Flock Defense "No Expectation of Privacy in Public" Is Wrong

7/6/2026 at 6:32:01 PM

If Flock feels this way the executive team should record the entrances and exits of their homes and stream them live online 24/7.

by everdrive

7/6/2026 at 8:39:17 PM

The "fuck you" move would be to record some important monkey's movements and then publish it...

E.g. July 6th 2026 CCO Josh Thomas left his home at 08:36. He dropped off his son at his school [__redacted__] at 8:54, and drove to his office, arriving at 09:26, etc, etc.

by netsharc

7/6/2026 at 6:02:57 PM

It's commercialized stalking. A group of people who physically stood in each park every day photographing children playing and sharing those images between each other would be run out of town so quick. Laws would be invented in a heartbeat to stop this.

by jvanderbot

7/6/2026 at 9:45:57 PM

Yeah, but if there were people who ran around carrying other people occasionally football tackled each other killing all involved we’d probably ban that too, and yet cars are not only permitted but we give them large amounts of our common space in cities. The linebackers running around wouldn’t be treated so kindly.

This shows that in most societies mechanical devices can acceptably have certain behavior that humans cannot exhibit. People can see that a camera recording something to a video recording system is different from a person watching and photographing someone.

So these analogies by way of “what if a person were to do this other thing that implies an intent a mechanical system does not?” do not land with me.

by arjie

7/6/2026 at 9:31:51 PM

>It's commercialized stalking. A group of people who physically stood in each park every day photographing children playing and sharing those images between each other would be run out of town so quick. Laws would be invented in a heartbeat to stop this.

This is a systemic problem.

There's a ton of things that are considered bad and questionably legal when small timers do them but if you spend millions producing fake bullshit paperwork to legitimize it it becomes a good thing.

I put a shed in my back yard, I'm an evil person for violating the Wetland Protection Act in my state, the city fines me and tries to turn it into leverage for stealing my house, the useful idiots cheer.

Blackrock pays some engineers to produce mumbo jumbo reports, they bulldoze the exact same f-ing "wetland" 100yd further back and put up solar panels, declare themselves to be saving the planet, and the same exact useful idiots once again cheer.

You can find a litany of examples like that in any industry, I just chose that one because I feel it's particularly on point for this audience.

by cucumber3732842

7/6/2026 at 7:09:05 PM

I think its entirely reasonable that license plates are recorded on public roads and accessible to police in lawful requests, like tracking stolen vehicles or dangerous suspects.

Your hysterics about photographing children in a park is silly and no one but the most online ideologue would find it at all comparable. Find a better argument if you want to convince other reasonable people who just want to live in safe neighborhoods and don't care much about your verbal word games and stretched analogies

by bko

7/6/2026 at 9:30:07 PM

> I think its entirely reasonable that license plates are recorded on public roads and accessible to police in lawful requests, like tracking stolen vehicles or dangerous suspects.

And I don’t. I think my right to privacy shouldn’t arc to nil.

Cops don’t care about stolen cars. Or stolen things from cars. I’ve given them footage of such a crime and.. nada.

And they have armies of police and armament to do the other police work. They have access to individually produced recordings that they do nothing with.

Instead of just dismantling all civic rights for _some_ property rights, maybe we should have a national convention about what police are obligated to do and their best practices to do so. Courts have already established that it is not public safety, so I personally wont support any action that simply gives them more.

by browningstreet

7/6/2026 at 7:43:29 PM

> no one but the most online ideologue

> Find a better argument

That is just a reversed no-true-scottsman fallacy. If the poster's "hysterics" are a poor argument, please break down why rather than just calling it silly.

It is obvious that many in this community are against wholesale collection of information, public or private, as evidenced by the thousands of posts that state such reservations.

by Rooster61

7/6/2026 at 8:26:05 PM

> as evidenced by the thousands of posts that state such reservations.

Posts on forums are not real life. Look at revealed preferences. Many people have cameras on their property. People prefer to live in neighborhoods with well funded police with tech resources.

