the ACLU before they went crazy.
When was that? Because in 1977 they defended Nazi's free speech to demonstrate in a town that had jewish people as half its population so it tried to block them, and I don't recall them doing anything nearly that controversial since.
Yeah that’s when they actually defended free speech. They now take sides on what speech should be allowed. That’s crazy.
ceejayoz 24 minutes ago [-]
> They now take sides on what speech should be allowed.
Alternative framing: Given limited resources and lots of things to care about, they pick the specific cases that best improve the freedoms they're interested in protecting.
In the case of the Second Amendment, they decided to let the NRA handle it, as that seems to be working just fine.
nxm 1 hours ago [-]
Exactly right. It’s more of an activist organization at this point
triceratops 17 minutes ago [-]
It's always been an activist organization. Even defending Nazis' free speech is activism. You just don't like their current activities.
whimsicalism 1 hours ago [-]
the difference is that they would not do this today
mothballed 2 hours ago [-]
Ha ha ha, you think it'll be used to help you? A hit and run drived totaled my car at an intersection with cameras, the cops would not even show up even though it was all on camera. When I called insurance they didn't bat an eye, the claims person pretty obviously was used to this happening all the time and didn't even question why I wasn't able to get a police report.
xhkkffbf 1 hours ago [-]
Yup. Some "teens" can riding down my street with a pellet gun shooting at the cars. They ended up breaking 3 to 5 windows. It probably cost us collectively $3000++.
The only problem with the license plate readers is that the "teens" drive cars with fake tags. They deliberately copy the plate numbers from some granny with the same model. Makes it fun when the SWAT team knocks on Granny's door.
ses1984 2 hours ago [-]
No one wants their whereabouts subject to constant surveillance, except everyone who carries a “normal” cell phone, in other words not a burner.
hrimfaxi 2 hours ago [-]
Do people who carry normal cell phones do so with the active desire to have their whereabouts subject to constant surveillance?
therobots927 2 hours ago [-]
Yes but you can always leave your phone behind if you want to drop off the map. Flock makes that borderline impossible.
deadbabe 2 hours ago [-]
You can remove your license plate, you will get pretty far before it actually gets you pulled over.
Corrado 1 hours ago [-]
Actually, that won’t work. The flock cameras don’t only rely on license plate information. They use “AI” to determine the make model and color of your car as well as any outstanding features, such as bumper stickers or roof racks.
sophacles 32 minutes ago [-]
Leaving a cellphone behind is legal still. Removing a license plate is breaking the law.
Drawing an equivalence is foolish.
anthonypasq 2 hours ago [-]
i think politicians have seriously underestimated how much people don't like crime, and most people would take constant surveillance if it could actually improve feelings of safety in urban environments.
eitally 1 hours ago [-]
I think it's also true that many people are wildly out of touch when they think about how "safe" their local municipality is.
The Bay Area is objectively safe, for example, yet I constantly run into neighbors in affluent neighborhoods who are afraid of venturing various places, letting their kids play outside or bike to school, or just generally exploring around.
I was at a BayFC match last weekend, for example, and ran into the family of an acquaintance from my elementary daughter's school. They have an 8th grader and are trying to get an intra-district transfer approved for high school so she doesn't have to go to the neighborhood school where a student brought a ghost gun on campus 3 years ago (he was arrested and successfully prosecuted, and no one was hurt)... and instead go to the local school where a handful of kids arranged their bodies in a swastika pattern on the football field (and photographed it!) several months ago. My point isn't that either of these crimes is acceptable, but that people tend to be irrational and ignorant of statistical analysis. Both of these are good schools with better than average student outcomes, but families consistently bring their own prejudices into analysis and it creates mild chaos & havoc across the system overall.
anthonypasq 23 minutes ago [-]
America is only society in the world that attempts to gaslight people into thinking they are safe despite having murder rates and violent crime rates so insane compared to the rest of the industrialized world that we basically live in Mad Max.
Its reminiscent of the school shooting debate. "Theres nothing we can do to fix this says the only place where this ever happens, and by the way its very unlikely your child will be shot so stop worrying about it anyway."
or you know, we could fix the problem like every other society has. This is not an intractable problem.
dmoy 4 minutes ago [-]
San Francisco homicide rate is like what, 2x Berlin and 3x London, so Berlin is half a Mad Max?
energy123 2 hours ago [-]
Enforcing public safety effectively is one of the most pro-democracy things you can do. Otherwise people use democracy to elect public safety authoritarians like the wildly popular Bukele and Duterte.
cucumber3732842 1 hours ago [-]
So we should 1984 the crap out of ourselves because if we don't we'll elect an authoritarian who'll 1984 the crap out of us?
