Live data from Hacker News

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

404media.co

411–420 of 507 posts

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

#411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in an Atlanta neighborhood where one of the founders lived. A prototype for Flock Camera was designed by three Georgia Tech grads because someone kept breaking into their car (not uncommon in our neighborhood tbh). The trick is that the camera was pointed towards a middle school. Which means they were constantly recording kids without adult consent. Now, years later, Atlanta is the most surveilled city in Nort…

>There are 124 cameras for every 1,000 people How does that make any kind of economic sense? Morals aside, that’s a ridiculous amount of devices, data collected and transmitted, and so on.

The police has never made economic sense. If you look up your local PD's budget, you will be shocked.

There's only so much military-grade vehicles you can spend that on, I guess. Cameras will do.

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

#412
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.

IIRC, this happened in Washington state: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/washington-court-rules...

And as a result, they got rid of the cameras. Funny how that works!

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

#413
post #39

Children could go missing thanks to Flock default settings. HN would tell me to never attribute to malice ... but there may be criminal negligence. To cover their butts I strongly suggest Flock implement a default "grading system" that will show a city in a banner at the top of their management and monitoring system that based on their camera and network configuration they get an A+ to F-. If the grade is below a C t…

Hanlons razor is stupid and we should stop using it.

First off, we don't actually know how ignorant someone is or is not, but from what I see people GREATLY underestimate ignorance.

Rich people building state-sponsored surveillance are not ignorant. They absolutely know the consequences. They either don't care, or they are actually targeting those consequences.

Secondly, it falls apart in organizations. When we apply hanlons razor to an organization, we're claiming EVERYONE there must be ignorant. Which is just obviously not true.

Someone knows, probably lots of people know. And they choose not to act - that is malice. Choosing not to do something is a form of malice.

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

#414
post #47

Yes, they should be secured so they can only be accessed by law enforcement. But if your spouse/SO/sister/mother/girlfriend/whatever was assaulted while jogging in a park that had Flock cameras, and it allowed law enforcement to quickly identify, track, apprehend and charge the criminal, you'd absolutely be grateful for the technology. There's nothing worse than being told "we don't have any leads" when someone you c…

If your argument has to start with "now, imagine your sister was raped", then it's probably just a bad argument.

Appealing to emotions, tsk tsk, but going right for the jugular? Yikes.

Also, elephant in the room: if your sister was going to be raped or beaten, it would probably be by someone in her home, in her family. Like her cop husband.

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

#415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well a lot of people can conceive of a cultural hegemony that is more pleasant to live under. It’s more that Y Combinator wants to be exposed to the returns of the Palantirs, Andurils and Clearviews out there.

Possibly. I think, at the very least, Garry Tan is a true believer. He's not proposing putting this in someone else's neighborhood or city, he wants it in SF, SJ, Berkeley, etc.

it's the opposite. expanding the Y Combinator startup index strategy to include the surveillance startups is less belief not more. it's less opinionated. Paul Graham is actually more opinionated about this than Garry Tan is.

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

#416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, stalking is very clearly illegal. The main issue is that we have a different set of laws that govern businesses and that govern private citizens. If I set up a camera in a local park and programmed it to zoom into children's faces and stream it directly to my computer, I am surely going to jail. But if I set up 100 cameras to do just that, baby, that's just business. It's almost paradoxical. The more evil I d…

Stalking is not illegal at all.

Stalking is very illegal in most US jurisdictions.

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

#417
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, stalking is very clearly illegal. The main issue is that we have a different set of laws that govern businesses and that govern private citizens. If I set up a camera in a local park and programmed it to zoom into children's faces and stream it directly to my computer, I am surely going to jail. But if I set up 100 cameras to do just that, baby, that's just business. It's almost paradoxical. The more evil I d…

>If I set up a camera in a local park and programmed it to zoom into children's faces and stream it directly to my computer, I am surely going to jail. [citation needed] You might be called a creep, and you might be asked to remove the camera (because you can't leave random cameras on public property without permission), but operating cameras in public and recording stuff isn't illegal. Paparazzis do that all the tim…

No, actually, how you do it matters.

If I use that information to track someone and watch them specifically, that is stalking and is illegal. I know it's illegal here in Texas.

The law is not an algorithm, it's very complex. Recording people in public is absolutely illegal in many instances.

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

#418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now you have scale with ai hardware becoming cheaper and software incentives aligning.

I always thought that show "person of interest" was a bit far fetched. how could one system have access to that much data? privacy concerns would surely stop it.

You'd think so, but everytime a crime is solved by flock or the like, people keep celebrating it and using it as a justification.

It reminds me of this meme: https://www.reddit.com/r/Cyberpunk/comments/sa0eh3/dont_crea...

There are few reasons people probably keep building on this topic: 1. Eventually someone will do this anyway. 2. Thus, it shall be mine - I for sure will handle data better than anyone else can, respecting all sorts of guardrails etc. 3. company ipos, founder leaves, things happen.

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

#419
post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus

Show HN: Torment nexus. Built in Rust (YC W25).

Oof, that felt too real. I'm half torn making that a reality before someone else does.

That's often the thing about these torment nexuses, they're somehow profitable.

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

#420

Was fortunate to talk to a security lead who built the data-driven policing network for a major American city that was an early adopter. ALPR vendors like Flock either heavily augment and/or anchor the tech setups. What was notable to me is the following, and it’s why I think a career spent on either security researching, or going to law school and suing, these vendors into the ground over 20 years would be the ultim…

As someone who has thought about, planned, and implemented a lot of RBAC... I would never trust the security of a system with RBAC at that level.

And to elaborate on that -- for RBAC to have properly defined roles for the right people and ensure that there's no unauthorized access to anything someone shouldn't have access to, you need to know exactly which user has which access. And I mean all of them. Full stop. I don't think I'm being hyperbolic here. Everyone's needs are so different and the risks associated to overprovisioning a role is too high.

When it's every LEO at the nation level that's way too many people -- it is pretty much impossible without dedicated people whose jobs it is to constantly audit that access. And I guarantee no institution or corporation would ever make a role for that position.

I'm not even going to lean into the trustworthiness and computer literacy of those users.

And that's just talking about auditing roles, never mind the constant bug fixes/additions/reductions to the implementation. It's a nightmare.

Funny enough, just this past week I was looking at how my company's roles are defined in admin for a thing I was working on. It's a complete mess and roles are definitely overprovisioned. The difference is it's a low-stakes admin app with only ~150 corporate employees who access it. But there was only like 8 roles!

Every time you add a different role, assign it to each different feature, and then give that role to a different user, it compounds.

I took your comment at face value but I hope to god that Flock at least as some sort of data/application partitioning that would make overprovisioning roles impossible. Was your Texas cop tracking an abortion a real example? Because that would be bad. So so bad.

Post reply on HN