Again, it's entirely reasonable to collect license plates and use it to apprehend criminals. Crime is a thing, almost everyone is affected by it at some point in their lives. I don't need a proof or study, it's common sense. You know it's true but you're just pretending you don't understand.

by bko

7/6/2026 at 9:04:21 PM

> Look at revealed preferences. Many people have cameras on their property

Go ask them if they realize their videos are being stored on a company's server somewhere and those companies employees can watch their camera feeds whenever they want

Most people have no clue, they think the camera handles all of it

by bluefirebrand

7/6/2026 at 9:00:07 PM

You’re braindead, hand waving an argument with common sense isn’t actually interacting with anyone in a meaningful manner, you would be more use saying this to a wall.

The point the original poster is making is that this is a private system which has a high potential for abuse and often is abused, à la the posters “hysterics”, as you driveled, of people taking pictures of children and sharing it amongst themselves. Nitwit

by TripolitianFish

7/6/2026 at 9:29:10 PM

We need to prevent the implementation of surveillance technologies that can be abused now, because later when they are weaponized against us we won’t be able to.

Some things are too dangerous to allow to exist, however reasonable and useful they might seem.

by nkrisc

7/6/2026 at 7:16:33 PM

"Online" has become such a trite dismissal.

I'm calling out, specifically, that "A camera capturing an image of a license plate that is openly displayed on a vehicle is not searching for someone's private life. It is recording what anyone standing on the same street could already observe."

... implies that a very absurd and objectionable thing like folks standing around each playground recording children and comparing notes is actually also supported by that defense and that we should consider if that defense is objectionable or not based on what it enables as much as what it is defending.

On this very forum, you can find backlash against geofencing, and here, support for flock cameras? The contradiction is bananas. Automated logging of people in public places is dystopian. You can object with that claim, fine.

by jvanderbot

7/6/2026 at 7:28:55 PM

> Automated logging of people in public places is dystopian

You went from recording license plates on public roads to logging people in public places.

If someone steals my car, I would want to be able to give police my license plate and have them track down the person very easily by all the cameras on public roads. This is not dystopian. This is what an orderly society should look like.

You're talking about children and random stuff that's completely irrelevant. If you can't or refuse to see that, I can't convince you.

by bko

7/6/2026 at 7:44:13 PM

> You went from recording license plates on public roads to logging people in public places.

No, man, the argument is in the linked article, the one from TFA, the one I quoted. It is about public spaces and recording "what anyone standing on the same street could already observe".

That is insufficiently restrictive of a criterion because it's overly broad, and therefore can lead to absurd situations we'd never expect. Like kid tracking mafias. Any device that records "what anyone on the street observe" becomes awful creepy real quick, and we shouldn't accept that kind of argument ever.

TFA goes on to say that it breaks down at scale, and I'm trying to call out that, no, it is creepy at local scales too, because recording public activity is a bad precedent to set. I don't know how to make it more clear.

> stolen car

Having a use for an overbroad surveillance tech is only a defense for you, not for me and probably not for the courts either. It's not like they only activate it when there's a car stolen. It records all the time.

We've stated our opinions clearly now, I think the back and forth can end.

by jvanderbot

7/6/2026 at 8:07:59 PM

If someone steals my car, I can open an app and find its precise geolocation better than some cameras, and deliver that information to the police of my own choice. (Ideally, the car company would be legally prohibited from sharing that information with any other party.)

"Monitor the movements of everyone in case of the minute chance of car theft and astronomical chance of the police caring" is patently absurd. We probably need cameras in bathrooms too, in case someone passes out and needs medical attention.

by redwall_hp

7/6/2026 at 8:14:07 PM

> deliver that information to the police of my own choice

Good luck with that.

I've heard plenty of stories of victims of theft and crime literally leading police to the door of their assailant and they can't get any action because this "privacy" movement has made their efforts pretty meaningless.

You're naive and you obviously have no real experience in this regard. It's just sad that you promote policies that help no one but criminals and you're completely unaware.

by bko

7/6/2026 at 9:25:32 PM

> I've heard plenty of stories of victims of theft and crime literally leading police to the door of their assailant and they can't get any action because this "privacy" movement has made their efforts pretty meaningless.

