Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public • Hacker News Board

Re: Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public

#161

Post by JKCalhoun » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 4:52 PM UTC

daymanstep wrote: post #67

pclowes wrote: post #45

People always want high trust societies. They are incredibly hard to create and incredibly easy to destroy. However, once the cameras go up, you will never ever create one there. High trust requires, well, actual trust. You can’t build real trust in a panopticon just a sickly police state facsimile of it. Society and progress moves at the speed of trust. Without it many uniquely human and beautiful things disappear.

My counter argument is that you only need 1% of the population to be bad apples in order to destroy a high trust society. Hell, even a single serial killer on the loose will make a lot of people too afraid to walk alone at night. One or two burglars can be responsible for 50% of the burglaries in a town. And so in and so forth. The other problem you have is that a lot of crime tends to be financially rewarding, so if…

"My counter argument is that you only need 1% of the population to be bad apples…"

"For all those reasons, you need surveillance to catch criminals and restore trust…"

We're making a huge assumption here that surveillance takes it down to less than 1%. You'd hate to be trading freedom for nothing at all.

Re: Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public

#162

Post by JKCalhoun » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 4:56 PM UTC

urams wrote: post #59

pclowes wrote: post #45

People always want high trust societies. They are incredibly hard to create and incredibly easy to destroy. However, once the cameras go up, you will never ever create one there. High trust requires, well, actual trust. You can’t build real trust in a panopticon just a sickly police state facsimile of it. Society and progress moves at the speed of trust. Without it many uniquely human and beautiful things disappear.

> However, once the cameras go up, you will never ever create one there. This is directly refuted by Singapore, Japan, arguably the UK, and others. Singapore is very interesting to visit. Externally there's somewhat of a narrative of a harsh police state but when I visited I almost never saw a single police officer and they don't have particularly many police officers on a per capita basis (170/100k vs 440/100k in NY…

"You know how they deal with crime down there?" Crosby asked me.

"Nope."

"They just don't have any crime down there. 'Papa' Monzano's made crime so damn unattractive, nobody even thinks about it without getting sick. I heard you can lay a billfold in the middle of a sidewalk and you can come back a week later and it'll be right there, with everything still in it."

"Um."

"You know what the punishment is for stealing something?"

"Nope."

"The hook," he said. "No fines, no probation, no thirty days in jail. It's the hook. The hook for stealing, for murder, for arson, for treason, for rape, for being a peeping Tom. Break a law—any damn law at all—and it's the hook. Everybody can understand that, and San Lorenzo is the best-behaved country in the world."

"What is the hook?"

"They put up a gallows, see? Two posts and a cross beam. And then they take a great big kind of iron fishhook and they hang it down from the cross beam. Then they take somebody who's dumb enough to break the law, and they put the point of the hook in through one side of his belly and out the other and they let him go—and there he hangs, by God, one damn sorry law-breaker."

Cat's Cradle

Re: Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public

#163

Post by cosmicgadget » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 5:22 PM UTC

joering2 wrote: post #34

when I was a kid, my mom used to say "think about something nice and pleasant if you cannot fall asleep". So sometimes I think about scenario in which some disgruntled IT manager in one of AWS data centers, knowing which CDN server belongs to Flock, unplugs one of their RAID drives and plug it to their own laptop and copies the whole database of all plates, coordinates, etc, and Flock didn't even find out because mos…

Between Epstein, Panama Papers, and Madison Cawthorne Story Time, I don't think any of these things will end careers as long as voters can be convinced their team is the winning one. This is the post-fact era.

Re: Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public

#164

Post by vkou » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 5:26 PM UTC

adrian_b wrote: post #145

vkou wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's somewhat meaningful. No society can go on for very long when a supermajority of it actively hates the government.

Even in the recent past, all the countries dominated by the Soviet Union have gone for a half of century without problems, while a supermajority of their citizens actively hated their government, and by "hate" I mean like really wishing all of them dead. This was made possible with traditional surveillance. With the modern surveillance means and with drones and robots, there will no longer exist any way in which even…

Those countries were occupied by a foreign empire. You may recall what happened when they attempted regime change - the Soviets would roll in.

As soon as Gorbachev made it clear that he's not going to do that, all of the Warsaw pact states immediately overthrew their governments.

Thank you for providing an example that further supports my thesis. No government can survive very long when a supermajority of the country hates it.

Re: Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public

#165

Post by preg_match » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 6:42 PM UTC

fodkodrasz wrote: post #74

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is I think if you give people the choice between a 0.001% chance of getting murdered on the street or a 100% chance of being surveilled 24/7 you will find that people will take their chances with the murderers

Reality shows otherwise. Take a look at Google and free-for-ads-and-surveillance everything. People are willing to make compromises on privacy for less important things than the change of them or their loved ones getting murdered, as mentioned as an example. But back to Flock: public cameras are not 24/7 surveillance, as those don't surveil people at home. ps: I'm not for a panopticon, enforcement needs to come with…

The main problem with these arguments, which are common and we also see in a lot of free-market discussions, is that they assume that every person has perfect knowledge all the time. Including knowledge of changes that might have just occurred.

That's... an extremely difficult claim to make, and one that people largely make for free, unchallenged. I'll challenge it: most people have absolutely no idea what's going on.

When you sign a terms of service, do you read it in full? When you get what feels like a weekly email saying the TOS has changed, do you read it in full? And, to be clear, you auto-consent when the terms of service changes, they don't pretend you have to read it.