Yeah, I'm all for public safety in theory but seems like these days that's just a dog whistle for "go hard on whatever sort of petty deviance I don't like" and so I'm unwilling to support things like that in the default case. It's all just so tiresome.
krastanov 1 hours ago [-]
I read OP differently. I thought they said "we should invest in non-dystopian public safety[1] to avoid dystopian populist creating a 1984 version of public safety".
[1]: I imagine this includes things like mental heath help, housing, and other related social safety nets.
yabutlivnWoods 51 minutes ago [-]
Often what we criminalize is stupid.
Giving away food to homeless is a crime in many places. Bad capitalism.
Feelings of insecurity are manufactured relative to the danger posed:
America is only society in the world that attempts to gaslight people into thinking they are safe despite having murder rates and violent crime rates so insane compared to the rest of the industrialized world that we basically live in Mad Max.
Its reminiscent of the school shooting debate. "Theres nothing we can do to fix this says the only place where this ever happens, and by the way its very unlikely your child will be shot so stop worrying about it anyway."
or you know, we could fix the problem like every other society has. This is not an intractable problem.
e2le 3 hours ago [-]
For those unfamiliar, you can read more about the flock safety cameras themselves here:
I realize how unpopular flock is, and I will first say that I have literally never personally looked into the privacy concerns. But one city you don’t see named here is SF, which has cited Flock as a primary driver of its 10x reduction in car break-ins, and 30% reduction in burglaries. Those were a quality of life plague while I lived there
QuadmasterXLII 1 hours ago [-]
I could believe that perma-cameraing every inch of public space is more akin to chemo than to vitamin gummies, that SF had the city equivalent of bone cancer, and that this doesn’t mean healthy midwestern towns need Flock in any way.
kevin_thibedeau 48 minutes ago [-]
The byproduct of habitually coddling criminals with zero consequences.
ceejayoz 35 minutes ago [-]
Hey, the Iran thread about 34-time felon Trump is over there.
ceejayoz 3 hours ago [-]
Crime's been descending from the COVID blip for a while, everywhere, Flock or otherwise. My city saw zero murders in Q1; 2021 saw ~15 by now.
The spike in your link's chart clearly starts in early 2020.
And "While our data extends only to 2018" is... important, yeah?
conductr 1 hours ago [-]
I read this as 2020 was Covid related drop, it then returned to normal for 2 years, then began dropping again in late 2023. The covid blip is explained by what was going on at the time, nothing since 2023 has any explanation and could be flock
ceejayoz 1 hours ago [-]
COVID makes it spike up (after a months long downward trend long before the cameras), not down. Nation-wide, incidentally.
> Starting on March 19, 2024, Flock Safety began installing ALPR cameras in various strategic locations across San Francisco. This rollout is expected to take place over the next 90 days. Per 19B ALPR policy, the administration of the Flock ALPR system is the responsibility of the Investigations Bureau.
How did the Flock cameras cause two crime drops before their installation?
The article's note about 2018 is talking about extending backwards, not forwards. It's entirely accurate, and a direct quote from your link.
whimsicalism 2 hours ago [-]
that drop is obviously in early 2020, not 2019 and there is no way you can look at that chart and describe car breaks ins as a "COVID blip"
ceejayoz 2 hours ago [-]
Look at the X axis labels again.
The chart is trending down by January 2020, changes directions (upwards) right around the March 2020 spot, and again around (down) the July 2023 spot.
The fact that they only have data going back to 2018 means it's hard to say if the pre-COVID stuff was the norm or unusual.
To be super-clear, here's the chart annotated to show that 90 day window (black rectangle) in which the cameras were installed. https://imgur.com/a/i00Gna0
"that drop is obviously in early 2020", to reemphasize, is several years before the cameras got installed.
mixmastamyk 12 minutes ago [-]
ALPR does help with some things but stationary burglaries are largely not among them.
BoggleOhYeah 2 hours ago [-]
Any evidence that the reduction is actually due to the cameras?
toephu2 38 minutes ago [-]
Don't people tend to behave if they know the are being watched?
chaps 15 minutes ago [-]
yes, people tend to act differently. not the people they're trying to afect, just random people just minding their business. but it is not an effective deterrent to things like "violent crime".
