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Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

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Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

#291

Post by rimbo789 »

chzblck wrote: post #221
fusslo wrote: post #131

I wonder what our founders would think about tools like Flock. From what I understand these systems are legal because there is no expectation of privacy in public. Therefore any time you go in public you cannot expect NOT to be tracked, photographed, and entered into a database (which may now outlive us). I think the argument comes from the 1st amendment. Weaponizing the Bill of Rights (BoR) for the government agains…

they prob be upset about the 13th 15th and 19th amendments too

Yea they would have had no issue with flock if it was for capturing escaped enslaved people

Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

#292

Post by embedding-shape »

overfeed wrote: post #189
embedding-shape wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really interesting the different cultures "YCombinator the startup incubator" and "Ycombinator/HN the internet forum has". A comment being so oblivious about surveillance would probably be flagged here, at least heavily downvoted, while this guy is actively the president and CEO of Ycombinator today? pg, what happened? Ycombinator used to be a beacon of sense in a sea of uselessness, but now uselessness is runni…

> pg, what happened? Don't look to pg for anything that can be seen as "woke" - he wants that mind-virus eliminated forever[0]. Many billionaires revealed their true colors after November 2024, remember this when they adjust their public posture to follow the political winds. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42780223

Did you link the right comment? He seems to argue against "aggressively performative moralism", something a lot more specific than the common "woke-ism" conservatives in the US is yelling about which is basically about anything with "social" in it's name (for them, in their eyes).

Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

#293

Post by unclad5968 »

amrocha wrote: post #287
fusslo wrote: post #131

I wonder what our founders would think about tools like Flock. From what I understand these systems are legal because there is no expectation of privacy in public. Therefore any time you go in public you cannot expect NOT to be tracked, photographed, and entered into a database (which may now outlive us). I think the argument comes from the 1st amendment. Weaponizing the Bill of Rights (BoR) for the government agains…

I think you should try to decide for yourself what to make of the situation instead of wondering what some ancient dead old dudes would think.

It is possible to have your own thoughts and also wonder what other people think.

Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

#294

Post by culi »

dang wrote: post #272
culi wrote: post #120

This was posted to HN a week ago but didn't get enough attention due to the weird title. It's a map of all city council meetings in the US whose agenda mentions Flock https://alpr.watch/

alpr.watch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46290916 - Dec 2025 (444 comments) That post was literally the #1 story on HN for the entire day: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2025-12-16 . It was on the frontpage for 25 hours. That's about as much attention as any thread gets - well above the 99th percentile.

you're right I misremembered. I still feel the enigmatic title of the post made it hard to realize its importance.

Maybe I'm just biased because it took me way too long to find it even with the algolia front-end

Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

#295

Post by culi »

LexiMax wrote: post #280
dang wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's the other way around. This post is ranked higher on the frontpage than it would be if it weren't YC-related. (In fact, it probably wouldn't be on the frontpage at all in that case.) A core principle is that we moderate less, not more, when YC or a YC-funded startup is part of the story. Many past explanations: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

I believe you when you say that nobody at YC put their thumb on the scale for this story in particular. However, YC very much has control over the algorithm used to rank stories on the Hacker News front page, and this algorithm very commonly downranks threads which are detected as being "controversial." If the algorithm "working as intended" consistently downranks stories that cast a bad light on YCombinator, the sor…

dang won't like me sharing this repo (sorry!) but hn-undocumented has a relevant section on this:

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented?tab=re...

> Currently, there is no evidence that non-job submissions about a YC startup receive preferential treatment on the front page, or kill submissions critical of a YC startup. In fact, the moderators have stated that they explicitly avoid killing controversial YC posts when possible.

And also:

> Additionally, founders of YC companies see each other's usernames show up in orange, which — although not an explicit benefit — does allow fellow YC founders to immediately identify one another in discussions.

Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

#296

Post by toomuchtodo »

candiddevmike wrote: post #286
dvtkrlbs wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and the biggest problem with this kind of ALPRs are they bypass the due process. Most of the time police can just pull up data without any warrant and there has been instances where this was abused (I think some cops used this for stalking their exes [1]) and also the most worrying Flock seems to really okay with giving ICE unlimited access to this data [2] [3] (which I speculate for loose regulations). [1]: http…

Maybe with these systems we should require them TO be open for anyone to query against. Maybe then people would care more about how they impact their privacy.

Flock’s objective is to hope people don’t care long enough to reach IPO. Will enough people care to dis enable this corporate dragnet surveillance apparatus? Remains to be seen. I don’t much care about the grift of dumping this pig onto the public markets (caveat emptor), but we should care about its continued use as a weapon against domestic citizens without effective governance and due process.

Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

#297

Post by monkaiju »

tracker1 wrote: post #16
edot wrote: post #6

Flock or their defenders will lock in on the excuse that “oh these are misconfigured” or “yeah hacking is illegal, only cops should have this data”. The issue is neither of the above. The issue is the collection and collation of this footage in the first place! I don’t want hackers watching me all the time, sure, but I DEFINITELY don’t trust the state or megacorps to watch me all the time. Hackers concern me less, ac…

I think more importantly people need to recognize that cops are people, flawed and fallible as is the flock system in general. It should never be the whole solution and be used as evidence alone.

This totally misses the OCs point, which is that this data shouldn't be gathered at all, regardless of the competency (or lack there of) of the cops

Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

#299

Post by tejtm »

SamInTheShell wrote: post #12
edot wrote: post #6

Flock or their defenders will lock in on the excuse that “oh these are misconfigured” or “yeah hacking is illegal, only cops should have this data”. The issue is neither of the above. The issue is the collection and collation of this footage in the first place! I don’t want hackers watching me all the time, sure, but I DEFINITELY don’t trust the state or megacorps to watch me all the time. Hackers concern me less, ac…

Nothing will be done until one of the investors of the tech end up embarrassed from weaponization of the tech against themselves. These people have no clue how creepy some of their technologic betters can be. I once witnessed a coworker surveilling his own network to ensure his girlfriend wasn't cheating on him (this was a time before massive SSL adoption). The guy just got a role doing networking at my company and t…

flock is a YC startup

We have met the enemy and he is us -Pogo

Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

#300

Post by SamInTheShell »

kirykl wrote: post #54

If the cameras are recoding public areas, isn’t it better the recorded footage stays public

This is pretty naive. What happens when you develop and extend such a system in a way that it can track who you interact with? What about social credit scores? You might go out to a social event with a very distinguished social credit score of 820 and get knocked down to 69 just because you were in proximity to Bob and Alice, who happen to be on some blacklists for their work in cryptography.

What you're staring at is the gateway tech that brings in a dystopian society. At first stuff like this is fairly benign, but slowly over time it ramps up into truly awful outcomes.

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