This is by design. It's not a coincidence the TOS is extremely long, extremely vague, and constantly changing. And, it doesn't matter anyway. There are no competitors. Because guess what - they have the same TOS. And the TOS doesn't mean anything, anyway. Because the majority of the rights they explain they can exercise in the TOS, they never do. So you can't even use that as a baseline for "what is this company doing".

So not only are people not knowledgeable in practice, but they also face many barriers, by design, to being knowledgeable. And, one further, they actually CAN'T be knowledge even if they dedicate their entire lives to it, because the knowledge does not exist and is not available.

People do not "want" the surveillance state. Rather, they submit to it, under lies, omissions, and asymmetric power. This includes me and you.

Re: Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public

#166

Post by preg_match » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 6:45 PM UTC

thaumaturgy wrote: post #92

urams wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, once the cameras go up, you will never ever create one there. This is directly refuted by Singapore, Japan, arguably the UK, and others. Singapore is very interesting to visit. Externally there's somewhat of a narrative of a harsh police state but when I visited I almost never saw a single police officer and they don't have particularly many police officers on a per capita basis (170/100k vs 440/100k in NY…

There's a glaring lie of omission when Singapore is cited as a "safe society" in a surveillance context without also mentioning that those same surveillance systems are used to aggressively suppress political dissent ( https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/asia-and-the-pacific/sou... ). Super safe society, unless you happen to express disagreement with any part of it. Then, not so safe for you. So I guess the question…

Right, and the elephant in the room here: if you aggressively suppress dissent, then of course people will say they're happy and everything is good.

I'm sure North Koreans will tell you to your face that it's fantastic, they love it, it's the best government on Earth. So once the surveillance is powerful enough, truth ceases to exist.

Re: Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public

#167

Post by preg_match » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 6:48 PM UTC

zombot wrote: post #123

wmf wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, Flock might create enough backlash to trigger regulations against surveillance. They're certainly an example of what not to do.

While police just use fleets of drones. Hardly any backlash there.

Police in America is so beyond cooked that the entire system needs to be rethought. It's just not working from any angle. It's expensive as all living fuck, with the majority of city budgets going to the police. It doesn't prevent crime. Traffic violations are still rampant, including speeding and reckless driving. And, worst of all, nobody likes it. People complain constantly and police basically just whine about how hard their job is.

Who is this for, really? Is this just a complex money-siphoning scheme to extract funds out of local governments?

Re: Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public

#168

Post by preg_match » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 6:52 PM UTC

nikkwong wrote: post #50

Even with all this said, surveillance like this is certainly going to be one of the best ways to catch criminals and reduce crime over the long term. I hope the misgivings that we have around Flock won't close the door to us ever using this type of technology, in some way, in the future.

This assumes the police even want to solve crimes. I'm not convinced they do. Everything I've seen points to them wanting to do the absolute bare minimum to not be disbanded, and that's it. Their primary goal is to get paid and go home. Well, solving crimes interferes with the "go home" part, so they don't. Normally, in a free market, you would fail if you can't do your primary purpose. Police have zero accountability to anyone, including the voter. They're systemically allowed to fail, and encouraged financially to fail.

No surprise then when they fail.

Re: Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public

#169

Post by janalsncm » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 7:26 PM UTC

jjav wrote: post #116

janalsncm wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two separate types of events with associated probabilities: 1) the probability of being harmed by criminals, and 2) the probability of being harmed by the government. For most people in most places, police are ineffective and therefore the first is orders of magnitude more of a problem. For example in the Bay Area, car break-ins are incredibly common and police are incapable of solving it. This would be unt…

> There are two separate types of events with associated probabilities: 1) the probability of being harmed by criminals, and 2) the probability of being harmed by the government. #1 is annoying but has many solutions. You can call the cops, you can defend yourself, you can sue in the courts. #2 is the most terrifying one since there is absolutely nothing you can do. Thus any society needs to do the utmost to prevent…

I’m glad you only find crime “annoying”. Others find it oppressive. For example the murder rate in New York City (a similarly dense urban area) is around 35-50x the rate of Singapore. This means your chance of being murdered within the first two weeks of living in NYC is equivalent to a whole year in Singapore.

You don’t have to walk around wondering if you will get mugged or shot. You don’t worry that your car or apartment will be broken into. Crime solve rates are very high because police have fewer crimes to deal with.

Re: Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public

#170

Post by scoofy » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 8:23 PM UTC

JKCalhoun wrote: post #161

daymanstep wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My counter argument is that you only need 1% of the population to be bad apples in order to destroy a high trust society. Hell, even a single serial killer on the loose will make a lot of people too afraid to walk alone at night. One or two burglars can be responsible for 50% of the burglaries in a town. And so in and so forth. The other problem you have is that a lot of crime tends to be financially rewarding, so if…

"My counter argument is that you only need 1% of the population to be bad apples…" "For all those reasons, you need surveillance to catch criminals and restore trust…" We're making a huge assumption here that surveillance takes it down to less than 1%. You'd hate to be trading freedom for nothing at all.

High-trust societies are based in transparency. Ironically you get high-trust by actually not trusting people. We can have surveillance and transparency at the same time... the point is that people actually need to be accountable.

It's the lack of accountability, especially on the meta-level where the people that need to be held accountable know that there is no accountability, that can make surveillance dangerous.

We need both police, and we need the police to have police, and at every level, there ought to be an antagonistic relationship.

Just deciding, fuck it, no transparency and no surveillance is just going to lead to organized crime and cronyism... and surprise, surprise, that's exactly what we're getting in America.