• Meta-analyses (studies that average the results of multiple studies) in the UK show that video surveillance has no statistically significant impact on crime.
• Preliminary studies on video surveillance systems in the US show little to no positive impact on crime.
> Starting on March 19, 2024, Flock Safety began installing ALPR cameras in various strategic locations across San Francisco. This rollout is expected to take place over the next 90 days.
In other words, the cameras were added where I've annotated the chart with a black rectangle here: https://imgur.com/a/i00Gna0
To my knowledge, Flock doesn't have a time machine offering.
jeffbee 6 minutes ago [-]
Unfortunately, Flock really has been doing some shady stuff and the alliance of 1) people with legitimate concerns about Flock operations, and 2) the much larger population of people who are accustomed to getting away with petty crimes is, together, politically successful.
It would be easy to create a camera network that is locally owned and operated by public agencies, and if any place in America could so that it should be SF.
MisterTea 2 hours ago [-]
> which has cited Flock as a primary driver of its 10x reduction in car break-ins, and 30% reduction in burglaries
Are there reports or studies released which explains how the flock system influenced these reductions?
cucumber3732842 2 hours ago [-]
The crime did not happen because of a lack of technological capability or resources availability at a given price point. It happened because of politics and priorities. The 1984 camera dragnet vendor is no more responsible for the change in politics and priorities and subsequent crime reduction than whatever vendor sold the tires for the cop cars.
I have not done any research if that's out of the frying pan and into the fire or an improvement
gosub100 2 hours ago [-]
I don't know if axon does it, but the future is going to be mobile ALPRs. Uber drivers going around scanning every plate, selling to police, and helping predatory auto lenders repo cars. The latter is already being done, so it's just a matter of time.
maerF0x0 51 minutes ago [-]
Interesting point. Autonomous cars themselves could sell all the data they collect (like license plates, but also street maps, live traffic data, pot hole counts and locations etc)
dfxm12 2 hours ago [-]
Practically, axon cameras aren't nearly as ubiquitous as flock's, thus reducing the leo's dragnet capability. I'm sure the feds will successfully try to get access to this footage as well.
chaps 13 minutes ago [-]
Kind of. Motorola (axon) effectively acts as an integration system for flock and about 20 other services. Motorola's stuff is IMO the bigger problem because it includes access to flock.
AlBugdy 2 hours ago [-]
Non-US citizens - what's the situation with cameras in public spaces where you live? In my town every 2nd hour or building entrance has a private camera pointed at the street. It's very depressing because the cops don't care - I've asked 2 in a patrol car when there was a mild case of vandalism I witnessed. Technically it's illegal, but nothing happens. The public cameras are on intersection and some bus stops. Too much, if you ask me, but the private cameras are everywhere.
boelboel 40 minutes ago [-]
In London cameras are everywhere, mostly private and they have been for years. Don't think I've seen anything like it in any European city I've visited.
buzer 1 hours ago [-]
Private cameras pointing to street can be lawful under GDPR, but in that case they are GDPR controller. That then requires them fulfill bunch of obligations which they probably aren't, e.g. giving proper Article 13 notice.
I don't know if it's criminal in any EU country, but it would be something that you could complain to DPA about. Or initiate civil lawsuit against the controller.
Worth noting is that in some cases the camera vendor might also be (joint) controller as they can determine means & purposes of the processing. If they are simply storing the video then it's unlikely, but if they for example use it for AI training that would likely bring them controller territory.
Dezvous 3 hours ago [-]
It's quite ironic to get an amazon ring video ad while viewing this article.
elphinstone 2 hours ago [-]
An obnoxious, autoplay-at-full-volume ad that took the page an extra 30 seconds to load and somehow bypassed firefox adblockers...
radiorental 29 minutes ago [-]
Firefox 149 + ublock origin did not display ads for me
30 minutes ago [-]
therobots927 3 hours ago [-]
Ring is just as bad. Arguably worse because it comes with a convenience / personal security factor.
jcstryker 2 hours ago [-]
And moving to the next vendor that hopefully does a better job of staying out of the public eye...
