How Cops Are Using Flock's ALPR Network to Surveil Protesters and Activists

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Nov 23, 2025, 5:14 AM UTC

potsandpans wrote: post #89

dang wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They key word in your comment is "certainly". People are constantly (over)interpreting this "mods are against my side" bias into what we do ( https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... ), but I can tell you for sure without knowing which side you're on (or what the topic even is) that people you disagree with feel just as strongly that we're clearly/obviously/certainly against them and that we ti…

It's even more curious that merely pointing out that you unevenly moderate triggers yet another link to the clustering illusion. The truth is: we never will be able to know the biases of this community or mod team with accuracy, because hackernews doesn't expose enough data to be able to perform a meaningful analysis. The call-out is disjoint from the rest of what you go on to say. I said you are _certainly_ biased.…

Post by potsandpans » Sun, Nov 23, 2025, 7:21 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #90

potsandpans wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's even more curious that merely pointing out that you unevenly moderate triggers yet another link to the clustering illusion. The truth is: we never will be able to know the biases of this community or mod team with accuracy, because hackernews doesn't expose enough data to be able to perform a meaningful analysis. The call-out is disjoint from the rest of what you go on to say. I said you are _certainly_ biased.…

I assumed you were the GP commenter and that created some confusion - sorry about that. But now I'm confused why you consider it curious that we pop into threads and request that people follow the rules. That's obviously the job.

Post by tptacek » Thu, Nov 27, 2025, 5:22 AM UTC

ranon wrote: post #94

tptacek wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These cameras don't use LLMs. The "AI" we're talking about is machine learning models for identifying and OCR'ing license plates and car models.

Flock Safety is a lot more than ALPR. They just try to fit in as an ALPR because those have been used for years. They do use their video feed to find unique identifiers of vehicles, such as dents, mods, color, make, model, etc. It's also highly likely they are doing facial recognition at some locations. I do not believe they are doing gait recognition yet for pedestrians, but it's just a matter of time.