I would typically agree with the statement, but I have a lot of trouble giving a flying shit about the people literally selling Doxxing-As-A-Service getting doxxed in return.
Human rights are routinely revoked from those that impede on the rights of others. This is the premise that underpins prisons.
Privacy being a human right still holds true.
Privacy absolutely should be a human right. But currently it isn't, and part of why is there is lots of money to be made with surveillance on ordinary people. And things will not change unless the people who exploit the privacy of other for monetary gain feel the effects of their privacy being violated.
You are equating installing personal security camera(s) to knowingly selling extra-judiciary mass-surveillance hardware and software to law enforcement. What's the point you're trying to make with this, exactly?
If they are sharing the footage with a dragnet, tracking people across the country, and giving access to unaccountable cops with a history of abusing that data?
Yes.
If they are using it to see when their amazon package got delivered, or for bog standard security purposes?
I think the point is these home systems are controlled centrally and can be used the same way flock can. I personally removed ring and installed my own system that doesnt export video out of concern with the governments lack of checks and balances anymore.
Paprazzi take effort and money. It's laughable to say "because paparazzi exists, we should give up all our rights".
No one took away private detectives or paprazzi. But if you replace both with a 24/7 never resting and no additional money tracking system, everyone will be tracked. It's litterally the business model because the mass tracking of americans without a warrant is what makes these companies money, not the hardware.
Question for me is "Will something you can do free now, be suspicious in the future?"
Like voting, or taking your kids to a private school, or going to an EFF meeting?
As long as you feel fine having the government know absolutely everything you do, then keep supporting surveillance. I personally have nothing to fear, but I hate the idea that I am being surveilled by a private company.
Flock had some prompts (/queries or something like that) leak and apparently something as innocuous as visiting multiple gas stations after hours within a short period of time could have it's system mark you as an armed robbery suspect.
I think we all have to fear police responding violently because Flock's sycophantic AI system told them with 100% confidence that we're the bad guy.
The fundamental issue here is the same one that led inevitably to Google's corruption: profit motive.
Flock's customers are data consumers.
Flock has every financial incentive to knowingly over-represent the reliability of their predictive analytics and actively conceal any issues with it.
If legally empowered and often armed end users are taking those representations at face value... well, there's the fundamental problem with Flock's business model.
Reminds me of the "if you don't want people to know, you probably shouldn't be doing it" comment from Eric Schmidt, the Google executive.
It was hilarious and well deserved when people immediately started digging up his dirt in response and exposing stuff like extramarital affairs to the point he had to deploy lawyers. Even before that quote, journalists were using Google itself to search and discover his personal information, and Google's response was to blacklist the journalists. Funny how angry these billionaires get when their privacy gets violated, huh.
It's extremely obnoxious that these big tech executives subject us to surveillance only to turn around and buy back their privacy with their wealth. They should have exactly zero privacy. Doxxing? It's called sousveillance.
I worry that Flock is going to take the fall, and some other bad actor with political connections (my money would be on Palantir) will just quietly pick up where they left off while everyone's patting themselves on the back for defeating Flock.
The stuff Flock is doing is going to be standard AI-driven surveillance in the future, and unless the actual practices are made into political third rails and made into criminal code violations, they will absolutely be legalized on some party line vote in the middle of the night.
Don't make it 'stop Flock,' make it 'criminalize AI-driven surveillance.' Denounce 'conspiracy to implement ai-driven surveillance' as an inherently immoral activity punishable by prison time.
Legislation guardrails around surveillance technology are a necessary component to defend against future corporate surveillance apparatus establishment and operation, as this surveillance could take many forms (video, audio, geolocation, RF signatures, etc). Flock and Axon today, whatever unsavory folks come along in the future.
“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work together for the benefit of all.” —- John Maynard Keynes
> The order came as The Texas Tribune was preparing to publish an investigation detailing how a state agency has devoted at least $30 million to building the state’s Flock surveillance network.
As an exercise, write the statute: how do you legally prevent Home Depot or Wal-Mart from videotaping their parking lots and adjacent streets as they've been doing for the past 3+ decades?
I'm genuinely curious how whatever you propose wouldn't be prior restraint.
I’m currently working with a representative on draft legislation, and will return once I have it and they move to introduce it. “You can just do things.”
The video capture is not the issue, but the data processing, retention, and sharing, which can trivially be regulated. CCTV for theft prevention and safety with a restricted retention period and no data sharing off the premises can remain legal. Data broker legislation adjacent.
> In what world is this not abridging the freedom of the press?
Why does that freedom supersede all other guaranteed freedoms? For example the US constitution tries to protect its citizens from unlawful searches, etc. just as strongly as protecting the presses. Why do I have to sacrifice my freedom from searches to preserve Home Depot’s freedom to tape others?
This is basic law. Your "freedom from [unreasonable] searches" applies only to the government: the government can be barred by the Constitution from broadly using or obtaining data, Home Depot can't be barred from collecting it or sharing it publicly. Both can be true simultaneously.
Furthermore, no relevant court has found these to be "searches" or that they are "unreasonable."
Your "freedom from [government] searches" doesn't somehow make my Ring doorbell illegal.
There’s obviously a line somewhere though, right? Like if that same company put a camera in a bathroom stall?
So on one extreme with have CCTV parking lot cams, on the other we have bathroom stalls. It seems like we could find where spy cameras that exist solely to break citizens rights to privacy land on the spectrum and write laws around that.
There are two separate issues here: the government itself being restricted, and the right of the people to collect and disseminate information (in this case, information that is quite arguably in the public interest.)
The government can certainly be limited by statute (police may be statutorily required to obtain a warrant to use aggregated ALPR data or may be barred from using it entirely), and may already be limited by existing case law - the relevant courts have not yet decided.
Limiting Home Depot from streaming a traffic cam or CCTV footage from the confines of their publicly-accessible property is no different than limiting a news crew who would choose to capture the same footage and share it with the world. This is very basic freedom of speech/press - especially when the information isn't being individualized to any one target (as a credit bureau might do.) Everyone is being collected and processed equally.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorrell_v._IMS_Health_Inc. - and have a look at the panel of Justices that ruled in consensus, even Sotomayor joined the still-existing majority on this matter. GP's proposed legislation almost certainly runs afoul of this fairly-recent decision.
> There’s obviously a line somewhere though
For the limitation of the government, the line is called "reasonable expectation of privacy." Any reasonable person would expect there to exist reasonable expectation to privacy in a bathroom stall, and the user of the stall has generally taken affirmative measures to ensure the same: they closed the door behind them, locked it.