gegtik 2 hours ago [-]
Funny they are just trying to get this started in Toronto
baggachipz 2 hours ago [-]
I drove into a very affluent subdivision this weekend, and like most others around here it had a flock camera recording every car on the way in. This camera, however, had the gall to advertise its presence as a neighborhood security measure. "Flock Safety watches this neighborhood" read the sign on the post, or some such. Of course the residents there had no choice but to accept its installation, as the local police support it. Nefarious framing and marketing in the name of "safety".
bob1029 2 hours ago [-]
> no choice but to accept its installation
You might be shocked to discover there are subdivisions so affluent they can afford physical armed security and access control structures with far more invasive identification and logging procedures.
baggachipz 2 hours ago [-]
I am not shocked to know that, but there are Flock cameras all over the town. None of the other ones have this advertisement on them. This neighborhood is not gated. However, Flock decided to do announce its presence only here.
alex43578 32 minutes ago [-]
Why is this such a surprise? It’s just like those “ADT Monitoring” signs in someone’s yard, scaled to the community.
baggachipz 25 minutes ago [-]
Because as far as I've seen until now, Flock cameras were stealthily installed and unannounced by the local government. When somebody contracts a company like ADT, they pay money and put that sign up voluntarily.
SoftTalker 33 minutes ago [-]
Most of the houses probably have little yard signs advertising some security service, and stickers on the doors advertising an alarm company too.
baggachipz 26 minutes ago [-]
Ok? They paid for those.
bradleyankrom 2 hours ago [-]
I saw the same thing in a Home Depot parking lot yesterday. I guess I'm glad there's some sort of notice about it, even if its intent is more, I dunno, branding? It took me a while to figure out what all the solar panel + camera on a post installations were as they popped up around my town. I even pulled over to inspect the hardware for signs of ownership and didn't find anything.
whimsicalism 2 hours ago [-]
we enforce laws presumably in the name of safety, is this really nefarious framing or marketing? seems pretty straightforward to me.
baggachipz 2 hours ago [-]
It is very clearly advertising on their part. They have been paid to put that thing there and added the sign to announce the presence. It's like when you get your roof replaced by a business and they ask if they can put a sign in your yard. They're not doing it to make everybody know that you're getting your roof replaced, they're advertising.
HoldOnAMinute 1 hours ago [-]
Monte Sereno or Saratoga?
gnerd00 32 minutes ago [-]
this kind of headline might have some scholarly name, because, no... actually the number of cameras and feeds in the San Francisco Bay Area is multiplying rapidly, along with the entirety of California with few exceptions.. long ago, San Diego county, a military-led area, was the exception and to many pariah on the constant increase in tracking of vehicles, people and "events".. now, what used to be thought of as harsh and creepy, is not only matched in hardware, but exceeded in backend capacity, across almost every populated area
HoldOnAMinute 1 hours ago [-]
Perhaps this venture would have been more successful as a Public Benefit Corporation.
In the USA in 2026, "capitalism", "politics", and "evil" have all become synonymous.
Maybe I am naive, and the corruption is too deep and pervasive.
mothballed 2 hours ago [-]
Our city voted them out for awhile. So the feds just put them on every bit of federal property near roads, which ended up doing the exact same thing.
loteck 1 hours ago [-]
Where is this?
gosub100 3 hours ago [-]
Someone in my hometown was arrested for vandalizing them. The media chose to say "city owned security camera". It's amazing how they will rush to defend private enterprise.
Zigurd 2 hours ago [-]
Legacy local news is highly dependent on the police for content and access. No surprise.
knowaveragejoe 23 minutes ago [-]
More likely: the local news reporter doesn't know the difference, or didn't think there was a difference.
anthonypasq 2 hours ago [-]
the alternative is to not punish vandalism? what are you even saying?
alex43578 30 minutes ago [-]
Apparently he’s saying property rights bad, Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone-for-all good.
2 hours ago [-]
phendrenad2 3 hours ago [-]
It's funny, if the company had just sold cameras to cities, they probably could have avoided this whole mess. But they just had to hit some keywords for Wall Street (like "AI" "cloud" and "SaaS"), which had the side-effect of making it appear (true or not) that they were part of a Palantir-style surveillance panopticon that tracks you everywhere.
alex43578 2 hours ago [-]
A big part of the value is the network: track a stolen a car or a suspect in the next town over or across the country.
kennywinker 1 hours ago [-]
A car, a suspect, an ex lover, a union organizer, a journalist going to meet a source, an activist headed to a rally. All kinds of things, really!
