Musician-turning-tech anarchist (?) Benn Jordan is making a very interesting series of videos about Flock cameras, their poor safety, and their gray-area interfacing with local governments:
>[1] Would crime go up, down or stay the same if all surveillance cameras were removed? The answer to that is the only one that matters.
At least 40,990 [2] innocent people died in the US in 2023, without significant outcry - that is, on the road, in car accidents. People in the US clearly value the freedom of driving over the deaths of innocent people. In 2023, there were an estimated 19,800 [3] homicides in the US. But even if you assume surveillance like Flock could prevent a meaningful fraction of those homicides - and there's little evidence it does [4] - that's still asking people to give up their most sensitive freedom, the right to move without being tracked, for speculative gains. People are not willing to sacrifice their freedom to save 40,990 people from cars, why should our constant locations be monitored?
The abuse isn't speculative. Police have been caught stalking exes, tracking abortions, and innocent people [5] have been held at gunpoint due to a flock misread. The "safety" these cameras provide comes with a surveillance that's already being turned against ordinary people.
[4] Flock can't even demonstrably reduce car break-ins. The drop in San Francisco started months before cameras were installed (https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/sf-car-breakins/). If it can't prevent car beak-ins, how can we expect it to make a dent in homicides.
>misreads by Flock's automated license plate readers... resulted in people who hadn't committed crimes being stopped at gunpoint, sent to jail, or mauled by a police dog, among other outcomes.
show comments
diogenes_atx
It seems like this article buried the best lede of the story on paragraph ten, which explains Flock's new business of surveillance drones launched in response to 911 calls (and also presumably triggered by other alerts configured by police and private businesses).
> Flock has recently expanded into other technologies... Most concerning are the latest Flock drones equipped with high-powered cameras. Flock's "Drone as First Responder" platform automates drone operations, including launching them in response to 911 calls or gunfire. Flock's drones, which reach speeds up to 60 mph, can follow vehicles or people and provide information to law enforcement.
show comments
schlap
These companies build this tech in SF and Seattle, cities with some of the gnarliest public safety problems in the country, then turn around and sell it to smaller towns where it does more harm than good.
Most places in America don't have problems that surveillance solves. They have problems they already know about and won't act on. Cameras don't fix homelessness or addiction or underfunded services. They just make life harder for regular people.
But that's the whole appeal for bureaucrats. Buying a product looks like doing something without having to do any of the actual work.
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jmuguy
I'm surprised Garrett Langley still has a job, he seems wildly out of touch. For instance he really believes that his Panopticon as a service is the reason crime is down in cities, conveniently ignoring crime rates prior to COVID.
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jdross
I realize how unpopular flock is, and I will first say that I have literally never personally looked into the privacy concerns. But one city you don’t see named here is SF, which has cited Flock as a primary driver of its 10x reduction in car break-ins, and 30% reduction in burglaries. Those were a quality of life plague while I lived there
show comments
e2le
For those unfamiliar, you can read more about the flock safety cameras themselves here:
I'm glad Flock made it as far as they did before the ass-handing commences. Even some my normie friends and family are aware of the scourge because of their initial success, where they would otherwise think we're talking about a group of birds.
I have not done any research if that's out of the frying pan and into the fire or an improvement
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AlBugdy
Non-US citizens - what's the situation with cameras in public spaces where you live? In my town every 2nd hour or building entrance has a private camera pointed at the street. It's very depressing because the cops don't care - I've asked 2 in a patrol car when there was a mild case of vandalism I witnessed. Technically it's illegal, but nothing happens. The public cameras are on intersection and some bus stops. Too much, if you ask me, but the private cameras are everywhere.
show comments
chermi
If you want to hear from the man himself, see link below. It was a fairly soft interview. I listened mainly because it was Noah and wasn't expecting him to be so pro-surveillance. So, even though I don't agree with them, it might be worth listening to their reasoning.
It's quite ironic to get an amazon ring video ad while viewing this article.
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kevincloudsec
flock says customers own their data and control access. but their national lookup tool means 5,000+ agencies can search your city's cameras without your city's permission. 'customer-owned data' that anyone in the network can query isn't customer-owned in any meaningful sense.
taobility
Should we remove logs from service running?