You may be recorded, the things you are observed doing are admissible in court, etc. in places where you reasonably expect people to be able to observe you. Driving down a public, taxpayer-funded road is the quintessential example of "no reasonable expectation of privacy."
> A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere ~ John Roberts
I do get the separation from private companies and government. I'm not arguing that. But this ruling was specifically about using Cell data collected by a private company being used to violate the privacy rights of citizens.
I don't think a private company harvesting data from public spaces and then reselling it is loop-hole enough to say "press rights > privacy rights". And there's precedence from the SCOTUS to support my belief on that.
I have no opinion one way or the other on restrictions on government use - whether they be judicial or legislative. I only care that the rights of private individuals and companies be preserved.
Carpenter didn't stop these companies from collecting historic cell site data, selling it privately, or giving it to police with a warrant.
My money would be on Axon. They at least have a claim to the "hold police accountable" angle with bodycams and less-lethal weapons. Compared with Flock's "we'll watch you and what're you gonna do about it"
Axon's had ALPRs long before Flock existed, and the data management story is completely different. Flock was essentially a data warehouse with dark patterns around sharing settings that led to a lot of places defaulting open. Axon started out in bodycams and other direct-investigative tools, and their data management is very much focused on "the agency keeps its data" -- by default, data sharing requests have to be individually approved. You can't just type a plate number in and get hits nationwide.
The question is: will Axon enshittify their mature products in order to pursue that panopticon money?
they'll find a particularly violent crime and use that as the strawman... "Oh you dont want this? well i guess you support violent immigrant mass murderers then!"
and then before you know it the state has implemented its mass surveillance apparatus across the entire country. And we though china's social credits were bad? just IMAGINE what those predatory tech bros are cookin up.
Exactly. Freedom isn't free. If I have to pay for it with locks on my doors and having to be discerning about which truck I buy $5 steaks out of the back of lest my house get burgled or I get ripped off that seems like a pretty fair deal.
It's not far fetched. They usually dress it up in dogwhistle words like "at risk individuals" to make it seem like help rather than the threat it is.
Go look at what HN was saying and upvoting during the big data era. Endless scheming about orwellian ways to identify and "dispatch enforcement resources" on the pettiest thing. We're talking like buy a spool of romex get a letter in the mail from the .gov reminding you about code compliance. Or combing through small business financial to try and identify businesses that probably aren't high margin enough to be complying with all the rules. Real "I'm watching you" crap like that. And we're all supposed to go along with it because these people have our best interests at heard and/or mean well.
You take these same evil individuals and replace database integrations with pervasive cameras and AI and they will impoverish us all by grinding us under the thumb of government and say it's for our own good.
As a higher level comment points out, my fear is that Flock will end up being the straw man, happily torn down in favor of more outwardly palatable but privately onerous player(s).
> they will absolutely be legalized on some party line vote in the middle of the night.
What would be legalized? You realize that recording people in public is already legal, right? I'm puzzled where people are getting the idea that Flock is doing something illegal.
you're being deliberately daft. Its not the recording, its the surveillance dragnet with zero regulation or oversight that creates an instant dossier on whatever datapoints are searched for, by whomever decides to search for them who has paid for access.
Honestly the nuance isn't that intellectually taxing and having to explain it to people in the tech space is tiresome.
You're calling me daft yet you couldn't be bothered to answer the question. What is going the be legalized, as the above commenter wrote? What law is Flock breaking presently?
Like it or not recording and photographing people in public, then selling that information is not illegal. Paparazzi do it all the time. You can point a webcam out your window, run ALPR software on the video feed, and sell access to query that information. Nothing about that is illegal. If it is, then please reference the laws that prohibit this.
People talk about privacy laws being violated, but in general privacy laws do not cover public activity. Privacy laws mostly focus on protecting communications and activities carried out in private.
That will notion of an individual’s right to photograph a person in public held against the rights of the person being photographed, to conduct their business and affairs undisturbed, is likely to be challenged successfully before the Supreme Court when it can be shown a majority of people are under perpetual persistent technical surveillance.
You assume that some future Supreme Court case will rule that governments' use of Flock violated the Fifth Amendment, but at present Flock is violating now laws. Like I said in the my original reply: nothing is good to be legalized because nothing Flock is doing violates the law.
There's a big difference between "X is illegal" and "X is presently legal, but my prediction is that the Supreme Court will, in the future, rule that X is illegal."
Pointing out the incorrect assumption that Flock is doing something illegal is not sealioning. There's a reason why none of the replies actually point to the law that Flock is supposedly breaking: because there isn't one.
Exactly my thoughts. Flock has been brazen on so many things, that second-movers with a modicum of political savvy can come assuage all the major Flock-FUD, while in fact being significantly worse.
This is still a useful first step. Once “flock” becomes eponymous and a toxic political football, it can be applied to all future companies who do the same thing.
The word “Flock” is quickly becoming toxic, in the future we’ll be able to use it as a shorthand for all companies of this type. e.g. if I call something a cleanex everyone knows what I’m talking about regardless of whether Cleanex the company actually made the item being referred to. Similarly we’ll be able to just say “flock camera” and everyone will know what it is regardless of who makes the camera.
I think the point you're trying to make is undermined slightly by the fact that the word I think you're looking for is "Kleenex" not Cleanex. It took me a while to figure out what you were talking about, and I did some searching online to make sure I wasn't missing something about "Cleanex" in particular
I still agree with you though ."Flock Camera" is very likely to become the general term for "public surveillance camera" and it will carry a negative weight.
> and some other bad actor with political connections (my money would be on Palantir) will just quietly pick up where they left off while everyone's patting themselves on the back for defeating Flock
At that point, though, there will be a large group of people trained on how to defeat a company like Flock.
We are so far away from that even being a possibility.
We live in a world that is most corrupt and above the law, at the very top. Why would anyone trust that world? Trust is required for this technology to be willingly adopted.
That’s what the auditing needs to cover. Every search should be tied to a case number and the police putting in fake numbers to stalk people need to be dealt with.
Depends on where you are. Defending against getting punched in the face by shooting them will get you thrown in prison a good portion of the time. Sometimes being a piece of shit should result in an ass whupping.
> Depends on where you are. Defending against getting punched in the face by shooting them will get you thrown in prison a good portion of the time.
