Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast • Hacker News Board

Re: Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast

#351

Post by sarchertech » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 11:02 AM UTC

derektank wrote: post #285

sarchertech wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a quick check here and it has a lower crime and a higher safety score than London and Paris. https://www.numbeo.com/crime/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Uni...

The only two statistics I trust for comparing crime prevalence across municipalities (let alone countries) are homicide and grand theft auto rates. Most other crimes suffer from differences in classification/definition, reporting procedures, or willingness of residents to report them to the police. Homicides and grand theft auto by comparison are very consistently reported and stand in well for violent crime and prop…

Car theft isn’t great for comparison because of vastly different car ownership rates, different kinds of cars, values etc…

For example, from 2019 to 2022 car thefts skyrocketed while other property crimes declined. Mostly because people figured out that Kia’s during that time were really easy to steal.

> Most other crimes suffer from differences in classification/definition, reporting procedures, or willingness of residents to report them to the police.

From what I can tell they use victim impact surveys and other surveys as well as crime reported to police to ameliorate that.

>homicide rate

Your theory is called the tip of the iceberg theory and it isn’t meritless but it isn’t very reliable either.

Different studies show different correlations between murder and different types of violent crime.

But the correlation in general is only moderate even within a country. Across counties, it’s much lower.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43576-023-00086-1

In the US guns are much more common, than in Europe, so so a crime like attempted murder that is highly correlated with murder within the US isn’t going to be highly correlated across the US and Europe.

For example, if it takes 3 attempted murders in a city with easy gun access to produce 1 murder, it might take 10 in a city where guns are hard to get. So you could be underestimating the attempted murder rate in that city by 3x.

Re: Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast

#352

Post by maccard » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 8:30 AM UTC

IncreasePosts wrote: post #279

maccard wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that logic, all problems are solved by LLMs. If that was true, then there's no reason for any products to exist for anything anymore.

I think the key word is on "any one". Personally, I know how do to the work, I just didn't want to because it provided minimum value to me. But I didn't actually need to know how to do it, because the llm produced perfect results for me without needing to prompt it with any specifics

But what you have is a license plate reader. They've existed and are a solved(mostly) problem since the 80s. Flock isn't an ANPR, it's a network of cameras that has that as a feature.

An LLM isn't replacing an interconnected camera network, it's replacing a script that can be replicated from a 6 year old blog post!

Re: Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast

#353

Post by motbus3 » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 6:24 AM UTC

matheusmoreira wrote: post #246

motbus3 wrote: post #238

Both flck and pltr uses a loophole on the law that if no one holds data no one is doing anything wrong. This needs to be fixed. Holding information about people should have a maximum time limit and should be treated respectfully. Given it is impossible to make them stop, it should be easy to see what's on you and anything else is illegally obtained.

Holding information about people should be a massive liability. It should actively cost them money to know even a single bit of information about us. They should be scrambling to forget all about us the second the transaction's completed.

Technically it is. But they create companies that operates for months and close and then open a new one using a different person's name. You can't do anything because between you find them and sue them they are closed and the data is elsewhere.

This is no child's play. The ads you see all around are designed for you not to click. They just want to inject more metadata to make you more identifiable.

Once I followed one of those fake stories like "look what happen with this pregnant horse" and it was literally 50+ pages of a possibility ai generated story that never ended. If you just moved to the main site the story was hosted the content was completely different and no link to the thing you were reading.

Why would anyone pay an ad for something like that? It needs to have a reason and I don't think it is to talk 52 pages about a horse who was pregnant

Re: Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast

#354

Post by sarchertech » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 12:06 PM UTC

nailer wrote: post #316

sarchertech wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that’s such a roundabout way of saying it had a higher startup rate. Why wouldn’t you just say that? Ambitious could mean so many things. Also it’s not relevant. Miami maybe a peer to NYC in 50-100 years, but it’s definitely not today. In the GaWC rankings it’s 4 tiers behind NYC.

> Ambitious could mean so many things. It just means ambitious. That, I would have thought fairly obviously, encompasses more startups but also people wanting to better their lives in some way. > In the GaWC rankings it’s 4 tiers behind NYC. Yes. Decline and growth take time. Skate to where the puck is going.

> but also people wanting to better their lives in some way.

So there you go. You aren’t just walking about more startups, you’re talking about the vibe you get from the people living there which is, so easily influenced by your own bubble that it’s not worth considering. I didn’t guess that’s you meant because how could you be in any way confident enough to make that statement.

As a counter anecdote I know dozens of people from Miami very well, and there’s nothing about them that strikes me as ambitious. It could just be that the people I know (my wife’s friends and family, and coworkers from a startup) aren’t particularly ambitious. But it could equally be true that the people you know from my Miami are the anomaly.

A specific measure like startup rate could just be caused by the regulatory environment in Florida, or any number of things that have nothing to do with the overall level of ambition in Miami.

>Skate to where the puck is going.

Well sure if you’re trying to invest in real estate or something.

But I’m talking about finding a city that is comparable to NYC today to compare crime rates.