So the police are useless when given a precise location, and you want to give them more invasive tools to continue to be useless? That's not the argument you think it is.

by redwall_hp

7/6/2026 at 7:32:27 PM

> On this very forum, you can find backlash against geofencing, and here, support for flock cameras? The contradiction is bananas.

There's more than one person on this forum. Why do you expect consistency? Different people have different opinions. Different people comment on different articles. HN is not a hivemind; don't expect consistency.

by AnimalMuppet

7/6/2026 at 7:47:05 PM

Ah yes, this is a fair point.

I should have stated something weaker: There are legitimate arguements, even on this forum, against geofencing, so entertaining arguments against camera-based always-on tracking shouldn't be automatically out of scope.

by jvanderbot

7/6/2026 at 8:56:31 PM

Fair enough. But there are also plenty of people here who yell at those who are against geofencing, so you can also expect plenty of yelling if you advocate camera-based always-on tracking.

by AnimalMuppet

7/6/2026 at 8:25:40 PM

Bro when I’m seeing cameras everywhere the last thing I think is “gee what a safe neighborhood I’m in”

by jazzyjackson

7/6/2026 at 7:18:12 PM

Yeah except flock is literally photographing children on playgrounds and inside gyms and showing those photos to random people in exactly the way being described.

But sure, "word games". Sure.

by vitally3643

7/6/2026 at 7:26:40 PM

> showing those photos to random people in exactly the way being described.

Do you actually believe this?

by bko

7/6/2026 at 7:39:24 PM

bko, perhaps it would be helpful to research this topic a bit more before commenting, just to keep our discussions useful (https://www.404media.co/city-learns-flock-accessed-cameras-i...)

by Computer0

7/6/2026 at 8:22:26 PM

> A blog post by Jason Hunyar, a Dunwoody, Georgia resident who learned about Flock accessing the city’s cameras by obtaining Flock access logs via a public records request is called “Why Are Flock Employees Watching Our Children?”

Wow, a surveillance system that's auditable through public records. Sounds pretty good system to me. Of course there are cases of abuse but seems like the worst system besides all the rest.

This is an insane ideological battle. Another technology people talk about is recorders that are trained to identify and triangulate gun shots. The most common sense stuff doesn't pass muster with these groups so theres really no point in debating. Just know that you are in the minority, unfortunately your groups have captured some politicians.

But hopefully we'll have some choice. I would welcome this an most tech to prevent crime in my neighborhood. And you can live in a completely "free" neighborhood where criminals are free from reasonable technology measures to prevent crime.

by bko

7/6/2026 at 8:14:13 PM

So I totally disagree with your arguments on nearly all points, but the fact that no companies prioritize security of data means that this footage WILL get released at some point, which in my opinion overrides ever single argument you made.

by apercu

7/6/2026 at 8:40:53 PM

Never forget, There are people here who are very proud of the system they built.

by mmmlinux

7/6/2026 at 6:53:52 PM

No person should be tracked by default.

There should not be any system that allows a person to be continuously tracked at all times short of as a consequence of criminal activity with a judge signing off on it.

It's so basic that a 3rd grader gets it.

by BizarroLand

7/6/2026 at 7:58:28 PM

Imagine the uproar if flock were used for automatic speeding tickets.

(which... we should, if we have the data to do it, why not actually enforce traffic laws?)

by cozzyd

7/6/2026 at 9:49:08 PM

In San Francisco we do have speed cameras. You’d need something like a calibrated distance measure to use Flock for speeding detection or it is (rightfully) contestable.

The cameras built for automatic speeding detection do fulfill their purpose, and I agree that it would be great to have more.

by arjie

7/6/2026 at 9:16:58 PM

I'm infuriated with this narrative because I can then be in my own private backyard with a fence and still be susceptible to surveillance. What the people who own the surveillance narrative really mean is that if they can record you, whether in private or not, you have no expectation of privacy.

by kittikitti

7/6/2026 at 7:46:38 PM

[dead]

by _ifton