Maybe in liberal California (where your 80 year old grandmother has a duty to retreat), thankfully not in my state. A punch to the face can be fatal, and you don't have to take one. Also, what an idiotic idea that one must assume that a "punch to the face" is all that is going to follow - and not a knife, head smashing on the ground, etc. This is frankly disgusting.
> Sometimes being a piece of shit should result in an ass whupping.
Got it, sometimes lawfully exercising your rights should mean you befall violence: I am glad I don't live in whatever shithole area you reside in. Perhaps we should extend this ideology to voting for the wrong candidate? - If you don't vote for who I want, it should result in an "ass whupping." Maybe your property: if you don't give me the contents of your wallet, it should result in an "ass whupping." This is bully mentality, and isn't tolerated in polite society.
Would a cop in your state tolerate a punch to the face? How would you expect him to respond?
I mean, if the guy is going to knife you you can shoot him. Feel free to release your clutched pearls.
The law is not moral license. You can legally do lots of disgusting things, like threaten to murder someone over a non-lethal engagement. Lots of those disgusting things warrant a nice punch in the face, and crying about it or declaring the moral high ground isn't going to move the needle. Why are we cry-bullying and hiding behind threat of lethal violence? Pretty ironic that someone who would criticize "liberal" states for not letting you get away with murder somehow thinks THAT remedy is more civilized than run of the mill combat. You can leave your Grandma at home, this isn't about her, this is about you deciding what is legally permissible is the only thing that matters.
Definitely "bully mentality" to think fisticuffs shouldn't result in unilateral execution by unhinged randos. Summary execution is the "civilized" response. Would-be murderers probably shouldn't be giving lectures online. You astonish me.
Everyone knows that the law is what really matters when it comes to prevailing in court. That's why there's no correlation between money spent on legal representation and the outcome of a ruling.
In that case, you agree with me that you don’t have a right to privacy for all of the reasons I already stated plus the additional one that you can’t afford to fight it in court.
I generally agree we have no constitutional right to privacy, but I wouldn't agree going to court against someone will result in their illegal behavior against you being remedied.
I have been researching family genealogy, and this alleged "privacy" has never actually been a thing at all, much less a "human right". First, it is well-known for anyone who lived in a small town, that every small town had rumor mills, gossip grapevines, and everyone knew everyone else's business, to the extent that there was a daily soap opera drama about relationships, and hard times and good times as well.
So this small-town attitude was imported when people urbanized, and a lot of neighborhoods had this sort of grapevine as well. Furthermore, the urban centers established some distinct "brother's keepers" practices.
There were the City Directories. Before telephones, these were the White Pages and Yellow Pages. Your name, your occupation, your address. All your neighbors and the businesses on your street. All indexed and alphabetized handily. Everyone in the city would know what you did; they all got subscribed to these directories. These are invaluable resources for researchers today, so that we can find folks and know their professions, sometimes on a year-by-year basis.
Census reports were taken every 10 years. These can be highly unreliable resources! The census takers had no way of verifying information or investigating answers! They always took citizens at face-value, so it was the practice of new immigrants and criminals, and others in the shadows, to conceal the truth from the census takers. But nevertheless, some facts were obvious, and so there was good information gathered, and released by USGov, about household compositions.
Also, the newspapers have been a crazy treasure trove of information since their inception. I was literally able to track the movements of some of my relatives, because the newspapers in each town would report when a family member, or friend, visited someone. They would say if they came by car, and how long they planned to stay, and where they're from and all that. So anyone traveling in the 1930s and 1940s and so on, their movements were never "private" and you had journalists who acted as Human License Plate Reporters, ensuring that the whole town knew you were hanging out for the weekend!
Our local governments are enabling Flock. Get involved in your local politics. Find out who made the decisions to put these cameras in the neighborhoods and hold them accountable. Until that happens they will just find another vendor if Flock folds. Just like Flock will find a new CEO if theirs is forced to resignation.
You should see how the datacenter companies operate. They have massive teams of lawyers bigger than the entire city staff threatening all sorts of lawsuits and even pressure cities into signing NDAs against discussing their negotiations with any other city. They have buckets of money and perks waiting to bribe a defector or fund an election campaign. Any old scummy company with a couple of billion dollars is frequently more sophisticated and powerful than a piddly local government.
I know this is an extremely hot take, but it's not the license plate reading service that bothers me.
A license plate is specifically a tracking number to identify a registered vehicle on a public road. The 4th Amendment gives you privacy inside of your car, but your car is not itself guaranteed privacy. Before Flock, police departments already had informally aggregated data from speed cameras, red light cameras, and toll booths. The distinction being that any evidence collected in such a way is purely circumstantial and still requires a warrant to investigate.
The big irony though of Flock plate readers is that because they're just tracking license plates, they're not actually that useful at solving meaningful crime. Realistically there are a small number of hit-and-runs that could be solved, and they can make certain investigations a bit shorter. And most of what we read about is officer directed stalking or harassment activities.
It's all of Flock's other advertised services that should really freak people out. The facial recognition, the audio scanners, the individual-level tracking databases - right now they're a fancy VIN lookup service. It's all the other stuff they're trying to sell departments on that are getting into really egregious 4th Amendment violations.
Recent WIRED[1] article goes in depth on this exact problem:
> Another prompt instructs the system to list everyone arrested more than twice in two years for “any offense,” exempting only narcotics arrests, and then says to map where those people live, retrieve the calls for service at their homes, and “do a workup on the top three individuals.” The prompt begins with everyone in the area who has an arrest record and ends with dossiers on three of them, chosen by the software.
> A “workup,” in Flock’s terminology, is a one-command background check. It starts with a name and a date of birth and returns what the department’s records and commercial data hold: vehicles, prior listings as a suspect, and, on a second screen, relatives, phone numbers, and online accounts.
This stuff is beyond the wildest fantasies of East Germany's Stasi, and it's going to be a whack-a-mole game dealing with all the baby Flocks that spring up if Flock itself can be shut down.
> This stuff is beyond the wildest fantasies of East Germany's Stasi
I feel like that's a bit of a false equivalency. The soviet secret police had surprisingly little hard evidence on anyone - part of the terror of these regimes is that they could act decisively with little more than a rumor or gossip and be free from scrutiny for any mistakes.
You're right: the current US regime has been gleefully weaponizing the legal system against political enemies, and the difference is that they don't care about scrutiny for mistakes because there have been zero consequences for anyone involved. The Soviets were at least somewhat worried about bad PR.