Larrikin 2 hours ago [-]
Or a woman who got an abortion
cucumber3732842 2 hours ago [-]
And they will either quietly rebrand and build it or someone else will.
Government loves the product. What it doesn't like about Flock is that the peasants are aware about it and complaining.
3 hours ago [-]
lenerdenator 3 hours ago [-]
It really is amazing how they managed to fit so much copper into those devices.
therobots927 3 hours ago [-]
Would be a shame if it became common knowledge.
josefritzishere 3 hours ago [-]
Funny that. Not everyone wants to live in an open air prison.
waNpyt-menrew 2 hours ago [-]
Would crime go up, down or stay the same if all surveillance cameras were removed? The answer to that is the only one that matters.
Ironically many people who whine about surveillance cameras have their video door bells or similar setups.
So which is it?
throwway120385 2 hours ago [-]
There are ways of doing this that don't require you to abdicate all of your privacy to a third-party SaaS company who makes it easy to share information with the police everywhere.
My camera system is not connected to the cloud and it has a retention policy of 4 weeks. I took pains not to aim them anywhere where I'd be collecting data outside of my own property. There's full-disk encryption in use. The police could maintain their own surveillance network and place their own cameras in a legally compliant way and it would be fine.
Flock and Ring are awful because they enable easy surveillance and search after the fact, not a priori because they are surveillance systems. If they required proof of warrant before letting the police execute a search I think a lot of people would be more comfortable with them. A police officer stalking an ex is like the basic example you get if you ask an ALPR vendor why we need audit logging and proactive auditing of all searches. But that's not the only way these tools enable invasion of privacy.
If you want proof that that's the problem with them, you should know that people have been building wired camera systems and ALPR systems for decades before Flock and Ring came into existence. So it's solely the cloud Search-as-a-Service business model that's the problem there.
asadotzler 7 minutes ago [-]
By any means necessary, as long as crime goes down? So we can execute anyone that breaks any kind of law and as long as crime goes down, that's all that should matter? Rights have no value to you, only protecting people from crime? There's no balance to be had, the only relevant question is if crime goes up or down?
Wow.
HelloMcFly 2 hours ago [-]
> The answer to that is the only one that matters.
This statement rests on the belief that absolute crime rate is the only thing that matters, and is a cousin to the "I have nothing to hide!" response from people who care little for intrusions to their privacy. Are you in favor of giving law enforcement authorities a way to unlock all private electronic devices?
I'm willing to tolerate the presence of some crime in the name of personal liberty. I do not think my whereabouts should be known on demand by government actors just because I drive a car.
stuffn 1 hours ago [-]
You’re going to be so shocked to find out the tracking device the government tricked you to put in your pocket is even worse. Police can run geofenced dragnets whenever they want, and all you got was the ability to shitpost on the Internet.
You’ll be even more shocked when biometric login isn’t protected by the 5th amendment. Possibly, even more shocked when you find out about XKEYSCORE.
ALPR is bad, of course, but in terms of actual invasion of privacy there are far bigger kraken sized fish to fry that we have accepted as just… completely normal and even necessary to function in our society. It’s only natural that they continue to push the boundaries. Almost like giving up rights for security has consequences we were warned about 250 years ago.
HelloMcFly 1 hours ago [-]
I won't be shocked (I don't have biometric logins enabled, thankyouverymuch), but does that mean I just celebrate it, or give up in all circumstances? I'm not yet a kicked dog, in either behavior or attitude.
macintux 1 hours ago [-]
Unless something has changed (or I'm simply clueless), it's not quite so trivial to ask where my phone was on January 30th. Camera surveillance is not time-limited.
RankingMember 2 hours ago [-]
> The answer to that is the only one that matters.
Is it, though? Crime would be super low if we were all confined to prison cells by default, too.
waNpyt-menrew 2 hours ago [-]
For a tech forum the rebuttals are terrible. I expected better. Cameras do not confine one to a prison cell.
RankingMember 2 hours ago [-]
You made a broad-brush statement that essentially justified anything in the name of safety. You might want to re-word your statement if you meant otherwise.
peab 2 hours ago [-]
It's a stretch for sure.
I think the point is that it's a tradeoff of civil liberties in exchange for safety.
I think it's an interesting discussion and it's not clear to me what the right answer is.
