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One of the Flock cameras was installed in my city nearby where I live. Once I noticed it, I thought it was a red light camera at first since it was near an intersection.
I did some research on them and found that they are completely wireless (cellular network most of the time) and powered by a 65w solar panel. Since they capture every license plate that passes by, I wasn't thrilled it was a private company keeping the data, even if they say they only keep it for 30 days.
I did a FOIA request with my city to see how many are in use and their locations to share with my community. I also plan on asking why my city thinks it is a good use of tax dollars. I think it should be a requirement for cities to disclose their use since it is a private company installing private equipment (and a camera at that!) on public land to monitor the public.
Call me old fashioned, but I think the constant monitoring of citizen's movements is bad even (especially?) when the state does it. If we're going to live in 1984, the involvement of corporations seems like the least of our troubles.
Good on you though, for actually going after this information and sharing it with your community. People absolutely have the right to know if they're being subjected to this.
I'm curious what the FOIA request will yield. Many of these are in private shopping centers or convenience stores, so I'm not sure any particular government body is accountable for them.
It would cost money for your city to buy its own camera system. These are presumably free, or perhaps even paying private property owners to lease the parking space. They can then turn around and charge municipalities and cities (and car repo companies, etc) for access to the information.
The police, et al, have <rules> about what they can gobble up and save, but there's nothing in the constitution about buying evidence from data brokers.
I'd bet having the comings and goings of everyone from the local WalMart and a few convenience stores at key intersections is very useful for tracking people down. At least one brand advertises the ability to get notifications when a vehicle is seen on any camera.
Flock got introduced to my municipality (Oak Park, IL) when OPPD was able to use data from a neighboring muni (it may have been Chicago, I forget which) to work back on an incident. OPPD had (has) authority to make arbitrary technology acquisitions so long as they're under a fixed cost (I believe $20k) --- this is a common arrangement in area munis, and maybe around the country --- which, if you're a product manager at Flock, gives you a trivial and effective game plan: go close deals to get <$20k pilot deployments up and running, and then work on expanding them.
The problem you have if Flock squicks you out is that you're not a normie. Flock's pitch to normies is incredibly compelling. Flock theoretically lights up any time a stolen car drives into your muni; stolen cars are a primary vector for crimes (here, especially: carjacking, but also thefts, burglaries, etc). The data it collects is shareable only, and with consent, to other law enforcement agencies. It records make/model/color/plate, but no other direct identifying information. Assume for the moment that it all works as advertised, and it's on paper a weird capability to push back on your local police having.
Our own OPPD messed up acquiring Flock. I think they tried to skip the pilot, and go straight to a muni-wide rollout, which required board approval. That blindsided the board. Instead of rubber-stamping it as expected, the board kicked it out to the technology and police oversight (CPOC) citizens commissions. I serve on one of those. Here's what we came up with:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v_sko3OljbZUEbcZbv_L9q9z...
What we ended up getting:
* A negotiated special-purpose police general order governing use of Flock, limiting it to violent crime, and installing procedural safeguards (most notably: a monthly readout to CPOC on Flock hits).
* A rollback down to 8 cameras from 20+.
* A one-year review of how Flock went.
The glaring hole left open: we have no direct public input on which munis we share Flock data with.
A year later, the monthly readouts to CPOC were FOIA'd and published, and the results are in: overwhelmingly, Flock stops in Oak Park were not responsive to crimes in Oak Park, but rather had OPPD doing warrants enforcement work for neighboring munis. Worse: the premise of Flock, that we could plug into regional hot-lists of stolen cars and cordon Oak Park off from them, turned out to be terribly flawed: the CPD hot-list is full of bullshit reports or recovered cars never cleared, so we were regularly pulling random innocent people over. The Flock technology worked fine! But the municipal systems it depends just aren't ready to safely use it.
The big thing coming off Flock for us is ACLU's CCOPS model ordinance, which adds mandatory board review for any surveillance technology (broadly defined in the ordinance). We worked for 4-5 months getting it prepped for the board, which has counsel drafting a local enacting ordinance; I'm optimistic we'll get it this year. CCOPS is something any muni can get; it's a good pitch, with something for a lot of different constituencies to like.
I think the "private company monitoring public land" thing is an argument that carries a lot of weight on Twitter and HN, but my experience in (our own specific) local politics is that it's a good way to get people to look at you like a Martian.
The SCALE of the surveillance is really the important thing.
Many comments here correctly point out that you don't have an expectation of privacy in public. But that rule was really created envisioning the occasional person observing the occasional person/act/event. Even a cop tailing you is so expensive that its not deployed everywhere. The rule did not anticipate a system where every person is observed all the time. This is a situation where "quantity has a quality all of it's own".
Mass surveillance needs to be held to higher standard than regular public observation.