My thinking is if we can stop pervasive AI-driven surveillance we might be saved from a totalitarian regime who views The Handmaid's Tale as an instruction manual, and instead be able to settle for a run-of-the-mill corrupt authoritarian one.
There's the one where a guy was surrounded by cops with their guns pointing at him because of a flock fuckup. He had a partial plate match (as in, some of the digits matched, but not an exact match) with a plate that was lost or stolen (as in the plate itself was stolen, not the car it was attached to.) That one went viral because the guy was an editor at a magazine driving a loaner car
There's this one where a lady was pulled out of her car at gunpoint after flock flagged her as a murder suspect. This happened twice in a weekend. She was never suspected of murder, it was a mistaken flag. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/aug/28/milwaukee-p...
Flock doesn't require evidence for an alert to be put in their system. If you have access you can apparently just put out an alert saying someone is a murder suspect, and some police department will repeatedly drag a woman out of her car until the media embarrasses them publicly
Right the US government definitely isn’t detaining people, sending them to foreign gulags or sending mobs of masked morons shooting innocent people like Pretti in broad daylight. We don’t even know the names of the ICE officers who did that to this day so they seem pretty free of scrutiny as well.
Purely statistically, this is a good first-pass filter if you are looking for perps. Chance a random adult is arrested in a 8-year window: ~5%. Chance a former convict gets arrested in an 8-year window: ~49%. So, it is ~10x the rate. Makes sense, statistically, to start there.
They aren't just tracking license plates though. They're tracking people - let me explain. Their 'ALPR' cameras (purposefully misleading to call them ALPR btw) capture the footage and send it off to their servers where it's retained - building a long-term historical location history on every vehicle. Advanced analysis is performed on the data to provide features to their customers such as the ability to search for vehicles based on a description of its characteristics (no plate needed), real-time route prediction, location heatmaps, and identifying vehicles that travel together (convoy search). Here's the important part - data is also ingested into another service they run called 'Nova', which is essentially a people search tool that connects the vehicles they capture directly to people and their PII. Access to their platforms (Flock OS, Nova, etc.) is sold via a subscription to law enforcement where they can perform searches for individuals or vehicle whereabouts for any reason, without a warrant, and practically no oversight or regulations.
Warrants (are supposed to) have judicial oversight and are limited in their scope. There's also a paper trail attached to information obtained from a warrant.
A warrant required for the searches should already be the bare minimum. If the constitution were being upheld it would have been a requirement from day 1. So, I suppose I would be 'okay' with this in a sense. What really irks me is the fact that Flock, Axon, etc. are acting almost exclusively as a proxy for the government to conduct mass surveillance that would otherwise be unconstitutional. If the government were directly doing the indiscriminate tracking these companies are, it would be unconstitutional even before a traditional "search" (query) of the data took place, so instead they pay a proxy (i.e. Flock, Axon, etc.) to perform the tracking for them and offer the searches as a subscription service.
Doxxing is bad of course but does "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" apply here? Or is that only for us working folk?
I would typically agree with the statement, but I have a lot of trouble giving a flying shit about the people literally selling Doxxing-As-A-Service getting doxxed in return.
Do you believe anyone with a surveillance camera should have the owners name and address published if in any way a “public” area is recorded?
I suppose we can start with all Blink, Ring and Nest Cams. Then we will continue with dash cam owners.
I don't. But I do think the CEO of a company who sells spying as a service to cops should have a taste of his own medicine.
So much for privacy should be a human right lol.
Human rights are routinely revoked from those that impede on the rights of others. This is the premise that underpins prisons. Privacy being a human right still holds true.
From which I conclude that prisons are wrong, but also if I don't like someone I can revoke his rights and push him downstairs.
What is the morally correct approach to dealing with murderers?
Privacy absolutely should be a human right. But currently it isn't, and part of why is there is lots of money to be made with surveillance on ordinary people. And things will not change unless the people who exploit the privacy of other for monetary gain feel the effects of their privacy being violated.
Like the CEO of Flock.
Maybe it should be one. Until it is, I'm all for giving the powerful the same consideration they give me.
Context matters. Without it, very foolish things can be said.
1. Installing a yard camera.
2. Building a mass surveillance dragnet and purpose-built tracking software and marketing it heavily to random local authorities.
Yep, totally the same thing...
You are equating installing personal security camera(s) to knowingly selling extra-judiciary mass-surveillance hardware and software to law enforcement. What's the point you're trying to make with this, exactly?
Are you asking if a public registry of where you're being observed by security cameras is a good thing? Sure. I wouldn't mind that.
If they are sharing the footage with a dragnet, tracking people across the country, and giving access to unaccountable cops with a history of abusing that data?
Yes.
If they are using it to see when their amazon package got delivered, or for bog standard security purposes?
No.
It sounds like you think Flock is just another home camera system, but it’s not and you could read up on that.
You should read up on police use of the cameras I mentioned
I think the point is these home systems are controlled centrally and can be used the same way flock can. I personally removed ring and installed my own system that doesnt export video out of concern with the governments lack of checks and balances anymore.
Scale matters. The “well technically an army of tens of millions of cops could achieve the same thing” argument is thoroughly unconvincing.
I have no issue banning ring and nest cams, actually. They hand the data to cops too
doxxing is about pseudonymous internet accounts, not people who are very public with their real name and lobbying the government.
this is whitepages reverse lookup
if he was just a guy chatting on the internet about cameras, sure, it would be doxxing, but he isnt. paparazzi have existed sonce forever
Paprazzi take effort and money. It's laughable to say "because paparazzi exists, we should give up all our rights".
No one took away private detectives or paprazzi. But if you replace both with a 24/7 never resting and no additional money tracking system, everyone will be tracked. It's litterally the business model because the mass tracking of americans without a warrant is what makes these companies money, not the hardware.
I don't think they were arguing for flock, they were excusing doxxing the CEO, because if you're famous, you can't really get doxxed
Question for me is "Will something you can do free now, be suspicious in the future?" Like voting, or taking your kids to a private school, or going to an EFF meeting?
As long as you feel fine having the government know absolutely everything you do, then keep supporting surveillance. I personally have nothing to fear, but I hate the idea that I am being surveilled by a private company.
Companies. The system used to be somewhat fragmented, but it is slowly starting to coalesce.