Given the first amendment in the USA, i think once it's cheap enough everyone will be filming everyone all the time. Just look at how many people have ring doorbells.
kennywinker 1 hours ago [-]
The first amendment?? Is surveillance speech now? Lets add it to the list: money is speech, surveillance is speech, protesting is NOT speech. Anything I’m missing?
ceejayoz 2 hours ago [-]
> For a tech forum the rebuttals are terrible.
Physician, heal thyself!
someguydave 1 hours ago [-]
HN has become much dumber as X became less censured.
hrimfaxi 2 hours ago [-]
No it's not. Would crime go up, down, or stay the same if we had to get strip searched before entering airplanes?
waNpyt-menrew 2 hours ago [-]
The types of crime that would happen in an airplane would already be identifiable due to its constrained cabin, so I don’t understand the comparison.
Let’s use your example for say a concert. Is checking bags worth it? Would crime go up if there was no bag check? Why or why not?
ceejayoz 2 hours ago [-]
> Is checking bags worth it?
Probably not. It's mostly there to preserve the profits from alcohol sales.
> Would crime go up if there was no bag check?
Did it go down when they added them?
ceejayoz 2 hours ago [-]
I mean, that depends on whether you consider the warrantless, disproportionate search a crime.
It should be!
esbranson 1 hours ago [-]
> Would crime go up, down or stay the same if all surveillance cameras were removed?
I would think the same, crime rates would be unaffected in the short and medium term, since I don't think it prevents much crime given the short or non-custodial sentences given many criminals. Clearance rates and justice (conviction rates) would likely go down though IMO.
macintux 2 hours ago [-]
Crime would go down if everyone was executed. Your question is not the only one that matters.
waNpyt-menrew 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
toephu2 38 minutes ago [-]
probably up
Rendered at 16:16:32 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMIwNiwQewQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1-uiUlHTo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ
I recommend them.
Also, I can't help but feel like I'm watching a young Dr. Emmett Brown.. Great Scott!!
There’s more of us techno anarchists out there apparently!
Benn Jordan's YouTube channel is a registered Nonprofit https://www.patreon.com/posts/nonprofit-has-82858569
It is very clearly because YouTube has a higher reach than any other platform in that space.
> Flock has recently expanded into other technologies... Most concerning are the latest Flock drones equipped with high-powered cameras. Flock's "Drone as First Responder" platform automates drone operations, including launching them in response to 911 calls or gunfire. Flock's drones, which reach speeds up to 60 mph, can follow vehicles or people and provide information to law enforcement.
With their drones they now have cameras roaming freely everywhere.
I’m not a fan of Flock but I would welcome anything that knocks out some of the ghetto birds’ budget.
His only advantage is that the cops are on his side and won’t let go of these cameras without a fight.
But sadly lots of people want everyone else subject to it, and some are willing to submit to it themselves to get it. It's not a foregone conclusion.
I agreed that there could be benefits but that the downside is that they know when and where you go to church, or the grocery, or where you get your hair done, or even when you go on vacation. Her eyes lit up and I she replied that she would have to think about that a bit.
I'm not saying that I changed her mind, but that bringing the consequences down to something she could understand was much better than yelling from the rooftops. Mentioning church is especially impactful with a lot of older folks.
Good job talking to your community. The first step is that people are aware of the cameras - for my neighbors, most did not know about them, and immediately found it creepy.
These systems were largely disliked bipartisanly because of those factors.
Which isn't necessarily where the most incidents are.
I don't see how removing the cameras is compatible with the first amendment, but if you have the right of "speech" to record me in public chasing every place I go in a manner that is the envy of any stalker, I ought to have the right of "speech" not to "say anything" (compelled speech of showing my plate).
https://www.oyez.org/cases/2017/16-402
> The government's warrantless acquisition of Carpenter's cell-site records violated his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures. Chief Justice John Roberts authored the opinion for the 5-4 majority. The majority first acknowledged that the Fourth Amendment protects not only property interests, but also reasonable expectations of privacy. Expectations of privacy in this age of digital data do not fit neatly into existing precedents, but tracking person's movements and location through extensive cell-site records is far more intrusive than the precedents might have anticipated.
Or in United States v. Jones (cited in https://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinions/201495A.P.pdf):
> Although the case was ultimately decided on trespass principles, five Justices agreed that “longer term GPS monitoring . . . impinges on expectations of privacy.” See id. at 430 (Alito, J., concurring); id. at 415 (Sotomayor, J., concurring). Based on “[t]raditional surveillance” capacity “[i]n the precomputer age,” the Justices reasoned that “society’s expectation” was that police would not “secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period.”