This is why we need the DRONES Act. That is all politicians should be followed and recorded drone mounted cameras any time they are on public property or viewable from public property.
https://www.muckrock.com/foi/list/?page=1&per_page=100&q=flo... ("Muckrock: Flock Safety FOIA Requests")
Feel free to spin up a FOIA request for your local jurisdiction using previous requests as a template.
Huge huge fan of increased surveillance in public places. The reason is that it's pretty well proven that likelihood of getting caught for crimes is much better at deterrence than severity of sentence. By enforcing crimes more consistently, we can actually reduce incarceration.
And I am a huge opponent of it because anything that can be used to track criminals can be used to track everyone. And if everyone is a criminal (imagine the-other-guy getting control of the system) then you are not actually deterring anyone, simply ensuring that whoever-is-on-the-outside is going to get the law coming down on them hard while whoever-is-on-the-inside will get let go in spite of direct evidence of their misdeeds being streamed to the cloud 24x7x365.
We can also expand what is considered a crime too. Without the cameras, cost/benefit just makes it impossible to enforce some tyrannical edicts, but if we all live in a fishbowl monitored by computers whose machine learning can flag nearly any activity, wow, just think of the possibilities. We don't even need to formally punish these, some interest group will just call up your employers and suggest very strongly that it would embarrass them deeply if they continued to employ you.
Cops have not demonstrated that access to more surveillance actually helps them catch more people. Meanwhile they still keep getting caught on their own bodycams dropping "evidence" like a bag of cocaine (where did the cop get that I wonder....) to screw innocent people over, at least when they aren't doing it with the bodycam off.
In fact, despite massive increases to surveillance tech, including cops having the location of anyone's cell phone whenever they want it thanks to private companies that are allowed to sell such data to cops with pretty much no limits, even though the cops themselves are not supposed to have such data, the clearance rate for violent crime is abysmal, 30ish percent.
Meanwhile property crime clearance rates are EVEN LOWER, at about 12%.
We don't even keep good stats about white collar crime meanwhile...
Before we give the cops more toys to harass us with, can we at least make them demonstrate they actually use the tools they have? Right now cops demonstrably do not do their jobs.
Ya know what also deters crimes? Having your needs met. I bet the money spent towards this spying apparatus could have been spent on housing programs, education, healthcare.
Nah, lets give it to a company to make it easier to punish people.
I am in a similar boat. I appreciate that there is opposition so that we can keep a balance but I am pro surveillance as well. There is potential for abuse but I also recognize that as a regions population increases, sometimes you have to conform to things to create a stable society.
I would love a national ID that I could use everywhere. Again ripe for abuse but I can see the benefits outweighing the negatives.
The statement "By enforcing crimes more consistently, we can actually reduce incarceration" sounds logical and reasonable, but actually isn't necessarily true unless A and B below are also true.
A. Actions that are considered crimes do not change over time.
B. Incentives to catch and prosecute crimes are not KPIed based on incarceration rates.
nah i'll take the crime thanks
Government uses private entities to get around the constitution.
Private entities use the government to get around regulation.
Same as it ever was.
I'm curious what constitutional provision you think is being violated. I get the ick factor, but as a lawyer I'm not sure what you're getting at.
The 10% of crimes (700k+ total) being solved in part due to Flock is insane.
I'm guessing they couldn't make this claim if it wasn't at least partly true, and they already include the caveat of 'solved' so it's not just 'tips'.
Truly impressive honestly, for a company started in 2017 to have that much of an impact.
I think it's foolish to take a company's marketing claims at face value. Do not trust them to be accurately representing what is "solved". Do not trust them as to what "solved in part due to Flock" means.
Frankly I suspect all this means is they served up a location hit to X requests, and they have a crime stat somehwere that says Y crimes have occurred. X/Y = 10%. Woo, what heros.
This is an ever expanding privacy concern. It's tough to locate all of the cameras, but I would be interested in a routing system built in OpenStreetMap which would avoid road segments containing the cameras.
You literally couldn't go anywhere, at this point. At least, not very far. A mile or two maybe, in a rural area?
A decade ago, maybe you could avoid being tracked if you took only back roads in the country and avoided towns and cities. But now every house you pass with some private security system or vendor in it (in addition to all of the other sources, plus those set up on roadways) is reporting back to someone, and they're selling either the raw video or the processed data.
Lots of people reading this probably subscribe to such a system and don't even know that they're contributing through whatever private system they or the property they reside in are using, because it's buried and obscured under ridiculously vague terms about third-party data sharing vendors.
This article has done the disservice of making it seem like a single company expanding over a few years in an otherwise empty market. But it's not an empty market, it's just a new player gaining share as commodity-level tech matures.
Private businesses are starting to get them, too. Lowes has been deploying them over the past year or so as part of loss prevention upgrades apparently, so they're feeding the Flock, so to say.
A shopping center nearby uses flock to "ticket" and fine employees that park in residential streets (which creates bad relations with neighbors) instead of the designated remote parking. I guess part of the lease/employment agreement states the proper directions or fine will be incurred. An employee drives around in a golf cart with an app/website/scanner/not sure. I know they use Flock though because it's been mentioned in community zoning meetings w/ regards to their expansion efforts.