Flock had some prompts (/queries or something like that) leak and apparently something as innocuous as visiting multiple gas stations after hours within a short period of time could have it's system mark you as an armed robbery suspect.
I think we all have to fear police responding violently because Flock's sycophantic AI system told them with 100% confidence that we're the bad guy.
The fundamental issue here is the same one that led inevitably to Google's corruption: profit motive.
Flock's customers are data consumers.
Flock has every financial incentive to knowingly over-represent the reliability of their predictive analytics and actively conceal any issues with it.
If legally empowered and often armed end users are taking those representations at face value... well, there's the fundamental problem with Flock's business model.
Reminds me of the "if you don't want people to know, you probably shouldn't be doing it" comment from Eric Schmidt, the Google executive.
It was hilarious and well deserved when people immediately started digging up his dirt in response and exposing stuff like extramarital affairs to the point he had to deploy lawyers. Even before that quote, journalists were using Google itself to search and discover his personal information, and Google's response was to blacklist the journalists. Funny how angry these billionaires get when their privacy gets violated, huh.
It's extremely obnoxious that these big tech executives subject us to surveillance only to turn around and buy back their privacy with their wealth. They should have exactly zero privacy. Doxxing? It's called sousveillance.
Non-cloudflare link that basically says the same thing: https://mstdn.social/@stux/117186158784673388
I worry that Flock is going to take the fall, and some other bad actor with political connections (my money would be on Palantir) will just quietly pick up where they left off while everyone's patting themselves on the back for defeating Flock.
The stuff Flock is doing is going to be standard AI-driven surveillance in the future, and unless the actual practices are made into political third rails and made into criminal code violations, they will absolutely be legalized on some party line vote in the middle of the night.
Don't make it 'stop Flock,' make it 'criminalize AI-driven surveillance.' Denounce 'conspiracy to implement ai-driven surveillance' as an inherently immoral activity punishable by prison time.
Legislation guardrails around surveillance technology are a necessary component to defend against future corporate surveillance apparatus establishment and operation, as this surveillance could take many forms (video, audio, geolocation, RF signatures, etc). Flock and Axon today, whatever unsavory folks come along in the future.
“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work together for the benefit of all.” —- John Maynard Keynes
Guardrails because we cannot trust the human.
Gov. Abbott blocks state agencies from spending money on Flock cameras - https://www.texastribune.org/2026/08/28/texas-greg-abbott-fl... - August 28th, 2026
> The order came as The Texas Tribune was preparing to publish an investigation detailing how a state agency has devoted at least $30 million to building the state’s Flock surveillance network.
Lawmakers added $1 to Texans’ car insurance policies. That money paid for thousands of Flock cameras. - https://www.texastribune.org/2026/08/28/texas-flock-cameras-... - August 28th, 2026
Pennsylvania state senator planning bill to ban Flock, ALPR cameras - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49482256 - August 2026
https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/pa-state-senato...
Lawmakers added $1 to Texans’ car insurance policies. That money paid for thousands of Flock cameras.
In this thread, two posts up: people who want more powerful governments claim that "capitalism" is to blame for this state of affairs.
As an exercise, write the statute: how do you legally prevent Home Depot or Wal-Mart from videotaping their parking lots and adjacent streets as they've been doing for the past 3+ decades?
I'm genuinely curious how whatever you propose wouldn't be prior restraint.
I’m currently working with a representative on draft legislation, and will return once I have it and they move to introduce it. “You can just do things.”
The video capture is not the issue, but the data processing, retention, and sharing, which can trivially be regulated. CCTV for theft prevention and safety with a restricted retention period and no data sharing off the premises can remain legal. Data broker legislation adjacent.
> the data processing
Maybe?
> restricted retention period
Prior restraint.
> no data sharing off the premises
1000% prior restraint. In what world is this not abridging the freedom of the press?
Good luck.
> Good luck.
Thanks!
> In what world is this not abridging the freedom of the press?
Why does that freedom supersede all other guaranteed freedoms? For example the US constitution tries to protect its citizens from unlawful searches, etc. just as strongly as protecting the presses. Why do I have to sacrifice my freedom from searches to preserve Home Depot’s freedom to tape others?
This is basic law. Your "freedom from [unreasonable] searches" applies only to the government: the government can be barred by the Constitution from broadly using or obtaining data, Home Depot can't be barred from collecting it or sharing it publicly. Both can be true simultaneously.
Furthermore, no relevant court has found these to be "searches" or that they are "unreasonable."
Your "freedom from [government] searches" doesn't somehow make my Ring doorbell illegal.
Understand. Thanks for the answer.
There’s obviously a line somewhere though, right? Like if that same company put a camera in a bathroom stall?
So on one extreme with have CCTV parking lot cams, on the other we have bathroom stalls. It seems like we could find where spy cameras that exist solely to break citizens rights to privacy land on the spectrum and write laws around that.
There are two separate issues here: the government itself being restricted, and the right of the people to collect and disseminate information (in this case, information that is quite arguably in the public interest.)
The government can certainly be limited by statute (police may be statutorily required to obtain a warrant to use aggregated ALPR data or may be barred from using it entirely), and may already be limited by existing case law - the relevant courts have not yet decided.
Limiting Home Depot from streaming a traffic cam or CCTV footage from the confines of their publicly-accessible property is no different than limiting a news crew who would choose to capture the same footage and share it with the world. This is very basic freedom of speech/press - especially when the information isn't being individualized to any one target (as a credit bureau might do.) Everyone is being collected and processed equally.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorrell_v._IMS_Health_Inc. - and have a look at the panel of Justices that ruled in consensus, even Sotomayor joined the still-existing majority on this matter. GP's proposed legislation almost certainly runs afoul of this fairly-recent decision.
> There’s obviously a line somewhere though
For the limitation of the government, the line is called "reasonable expectation of privacy." Any reasonable person would expect there to exist reasonable expectation to privacy in a bathroom stall, and the user of the stall has generally taken affirmative measures to ensure the same: they closed the door behind them, locked it.
When you are outdoors, especially on public property, you generally have no "expectation of privacy." See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katz_v._United_States
You may be recorded, the things you are observed doing are admissible in court, etc. in places where you reasonably expect people to be able to observe you. Driving down a public, taxpayer-funded road is the quintessential example of "no reasonable expectation of privacy."
> When you are outdoors, especially on public property, you generally have no "expectation of privacy."
what about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States?
> A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere ~ John Roberts
I do get the separation from private companies and government. I'm not arguing that. But this ruling was specifically about using Cell data collected by a private company being used to violate the privacy rights of citizens.