Cipater
Y Combinator CEO Gary Tan evangelises this company every chance he gets and YC was an early stage seed funder (Summer 2017)
Cipater
Y Combinator CEO Gary Tan evangelises this company and YC was an early stage seed funder (Summer 2017)
jcstryker
And moving to the next vendor that hopefully does a better job of staying out of the public eye...
gegtik
Funny they are just trying to get this started in Toronto
baggachipz
I drove into a very affluent subdivision this weekend, and like most others around here it had a flock camera recording every car on the way in. This camera, however, had the gall to advertise its presence as a neighborhood security measure. "Flock Safety watches this neighborhood" read the sign on the post, or some such. Of course the residents there had no choice but to accept its installation, as the local police support it. Nefarious framing and marketing in the name of "safety".
show comments
tamimio
> means the installation of ALPR cameras
That’s a big misconception, flock is a car identification system not a license plate one. I have seen many videos of some crime documentaries where flock was used to ID cars with no license plates, and weeks later they still have them in the system to track, coupled with phone tracking, they know exactly all the details needed.
iwontberude
Congratulations EFF I know for a fact you’ve been working hard to get these removed.
gnerd00
this kind of headline might have some scholarly name, because, no... actually the number of cameras and feeds in the San Francisco Bay Area is multiplying rapidly, along with the entirety of California with few exceptions.. long ago, San Diego county, a military-led area, was the exception and to many pariah on the constant increase in tracking of vehicles, people and "events".. now, what used to be thought of as harsh and creepy, is not only matched in hardware, but exceeded in backend capacity, across almost every populated area
mothballed
Our city voted them out for awhile. So the feds just put them on every bit of federal property near roads, which ended up doing the exact same thing.
show comments
phendrenad2
It's funny, if the company had just sold cameras to cities, they probably could have avoided this whole mess. But they just had to hit some keywords for Wall Street (like "AI" "cloud" and "SaaS"), which had the side-effect of making it appear (true or not) that they were part of a Palantir-style surveillance panopticon that tracks you everywhere.
show comments
josefritzishere
Funny that. Not everyone wants to live in an open air prison.
gosub100
Someone in my hometown was arrested for vandalizing them. The media chose to say "city owned security camera". It's amazing how they will rush to defend private enterprise.
show comments
lenerdenator
It really is amazing how they managed to fit so much copper into those devices.
show comments
HoldOnAMinute
Perhaps this venture would have been more successful as a Public Benefit Corporation.
In the USA in 2026, "capitalism", "politics", and "evil" have all become synonymous.
Maybe I am naive, and the corruption is too deep and pervasive.
Musician-turning-tech anarchist (?) Benn Jordan is making a very interesting series of videos about Flock cameras, their poor safety, and their gray-area interfacing with local governments:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMIwNiwQewQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1-uiUlHTo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ
I recommend them.
>[1] Would crime go up, down or stay the same if all surveillance cameras were removed? The answer to that is the only one that matters.
At least 40,990 [2] innocent people died in the US in 2023, without significant outcry - that is, on the road, in car accidents. People in the US clearly value the freedom of driving over the deaths of innocent people. In 2023, there were an estimated 19,800 [3] homicides in the US. But even if you assume surveillance like Flock could prevent a meaningful fraction of those homicides - and there's little evidence it does [4] - that's still asking people to give up their most sensitive freedom, the right to move without being tracked, for speculative gains. People are not willing to sacrifice their freedom to save 40,990 people from cars, why should our constant locations be monitored?
The abuse isn't speculative. Police have been caught stalking exes, tracking abortions, and innocent people [5] have been held at gunpoint due to a flock misread. The "safety" these cameras provide comes with a surveillance that's already being turned against ordinary people.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47690237
[2] https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/2022-traffic-deaths-202...
[3] https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/hvus23.pdf
[4] Flock can't even demonstrably reduce car break-ins. The drop in San Francisco started months before cameras were installed (https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/sf-car-breakins/). If it can't prevent car beak-ins, how can we expect it to make a dent in homicides.
[5] https://www.businessinsider.com/flock-safety-alpr-cameras-mi...
>misreads by Flock's automated license plate readers... resulted in people who hadn't committed crimes being stopped at gunpoint, sent to jail, or mauled by a police dog, among other outcomes.
It seems like this article buried the best lede of the story on paragraph ten, which explains Flock's new business of surveillance drones launched in response to 911 calls (and also presumably triggered by other alerts configured by police and private businesses).
> Flock has recently expanded into other technologies... Most concerning are the latest Flock drones equipped with high-powered cameras. Flock's "Drone as First Responder" platform automates drone operations, including launching them in response to 911 calls or gunfire. Flock's drones, which reach speeds up to 60 mph, can follow vehicles or people and provide information to law enforcement.
These companies build this tech in SF and Seattle, cities with some of the gnarliest public safety problems in the country, then turn around and sell it to smaller towns where it does more harm than good.