Kind of interesting you can pay for a private service which will uncloak license plates. I wonder how much it is as I'd love to uncloak neighborhood speeders too.
About 33 years ago, the band Death was already discussing the end of privacy in their song '1000 Eyes'.
https://oldtimemusic.com/the-meaning-behind-the-song-1000-ey...
It looks like the 1920s sci fi novel "We" by Yevgeny Zamyatin is one of the earliest explorations of mass surveillance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_(novel)
XD so would it be illegal to blast IR to cover your plate specifically tuned to these cameras if they are private domain?
Very cool company, now involved in solving 10% of reported crime in the US.
They use DoltDB to version control their machine learning feature store:
OP for sharing this on hackernews (and I talked to Tyler Dukes a bit about this). I think ALPR's are good investments, but having more rigorous standards in place for when people can do searches is necessary. There are rules for when you can run a criminal history background in states I am familiar with (that are policy set, so less rigorous than a warrant), that I think should be applied the same for searching license plates without too much friction for law enforcement.
I think Flock has a good product (and ditto I think Dolt is neat!) But that said, this 10% metric is so ridiculous it rises to the level I need to make a comment. Imagine I did something to decrease crime by 10% in two cities, and then went and made a claim like "I decreased crime 10% in the US" -- this is Flock's claim. (The study to get the 10% clearance estimate is crazy bad as well, but this 10% of solved crimes in US is such a bizarro projection to the entire US it is inarguable as to its absurdity).
I don't disagree that it's bad, but this article seems to give the impression that this is new. TLO (owned by TransUnion since 2014) has been selling this stuff since the 2000s.
Basically, assume any parking lot or other surveillance camera you come across is reporting back either the raw data itself or the processed data, like which license plate has been seen. Even the tiny mom-and-pop's, through some deal with either their (or whoever they lease property from's) surveillance or software provider.
And it's regularly been abused by bad actors among debt collectors, private investigators, police, and background check companies selling their access. Like to amateur rap crews from North Carolina, in this example:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2018/10/12/how-a...
So.. yeah, call attention to the practice and the fact it's expanding, that more and more companies are gaining and selling the data. But it minimizes the scope and scale of the problem to focus on one relatively new company's actions over the course of a few years.
Kind of feels like they are implementing China like full blow AI surveillance state here, and just waiting to flip the switch on it. They probably have all the bills sitting in a drawer somewhere for the next pandemic or whatever the heck happens that justifies emergency measures.
These have been deployed in my neighborhood, and I'm very happy with that. It's the best technique the police have to catch home burglars, of which there are an ever increasing number, I believe due to soft on crime policies.
Most of the comments here are against the use of cameras to monitor public spaces. But how else is society supposed to deal with crime while limiting expense on police officers, detectives, prosecutors, and all that? Surveillance and AI powered surveillance (with human verification) seems like a good way to track and identify and capture criminals. I definitely think there should be some regulation to protect the data, require probable cause, warrants, or whatever - but I don’t think banning it is the right answer either. Unless we are willing to become harsher on crime in other ways to deter it.
The scary thing is it records video. They now have your driving habits, and so do any cop in the US & Canada.
Seeing as many modern cars have camera arrays. I wonder if an auto manufacturer could sell access to their camera network to "authorities" as a more effective surveillance application?
Why not just name your company Freedom Surveillance while you’re at it
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I am surprised police dep actually paid for that, where I live, they would just show up and take any kind of access for free.
Why is this legal? Who allows this? What do we do?
Why is the title "Claude Team plan and iOS app"? Did this submission get renamed incorrectly?
Hm very strange the title did have to do with Flock Safety when it was first posted and now is referencing Claude not sure of user error or something to do with hacker news. I’ll put a tin foil hat on for just a second, Flock Safety is a graduate of Y Combinator so maybe the misnaming is not as innocent as it may seem?
My 2 cents: I live in the Atlanta metro and it’s crazy just how much Flock has permeated communities. From main streets to small neighborhoods flock safety cameras are in use everywhere, it is off putting. I’m not sure if HOAs are the ones OKing them or if it’s the city but having a private corporation able to run cameras that read plates and can potentially surveil home consistently seems like undue erosion of privacy
Is there an issue with the title? I don't see what Claude has to do with this article...
In the long run this will enable more crime than it deters. If I have a target I could determine where they are at all times, what they do, train models on their behavior and get social network info, etc…
I’m sure the claim will be that the system is secure and not easy for criminals to use for criminal purposes but everyone here knows or should know that’s a falsehood. It cannot be secured and will be used by adversaries against law abiding citizens.
Whats the issue? police using for nefarious deeds that they get caught and fired for like in the article? or is it people think that privacy is a right but then have 10+ apps on their phone that track every movement they make?