I don't think a private company harvesting data from public spaces and then reselling it is loop-hole enough to say "press rights > privacy rights". And there's precedence from the SCOTUS to support my belief on that.
I have no opinion one way or the other on restrictions on government use - whether they be judicial or legislative. I only care that the rights of private individuals and companies be preserved.
Carpenter didn't stop these companies from collecting historic cell site data, selling it privately, or giving it to police with a warrant.
My money would be on Axon. They at least have a claim to the "hold police accountable" angle with bodycams and less-lethal weapons. Compared with Flock's "we'll watch you and what're you gonna do about it"
Fuck them both.
NPR reported they are already moving in with a competing product .
https://www.npr.org/2026/08/22/nx-s1-5931446/flock-fallout-c...
Axon's had ALPRs long before Flock existed, and the data management story is completely different. Flock was essentially a data warehouse with dark patterns around sharing settings that led to a lot of places defaulting open. Axon started out in bodycams and other direct-investigative tools, and their data management is very much focused on "the agency keeps its data" -- by default, data sharing requests have to be individually approved. You can't just type a plate number in and get hits nationwide.
The question is: will Axon enshittify their mature products in order to pursue that panopticon money?
>The question is: will Axon enshittify their mature products in order to pursue that panopticon money?
It would be an historic first if they didn't
Same problems long term with better marketing.
>they will absolutely be legalized on some party line vote in the middle of the night.
Or they'll be legalized piecemeal and you'll get sneered at by the useful idiots for opposing each incremental step based on principal.
they'll find a particularly violent crime and use that as the strawman... "Oh you dont want this? well i guess you support violent immigrant mass murderers then!"
and then before you know it the state has implemented its mass surveillance apparatus across the entire country. And we though china's social credits were bad? just IMAGINE what those predatory tech bros are cookin up.
I mean, is that even a strawman? You can oppose mass AI surveillance and acknowledge the price of that is more crime.
Exactly. Freedom isn't free. If I have to pay for it with locks on my doors and having to be discerning about which truck I buy $5 steaks out of the back of lest my house get burgled or I get ripped off that seems like a pretty fair deal.
Better five guilty people free than one innocent in prison.
I'd like a national poll on this principle. My guess is a vast majority would disagree with it.
They could even start identifying "pre-crime" :)
Not as far fetched as it sounds even. Plenty of not-quite-a-crime things they could track if desired.
It's not far fetched. They usually dress it up in dogwhistle words like "at risk individuals" to make it seem like help rather than the threat it is.
Go look at what HN was saying and upvoting during the big data era. Endless scheming about orwellian ways to identify and "dispatch enforcement resources" on the pettiest thing. We're talking like buy a spool of romex get a letter in the mail from the .gov reminding you about code compliance. Or combing through small business financial to try and identify businesses that probably aren't high margin enough to be complying with all the rules. Real "I'm watching you" crap like that. And we're all supposed to go along with it because these people have our best interests at heard and/or mean well.
You take these same evil individuals and replace database integrations with pervasive cameras and AI and they will impoverish us all by grinding us under the thumb of government and say it's for our own good.
As a higher level comment points out, my fear is that Flock will end up being the straw man, happily torn down in favor of more outwardly palatable but privately onerous player(s).
> they will absolutely be legalized on some party line vote in the middle of the night.
What would be legalized? You realize that recording people in public is already legal, right? I'm puzzled where people are getting the idea that Flock is doing something illegal.
you're being deliberately daft. Its not the recording, its the surveillance dragnet with zero regulation or oversight that creates an instant dossier on whatever datapoints are searched for, by whomever decides to search for them who has paid for access.
Honestly the nuance isn't that intellectually taxing and having to explain it to people in the tech space is tiresome.
You're calling me daft yet you couldn't be bothered to answer the question. What is going the be legalized, as the above commenter wrote? What law is Flock breaking presently?
Like it or not recording and photographing people in public, then selling that information is not illegal. Paparazzi do it all the time. You can point a webcam out your window, run ALPR software on the video feed, and sell access to query that information. Nothing about that is illegal. If it is, then please reference the laws that prohibit this.
People talk about privacy laws being violated, but in general privacy laws do not cover public activity. Privacy laws mostly focus on protecting communications and activities carried out in private.
That will notion of an individual’s right to photograph a person in public held against the rights of the person being photographed, to conduct their business and affairs undisturbed, is likely to be challenged successfully before the Supreme Court when it can be shown a majority of people are under perpetual persistent technical surveillance.
You assume that some future Supreme Court case will rule that governments' use of Flock violated the Fifth Amendment, but at present Flock is violating now laws. Like I said in the my original reply: nothing is good to be legalized because nothing Flock is doing violates the law.
There's a big difference between "X is illegal" and "X is presently legal, but my prediction is that the Supreme Court will, in the future, rule that X is illegal."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
Pointing out the incorrect assumption that Flock is doing something illegal is not sealioning. There's a reason why none of the replies actually point to the law that Flock is supposedly breaking: because there isn't one.
Sealioning is a style of trolling, not a logical fallacy.
And what about pointing out the fact that Flock's activities are legal, contrary to what people claim, is trolling?
Exactly my thoughts. Flock has been brazen on so many things, that second-movers with a modicum of political savvy can come assuage all the major Flock-FUD, while in fact being significantly worse.
After watching the public flaying of Flock, they're certainly welcome to step into the spotlight next and convince the public that they're different.
This is still a useful first step. Once “flock” becomes eponymous and a toxic political football, it can be applied to all future companies who do the same thing.
The word “Flock” is quickly becoming toxic, in the future we’ll be able to use it as a shorthand for all companies of this type. e.g. if I call something a cleanex everyone knows what I’m talking about regardless of whether Cleanex the company actually made the item being referred to. Similarly we’ll be able to just say “flock camera” and everyone will know what it is regardless of who makes the camera.
I think the point you're trying to make is undermined slightly by the fact that the word I think you're looking for is "Kleenex" not Cleanex. It took me a while to figure out what you were talking about, and I did some searching online to make sure I wasn't missing something about "Cleanex" in particular
I still agree with you though ."Flock Camera" is very likely to become the general term for "public surveillance camera" and it will carry a negative weight.
Sometimes a misspelling is for avoiding social media vampire lawyers.
That's silly. :)
Well sure, but people still do it.
