US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology • Hacker News Board

Re: US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology

#101

Post by macintux » Wed, Apr 08, 2026, 2:54 PM UTC

stuffn wrote: post #98

HelloMcFly wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

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 i…

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.

Re: US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology

#102

Post by nemomarx » Wed, Apr 08, 2026, 2:54 PM UTC

mothballed wrote: post #82

nemomarx wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really doesn't seem like the courts agree that you have a right to travel via car without a visible plate.

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 auspice…

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.

Re: US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology

#103

Post by QuadmasterXLII » Wed, Apr 08, 2026, 2:56 PM UTC

jdross wrote: post #9

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

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.

Re: US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology

#104

Post by whimsicalism » Wed, Apr 08, 2026, 3:00 PM UTC

estebank wrote: post #63

zulux wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/the-skokie-case-how-i-...

the difference is that they would not do this today

Re: US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology

#105

Post by ceejayoz » Wed, Apr 08, 2026, 3:01 PM UTC

nemomarx wrote: post #79

mothballed wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "s…

It really doesn't seem like the courts agree that you have a right to travel via car without a visible plate.

Courts are currently wrestling with this.

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.

Re: US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology

#106

Post by loteck » Wed, Apr 08, 2026, 3:02 PM UTC

mothballed wrote: post #58

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.

Where is this?

Re: US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology

#107

Post by devin » Wed, Apr 08, 2026, 3:02 PM UTC

gorgonical wrote: post #21

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: 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.

Benn is the best. His most recent video is about Ring cameras.

Re: US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology

#108

Post by kennywinker » Wed, Apr 08, 2026, 3:04 PM UTC

alex43578 wrote: post #46

phendrenad2 wrote: post #13

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.

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.

[flagged]

Re: US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology

#109

Post by diogenes_atx » Wed, Apr 08, 2026, 3:04 PM UTC

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.

Re: US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology

#110

Post by esbranson » Wed, Apr 08, 2026, 3:04 PM UTC

waNpyt-menrew wrote: post #20

[flagged]

> 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.