It seems clear these cameras can hit some kind of threshold where they're common enough and interlinked enough to amount to unconstitutional surveilance. We don't know exactly where that threshold is yet.
Precedent is often crap and wrong until someone can find a good case paired with good lawyers to rectify.
Trying to interpret viewing and recording the plate as speech but not displaying it as speech is trying to have your cake and eat it too. If the camera can stalk my car everywhere and record it under auspices of 'speech', it's only logical I can hide it as 'speech.'
You shouldn't pin your ideals on anything as flawed as the Constitution of the US. It was barely a workable system to begin with, and who knows how long it can last now.
When was that? Because in 1977 they defended Nazi's free speech to demonstrate in a town that had jewish people as half its population so it tried to block them, and I don't recall them doing anything nearly that controversial since.
https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/the-skokie-case-how-i-...
Alternative framing: Given limited resources and lots of things to care about, they pick the specific cases that best improve the freedoms they're interested in protecting.
In the case of the Second Amendment, they decided to let the NRA handle it, as that seems to be working just fine.
The only problem with the license plate readers is that the "teens" drive cars with fake tags. They deliberately copy the plate numbers from some granny with the same model. Makes it fun when the SWAT team knocks on Granny's door.
Drawing an equivalence is foolish.
The Bay Area is objectively safe, for example, yet I constantly run into neighbors in affluent neighborhoods who are afraid of venturing various places, letting their kids play outside or bike to school, or just generally exploring around.
I was at a BayFC match last weekend, for example, and ran into the family of an acquaintance from my elementary daughter's school. They have an 8th grader and are trying to get an intra-district transfer approved for high school so she doesn't have to go to the neighborhood school where a student brought a ghost gun on campus 3 years ago (he was arrested and successfully prosecuted, and no one was hurt)... and instead go to the local school where a handful of kids arranged their bodies in a swastika pattern on the football field (and photographed it!) several months ago. My point isn't that either of these crimes is acceptable, but that people tend to be irrational and ignorant of statistical analysis. Both of these are good schools with better than average student outcomes, but families consistently bring their own prejudices into analysis and it creates mild chaos & havoc across the system overall.
Its reminiscent of the school shooting debate. "Theres nothing we can do to fix this says the only place where this ever happens, and by the way its very unlikely your child will be shot so stop worrying about it anyway."
or you know, we could fix the problem like every other society has. This is not an intractable problem.
Reminds me of this classic: https://static.poder360.com.br/2020/11/2020-11-07-22.31.49.j...
Yeah, I'm all for public safety in theory but seems like these days that's just a dog whistle for "go hard on whatever sort of petty deviance I don't like" and so I'm unwilling to support things like that in the default case. It's all just so tiresome.
[1]: I imagine this includes things like mental heath help, housing, and other related social safety nets.
Giving away food to homeless is a crime in many places. Bad capitalism.
Feelings of insecurity are manufactured relative to the danger posed:
https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die...
Its reminiscent of the school shooting debate. "Theres nothing we can do to fix this says the only place where this ever happens, and by the way its very unlikely your child will be shot so stop worrying about it anyway."
or you know, we could fix the problem like every other society has. This is not an intractable problem.
https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Flock_license_plate_readers
And more about the company behind the cameras:
https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Flock_Safety
In other words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSVqLHghLpw
And "While our data extends only to 2018" is... important, yeah?
The cameras were added where the black rectangle is here: https://imgur.com/a/i00Gna0
https://imgur.com/a/FK3sfna
There's an enormous drop in edit: late 2019, and the second drop starts in 2023.
https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/your-sfpd/policies/depart...
> Starting on March 19, 2024, Flock Safety began installing ALPR cameras in various strategic locations across San Francisco. This rollout is expected to take place over the next 90 days. Per 19B ALPR policy, the administration of the Flock ALPR system is the responsibility of the Investigations Bureau.
How did the Flock cameras cause two crime drops before their installation?
The article's note about 2018 is talking about extending backwards, not forwards. It's entirely accurate, and a direct quote from your link.
The chart is trending down by January 2020, changes directions (upwards) right around the March 2020 spot, and again around (down) the July 2023 spot.
The fact that they only have data going back to 2018 means it's hard to say if the pre-COVID stuff was the norm or unusual.