> and some other bad actor with political connections (my money would be on Palantir) will just quietly pick up where they left off while everyone's patting themselves on the back for defeating Flock
At that point, though, there will be a large group of people trained on how to defeat a company like Flock.
Related:
Flock CEO gets his house blurred out on Google Maps and Zillow
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49467750
this house? https://www.zumper.com/address/2588-winslow-dr-ne-atlanta-ga...
I have to say, I wish we lived in a society where tools like Flock were not problematic, due to abuse and other factors.
However, if we lived in such a society, we wouldn't want tools like Flock to begin with.
edit: to be clear, we are far too corrupt a society to have things like Flock. The point of my comment was this irony.
We do not need Flock in this current iteration of society.
In utopia, we would also not need Flock.
Privacy should be a human right.
Agreed. I now realize that my initial comment did not make my position clear.
We don’t _need_ many things. But there are real problems that it solves and solves better than anything else.
I feel like the best solution is very tightly regulating and auditing this technology so it can only be used to benefit society.
We are so far away from that even being a possibility.
We live in a world that is most corrupt and above the law, at the very top. Why would anyone trust that world? Trust is required for this technology to be willingly adopted.
> We don’t _need_ many things. But there are real problems that it solves and solves better than anything else.
I really don't believe this, nor do i believe any amount of regulation will actually prevent dipshit US cops from abusing it
> But there are real problems that it solves and solves better than anything else.
Like when a cop wants to stalk his ex-girlfriend, or ex-wife. Who else is gonna solve this problem if not flock?
That’s what the auditing needs to cover. Every search should be tied to a case number and the police putting in fake numbers to stalk people need to be dealt with.
> But there are real problems that it solves and solves better than anything else.
I disagree. What problems does it solve better than anything else? Any examples?
The best solution is to NOT LIVE IN A SURVEILLANCE STATE.
i have a RIGHT to privacy, and so does everyone on American soil. end of argument.
In public? I have an (actually-enumerated) First Amendment right to record you. End of argument.
Amendments don't protect you from physical harm by other citizens.
No, but my concealed pistol (that pesky second amendment) indeed does.
"If you exercise your rights, you will be hurt" - what a world to live in.
Depends on where you are. Defending against getting punched in the face by shooting them will get you thrown in prison a good portion of the time. Sometimes being a piece of shit should result in an ass whupping.
> Depends on where you are. Defending against getting punched in the face by shooting them will get you thrown in prison a good portion of the time.
Maybe in liberal California (where your 80 year old grandmother has a duty to retreat), thankfully not in my state. A punch to the face can be fatal, and you don't have to take one. Also, what an idiotic idea that one must assume that a "punch to the face" is all that is going to follow - and not a knife, head smashing on the ground, etc. This is frankly disgusting.
> Sometimes being a piece of shit should result in an ass whupping.
Got it, sometimes lawfully exercising your rights should mean you befall violence: I am glad I don't live in whatever shithole area you reside in. Perhaps we should extend this ideology to voting for the wrong candidate? - If you don't vote for who I want, it should result in an "ass whupping." Maybe your property: if you don't give me the contents of your wallet, it should result in an "ass whupping." This is bully mentality, and isn't tolerated in polite society.
Would a cop in your state tolerate a punch to the face? How would you expect him to respond?
I mean, if the guy is going to knife you you can shoot him. Feel free to release your clutched pearls.
The law is not moral license. You can legally do lots of disgusting things, like threaten to murder someone over a non-lethal engagement. Lots of those disgusting things warrant a nice punch in the face, and crying about it or declaring the moral high ground isn't going to move the needle. Why are we cry-bullying and hiding behind threat of lethal violence? Pretty ironic that someone who would criticize "liberal" states for not letting you get away with murder somehow thinks THAT remedy is more civilized than run of the mill combat. You can leave your Grandma at home, this isn't about her, this is about you deciding what is legally permissible is the only thing that matters.
Definitely "bully mentality" to think fisticuffs shouldn't result in unilateral execution by unhinged randos. Summary execution is the "civilized" response. Would-be murderers probably shouldn't be giving lectures online. You astonish me.
Good luck with your theories. Think twice before punching people, tough guy.
That a physical threat?
1) Except for specific things like third and fourth amendment rights, you don’t have a blanket “privacy” right, much less in public.
2) If your argument is that flock cameras are illegal, take them to court.
Everyone knows that the law is what really matters when it comes to prevailing in court. That's why there's no correlation between money spent on legal representation and the outcome of a ruling.
In that case, you agree with me that you don’t have a right to privacy for all of the reasons I already stated plus the additional one that you can’t afford to fight it in court.
I generally agree we have no constitutional right to privacy, but I wouldn't agree going to court against someone will result in their illegal behavior against you being remedied.
I have been researching family genealogy, and this alleged "privacy" has never actually been a thing at all, much less a "human right". First, it is well-known for anyone who lived in a small town, that every small town had rumor mills, gossip grapevines, and everyone knew everyone else's business, to the extent that there was a daily soap opera drama about relationships, and hard times and good times as well.
So this small-town attitude was imported when people urbanized, and a lot of neighborhoods had this sort of grapevine as well. Furthermore, the urban centers established some distinct "brother's keepers" practices.
There were the City Directories. Before telephones, these were the White Pages and Yellow Pages. Your name, your occupation, your address. All your neighbors and the businesses on your street. All indexed and alphabetized handily. Everyone in the city would know what you did; they all got subscribed to these directories. These are invaluable resources for researchers today, so that we can find folks and know their professions, sometimes on a year-by-year basis.
Census reports were taken every 10 years. These can be highly unreliable resources! The census takers had no way of verifying information or investigating answers! They always took citizens at face-value, so it was the practice of new immigrants and criminals, and others in the shadows, to conceal the truth from the census takers. But nevertheless, some facts were obvious, and so there was good information gathered, and released by USGov, about household compositions.
Also, the newspapers have been a crazy treasure trove of information since their inception. I was literally able to track the movements of some of my relatives, because the newspapers in each town would report when a family member, or friend, visited someone. They would say if they came by car, and how long they planned to stay, and where they're from and all that. So anyone traveling in the 1930s and 1940s and so on, their movements were never "private" and you had journalists who acted as Human License Plate Reporters, ensuring that the whole town knew you were hanging out for the weekend!
I noticed he requested to hide his house street view on google maps.
