This map of Flock cameras[0] is pretty neat. It actually utilizes OpenStreetMap data. It was controversial but at some point in the last decade OSM decided to allow annotating surveillance cameras. You can add all sorts of characteristics including what they're mounted to and which direction they're facing. As well as the manufacturer which is what that map is based on.
The open-source project Every Door has been a really convenient on-the-go tool for contributing these annotations[1]
Could someone who’s been successful at getting these banned at the local level speak to how they did it?
(We’ve recently had some high-profile political fundraisers in my town. Our state’s FOIA is halfway powerful, and a few of us were considering publishing maps of the routes they and they security details took, to illustrate how these products compromise our safety. But that strikes me as more of a fun publicity stunt than anything that would force the county.)
I have been able to get them deactivated in two cities. They have not yet been physically removed but that is looking like a likely near-term outcome.
Flock has been a "side project" that's been eating about as many hours as a part-time job since late June. I have spoken at city council meetings in two cities, met individually with city councilors, met with a chief of police, presented to city councilors in Portland, am in almost daily conversations with ACLU Oregon, have received legal advice from EFF, done numerous media interviews, and I have an upcoming presentation to the state Senate Judiciary Committee. I may also be one of the reasons that Ron Wyden's office investigated Flock more carefully over the Summer and recently released a letter suggesting that cities terminate their relationship with the company.
All of which is to say I've been in it for a while now and have had some wins.
Good and bad news: it's a lot easier to fight it now than it was in June, but it's still going to take more effort than you probably imagine.
You'll need a team. I'm one member of a community working group. We have a core group of about a half-dozen active organizers. We have filed (and paid thousands in fees for) tons of public records requests, done a lot of community organizing and outreach, built partnerships with adjacent activist organizations, and done original technical research.
There are a couple of different strategies to pursue that can kick these things out of a community. My recommendation is to find the one that you like best, and find other people that like other ones, and pursue them in parallel.
Depending on your local police department, you may find them to be surprisingly cooperative, or you may find that they dig in and start putting in an equal amount of effort to block yours. I've had both. Odds are that your city councilors are not aware at all of what Flock is or how it works, so your first step is to raise awareness. I strongly recommend starting with an approach that makes you seem like a reasonable, honest, and reliable member of your community.
I realize this comment isn't super helpful by itself. I'm a bit distracted at the moment and I don't think I could figure out how to write a helpful, comprehensive, and yet concise comment here on this. I need to put together an info packet for people that want to get efforts like this one started in their own community. In the meanwhile, you should be able to email contact@eyesoffeugene.org and I'm happy to provide advice and assistance to anyone that wants to take this up in their city.
> Would you be open to consulting for a group that's trying to do the same in west Wyoming?
Absolutely!
Re: Strategies
- Public records requests (aka FOIAs, though FOIA is technically for federal stuff): this has been a big one for us. File a request for the contract, a request for the locations, a request for communications, requests for the network audit, and more. PRRs take practice, but I can put you in touch with someone that's become an expert at them. Some requests may come with price tags attached and in some cases they can be expensive. Usually that means either the agency is fighting you or something in the request needs to be reworded.
- Comms: set up a site (go with something quick and easy for multiple people to use), we've had good luck setting up a community chat on Signal (now with almost 100 participants). I've spent a pile of hours just assembling different slide decks that digest lots of Flock info into smaller bits for people learning about it for the first time.
- Show up: things got rolling here when a couple of people used the public comment period at local city council meetings. Local media often monitor city council meetings, and if you're a new face and you're saying something interesting, there may be a brief interview afterward.
- Gather intelligence: we've gotten to know our local politicians pretty well. You'll want to keep some notes on where everyone stands on it, who can be moved, who prefers individual meetings, talking points they may be responsive to.
- Engage with other local activist groups. Flock s a problem that affects people with lots of different political opinions.
- Try meeting with your local police department chief and just initiate a conversation about it. They may not be as pro-Flock as you'd expect. You at least want to figure out where they stand on it and let them see you as not a direct opponent from the get-go.
- Make contact with your local chapter of the ACLU. In our case, they've filed a lawsuit on our behalf over a public records request that the city refused to fulfill and the county DA denied on appeal.