Most places in America don't have problems that surveillance solves. They have problems they already know about and won't act on. Cameras don't fix homelessness or addiction or underfunded services. They just make life harder for regular people.
But that's the whole appeal for bureaucrats. Buying a product looks like doing something without having to do any of the actual work.
I'm surprised Garrett Langley still has a job, he seems wildly out of touch. For instance he really believes that his Panopticon as a service is the reason crime is down in cities, conveniently ignoring crime rates prior to COVID.
I realize how unpopular flock is, and I will first say that I have literally never personally looked into the privacy concerns. But one city you don’t see named here is SF, which has cited Flock as a primary driver of its 10x reduction in car break-ins, and 30% reduction in burglaries. Those were a quality of life plague while I lived there
For those unfamiliar, you can read more about the flock safety cameras themselves here:
https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Flock_license_plate_readers
And more about the company behind the cameras:
https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Flock_Safety
I'm glad Flock made it as far as they did before the ass-handing commences. Even some my normie friends and family are aware of the scourge because of their initial success, where they would otherwise think we're talking about a group of birds.
And switches to Axon - https://denverite.com/2026/02/24/denver-ends-flock-contract-...
I have not done any research if that's out of the frying pan and into the fire or an improvement
Non-US citizens - what's the situation with cameras in public spaces where you live? In my town every 2nd hour or building entrance has a private camera pointed at the street. It's very depressing because the cops don't care - I've asked 2 in a patrol car when there was a mild case of vandalism I witnessed. Technically it's illegal, but nothing happens. The public cameras are on intersection and some bus stops. Too much, if you ask me, but the private cameras are everywhere.
If you want to hear from the man himself, see link below. It was a fairly soft interview. I listened mainly because it was Noah and wasn't expecting him to be so pro-surveillance. So, even though I don't agree with them, it might be worth listening to their reasoning.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2V5m4J0tjYg1shWXWrOG8k?si=k...
According to DeFlock.org, my local Lowe's store has 4 of them covering every entrance point.
https://deflock.org/map#map=17/41.468996/-90.483817
It's quite ironic to get an amazon ring video ad while viewing this article.
flock says customers own their data and control access. but their national lookup tool means 5,000+ agencies can search your city's cameras without your city's permission. 'customer-owned data' that anyone in the network can query isn't customer-owned in any meaningful sense.
Should we remove logs from service running?
Y Combinator CEO Gary Tan evangelises this company every chance he gets and YC was an early stage seed funder (Summer 2017)
Y Combinator CEO Gary Tan evangelises this company and YC was an early stage seed funder (Summer 2017)
And moving to the next vendor that hopefully does a better job of staying out of the public eye...
Funny they are just trying to get this started in Toronto
I drove into a very affluent subdivision this weekend, and like most others around here it had a flock camera recording every car on the way in. This camera, however, had the gall to advertise its presence as a neighborhood security measure. "Flock Safety watches this neighborhood" read the sign on the post, or some such. Of course the residents there had no choice but to accept its installation, as the local police support it. Nefarious framing and marketing in the name of "safety".
> means the installation of ALPR cameras
That’s a big misconception, flock is a car identification system not a license plate one. I have seen many videos of some crime documentaries where flock was used to ID cars with no license plates, and weeks later they still have them in the system to track, coupled with phone tracking, they know exactly all the details needed.
Congratulations EFF I know for a fact you’ve been working hard to get these removed.
this kind of headline might have some scholarly name, because, no... actually the number of cameras and feeds in the San Francisco Bay Area is multiplying rapidly, along with the entirety of California with few exceptions.. long ago, San Diego county, a military-led area, was the exception and to many pariah on the constant increase in tracking of vehicles, people and "events".. now, what used to be thought of as harsh and creepy, is not only matched in hardware, but exceeded in backend capacity, across almost every populated area
Our city voted them out for awhile. So the feds just put them on every bit of federal property near roads, which ended up doing the exact same thing.
It's funny, if the company had just sold cameras to cities, they probably could have avoided this whole mess. But they just had to hit some keywords for Wall Street (like "AI" "cloud" and "SaaS"), which had the side-effect of making it appear (true or not) that they were part of a Palantir-style surveillance panopticon that tracks you everywhere.
Funny that. Not everyone wants to live in an open air prison.
Someone in my hometown was arrested for vandalizing them. The media chose to say "city owned security camera". It's amazing how they will rush to defend private enterprise.
It really is amazing how they managed to fit so much copper into those devices.
Perhaps this venture would have been more successful as a Public Benefit Corporation.
In the USA in 2026, "capitalism", "politics", and "evil" have all become synonymous.
Maybe I am naive, and the corruption is too deep and pervasive.