Sounds like he doesn't want to compromise his privacy in the name of safety
Our local governments are enabling Flock. Get involved in your local politics. Find out who made the decisions to put these cameras in the neighborhoods and hold them accountable. Until that happens they will just find another vendor if Flock folds. Just like Flock will find a new CEO if theirs is forced to resignation.
You should see how the datacenter companies operate. They have massive teams of lawyers bigger than the entire city staff threatening all sorts of lawsuits and even pressure cities into signing NDAs against discussing their negotiations with any other city. They have buckets of money and perks waiting to bribe a defector or fund an election campaign. Any old scummy company with a couple of billion dollars is frequently more sophisticated and powerful than a piddly local government.
I know this is an extremely hot take, but it's not the license plate reading service that bothers me.
A license plate is specifically a tracking number to identify a registered vehicle on a public road. The 4th Amendment gives you privacy inside of your car, but your car is not itself guaranteed privacy. Before Flock, police departments already had informally aggregated data from speed cameras, red light cameras, and toll booths. The distinction being that any evidence collected in such a way is purely circumstantial and still requires a warrant to investigate.
The big irony though of Flock plate readers is that because they're just tracking license plates, they're not actually that useful at solving meaningful crime. Realistically there are a small number of hit-and-runs that could be solved, and they can make certain investigations a bit shorter. And most of what we read about is officer directed stalking or harassment activities.
It's all of Flock's other advertised services that should really freak people out. The facial recognition, the audio scanners, the individual-level tracking databases - right now they're a fancy VIN lookup service. It's all the other stuff they're trying to sell departments on that are getting into really egregious 4th Amendment violations.
Recent WIRED[1] article goes in depth on this exact problem:
> Another prompt instructs the system to list everyone arrested more than twice in two years for “any offense,” exempting only narcotics arrests, and then says to map where those people live, retrieve the calls for service at their homes, and “do a workup on the top three individuals.” The prompt begins with everyone in the area who has an arrest record and ends with dossiers on three of them, chosen by the software.
> A “workup,” in Flock’s terminology, is a one-command background check. It starts with a name and a date of birth and returns what the department’s records and commercial data hold: vehicles, prior listings as a suspect, and, on a second screen, relatives, phone numbers, and online accounts.
This stuff is beyond the wildest fantasies of East Germany's Stasi, and it's going to be a whack-a-mole game dealing with all the baby Flocks that spring up if Flock itself can be shut down.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/flock-safety-os-investigate/
> This stuff is beyond the wildest fantasies of East Germany's Stasi
I feel like that's a bit of a false equivalency. The soviet secret police had surprisingly little hard evidence on anyone - part of the terror of these regimes is that they could act decisively with little more than a rumor or gossip and be free from scrutiny for any mistakes.
You're right: the current US regime has been gleefully weaponizing the legal system against political enemies, and the difference is that they don't care about scrutiny for mistakes because there have been zero consequences for anyone involved. The Soviets were at least somewhat worried about bad PR.
My thinking is if we can stop pervasive AI-driven surveillance we might be saved from a totalitarian regime who views The Handmaid's Tale as an instruction manual, and instead be able to settle for a run-of-the-mill corrupt authoritarian one.
Look up some of the Flock horror stories.
There's the one where a guy was surrounded by cops with their guns pointing at him because of a flock fuckup. He had a partial plate match (as in, some of the digits matched, but not an exact match) with a plate that was lost or stolen (as in the plate itself was stolen, not the car it was attached to.) That one went viral because the guy was an editor at a magazine driving a loaner car
There's this one where a lady was pulled out of her car at gunpoint after flock flagged her as a murder suspect. This happened twice in a weekend. She was never suspected of murder, it was a mistaken flag. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/aug/28/milwaukee-p...
Flock doesn't require evidence for an alert to be put in their system. If you have access you can apparently just put out an alert saying someone is a murder suspect, and some police department will repeatedly drag a woman out of her car until the media embarrasses them publicly
Right the US government definitely isn’t detaining people, sending them to foreign gulags or sending mobs of masked morons shooting innocent people like Pretti in broad daylight. We don’t even know the names of the ICE officers who did that to this day so they seem pretty free of scrutiny as well.
> everyone arrested more than twice in two years
Purely statistically, this is a good first-pass filter if you are looking for perps. Chance a random adult is arrested in a 8-year window: ~5%. Chance a former convict gets arrested in an 8-year window: ~49%. So, it is ~10x the rate. Makes sense, statistically, to start there.
https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/recidivism-am...
For a more modern example, China already has this and a lot more. The public seems largely supportive of it though because most street crimes stopped.
The potential for abuse is obviously massive, but the benefit to society is too.
They aren't just tracking license plates though. They're tracking people - let me explain. Their 'ALPR' cameras (purposefully misleading to call them ALPR btw) capture the footage and send it off to their servers where it's retained - building a long-term historical location history on every vehicle. Advanced analysis is performed on the data to provide features to their customers such as the ability to search for vehicles based on a description of its characteristics (no plate needed), real-time route prediction, location heatmaps, and identifying vehicles that travel together (convoy search). Here's the important part - data is also ingested into another service they run called 'Nova', which is essentially a people search tool that connects the vehicles they capture directly to people and their PII. Access to their platforms (Flock OS, Nova, etc.) is sold via a subscription to law enforcement where they can perform searches for individuals or vehicle whereabouts for any reason, without a warrant, and practically no oversight or regulations.
retained data means they arent just tracking vehicles
as the ml improves, its tracking absolutely everything. they could rwll you the migration paths of the local racoons and coyotes, for instance
Oh yes, I'm aware of this. And Flock - in the past - listed other things they were already tracking outside of vehicles.
So would you be okay with this is Flock demanded a warrant before showing police the information?
I, personally, would feel better about it.
Warrants (are supposed to) have judicial oversight and are limited in their scope. There's also a paper trail attached to information obtained from a warrant.
A warrant required for the searches should already be the bare minimum. If the constitution were being upheld it would have been a requirement from day 1. So, I suppose I would be 'okay' with this in a sense. What really irks me is the fact that Flock, Axon, etc. are acting almost exclusively as a proxy for the government to conduct mass surveillance that would otherwise be unconstitutional. If the government were directly doing the indiscriminate tracking these companies are, it would be unconstitutional even before a traditional "search" (query) of the data took place, so instead they pay a proxy (i.e. Flock, Axon, etc.) to perform the tracking for them and offer the searches as a subscription service.
When the mechanisms of government fail, violence is sometimes necessary and justified.