To be super-clear, here's the chart annotated to show that 90 day window (black rectangle) in which the cameras were installed. https://imgur.com/a/i00Gna0
"that drop is obviously in early 2020", to reemphasize, is several years before the cameras got installed.
• Meta-analyses (studies that average the results of multiple studies) in the UK show that video surveillance has no statistically significant impact on crime.
• Preliminary studies on video surveillance systems in the US show little to no positive impact on crime.
https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/images/asset_upload...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/sf-car-breakins/ has a chart of the car breakins.
It shows the drop starting in September of 2023.
https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/your-sfpd/policies/depart...
> Starting on March 19, 2024, Flock Safety began installing ALPR cameras in various strategic locations across San Francisco. This rollout is expected to take place over the next 90 days.
In other words, the cameras were added where I've annotated the chart with a black rectangle here: https://imgur.com/a/i00Gna0
To my knowledge, Flock doesn't have a time machine offering.
It would be easy to create a camera network that is locally owned and operated by public agencies, and if any place in America could so that it should be SF.
Are there reports or studies released which explains how the flock system influenced these reductions?
I have not done any research if that's out of the frying pan and into the fire or an improvement
I don't know if it's criminal in any EU country, but it would be something that you could complain to DPA about. Or initiate civil lawsuit against the controller.
Worth noting is that in some cases the camera vendor might also be (joint) controller as they can determine means & purposes of the processing. If they are simply storing the video then it's unlikely, but if they for example use it for AI training that would likely bring them controller territory.
You might be shocked to discover there are subdivisions so affluent they can afford physical armed security and access control structures with far more invasive identification and logging procedures.
In the USA in 2026, "capitalism", "politics", and "evil" have all become synonymous.
Maybe I am naive, and the corruption is too deep and pervasive.
Government loves the product. What it doesn't like about Flock is that the peasants are aware about it and complaining.
Ironically many people who whine about surveillance cameras have their video door bells or similar setups.
So which is it?
My camera system is not connected to the cloud and it has a retention policy of 4 weeks. I took pains not to aim them anywhere where I'd be collecting data outside of my own property. There's full-disk encryption in use. The police could maintain their own surveillance network and place their own cameras in a legally compliant way and it would be fine.
Flock and Ring are awful because they enable easy surveillance and search after the fact, not a priori because they are surveillance systems. If they required proof of warrant before letting the police execute a search I think a lot of people would be more comfortable with them. A police officer stalking an ex is like the basic example you get if you ask an ALPR vendor why we need audit logging and proactive auditing of all searches. But that's not the only way these tools enable invasion of privacy.
If you want proof that that's the problem with them, you should know that people have been building wired camera systems and ALPR systems for decades before Flock and Ring came into existence. So it's solely the cloud Search-as-a-Service business model that's the problem there.
Wow.
This statement rests on the belief that absolute crime rate is the only thing that matters, and is a cousin to the "I have nothing to hide!" response from people who care little for intrusions to their privacy. Are you in favor of giving law enforcement authorities a way to unlock all private electronic devices?
I'm willing to tolerate the presence of some crime in the name of personal liberty. I do not think my whereabouts should be known on demand by government actors just because I drive a car.
You’ll be even more shocked when biometric login isn’t protected by the 5th amendment. Possibly, even more shocked when you find out about XKEYSCORE.
ALPR is bad, of course, but in terms of actual invasion of privacy there are far bigger kraken sized fish to fry that we have accepted as just… completely normal and even necessary to function in our society. It’s only natural that they continue to push the boundaries. Almost like giving up rights for security has consequences we were warned about 250 years ago.
Is it, though? Crime would be super low if we were all confined to prison cells by default, too.
I think the point is that it's a tradeoff of civil liberties in exchange for safety.
I think it's an interesting discussion and it's not clear to me what the right answer is.
Given the first amendment in the USA, i think once it's cheap enough everyone will be filming everyone all the time. Just look at how many people have ring doorbells.
Physician, heal thyself!
Let’s use your example for say a concert. Is checking bags worth it? Would crime go up if there was no bag check? Why or why not?
Probably not. It's mostly there to preserve the profits from alcohol sales.
> Would crime go up if there was no bag check?
Did it go down when they added them?
It should be!
I would think the same, crime rates would be unaffected in the short and medium term, since I don't think it prevents much crime given the short or non-custodial sentences given many criminals. Clearance rates and justice (conviction rates) would likely go down though IMO.