- Write lots of emails to local officials, offer to meet them for coffee. They can be hard to reach initially, but once you get that initial meeting, if it goes well, they know who you are and they'll answer your texts. We are now having frequent text chats with city councilors and police commissioners and even state legislators.
This is all just off the top of my head real quick, I am probably forgetting at least one important strategy. But each of these can take a lot of time and each benefits from different skill sets, so that's where having a small group of people is really helpful.
Rather than trying to set up a hierarchical, official organization, we decided early on to just run as an ad-hoc informal "working group", and each of us would just pick up whatever tasks we were most interested in. That has worked out really well.
Cards on the table that I was not a full-throated supporter of cancelling our Flock contract, for complicated reasons, but past that I'll take a fair bit of credit for the harm-reduction work we did, which ultimately created the procedural tracks we used to kill the contract.
Short answer for how we did it: message board nerding.
You're interested in getting the cameras taken down in a Wyoming muni. One advantage we had in Oak Park that you might not in WY is that our cost function priced bogus stops of Black drivers very high. So, if I was strategizing killing cameras in a major metro suburb, my strategy would be:
(1) Create procedural rails to collect your own transparency data on stops.
(2) Do the analysis to trace "real" stops to crimes meaningful to your muni (for us: enforcing failure-to-appear warrants for neighboring suburbs was not high-value work for OPPD, so many of the "legit" stops had negative value).
(3) You'll be left with some subset of real crimes cameras were involved with, and in only a subset of those will the cameras have been meaningful.
One thing that complicates Flock deployments in Illinois is that they depend on the ISP LEADS database as their hotlist of stolen vehicles, and LEADS is not maintained well enough to use as a real-time information source (or even a week-by-week granular source), so we had a bunch of bogus stops.
A super important thing I think everybody should know about Flock cameras:
You do not in fact need to be enrolled in Flock's sharing system to get data from neighboring muni cameras. In fact, I think Flock even has a product you can buy that just gives you access to sharing data without even owning cameras.
Since "we need to share our data to get access to other muni's data" is the only reason to have sharing enabled on these things, it should be pretty easy, as a political lift, to turn sharing off.
Why would a stop for an outstanding warrant have negative value for your community? If word got out that OPPD will come down hard on anyone with warrants, perhaps people with warrants would stay away from your community. I'm not sure I see the downside; deterrence is a good thing.
Analogy: criminals know Target stores have a policy to prosecute all shoplifters, so when there was still a shoplifting subreddit that fact would be regularly trotted out and criminals were warned by their peers (the best kind of testimonial) to stay away. I would love it if my neighborhood had that reputation.
A failure to appear warrant is generally someone not showing up to court to pay a traffic ticket. It's essentially municipal debt collection work. I'm not saying it's bad to catch people with outstanding warrants; i'm saying that OPPD curbing a car and making an arrest has a simple logistical cost, and that cost swamps the minuscule value of helping a neighboring suburb collect ticket revenue.
Our police have real work to do. If we had a special magic beepy device in all the police cruisers that lit up when someone with an outstanding warrant drove past, we would not prioritize that enforcement work to the exclusion of the real work. But since OPPD doesn't know that they're going to end up burning 5 hours on a failure-to-appear warrant when they curb a car on a Flock alert, that's what Flock essentially had us doing.
I honestly think this argument is probably pretty portable to a lot of different municipalities. It's not a function of anything Flock itself deliberately does, but rather a simple function of pretextual or preemptive stops on cars: you are probably going to end up making a whole bunch of failure-to-appear arrests. And I think in pretty much every community where killing camera contracts is on the table, failure-to-appear enforcement will be perceived as net-negative, a distraction from preventing serious crime.
The thing I like about this argument is that it's insensitive to people's priors about law enforcement. Whether or not you like your PD (I very much like OPPD), this argument should have weight!
The key observation here, again, is that any arrest has a very high fixed cost.
I don't know, I think paying your traffic tickets is about the least you can do downstream of very occasionally being caught for habitual dangerous driving behavior. Breaking the "municipal debt collection" breaks the deterrent effect of traffic tickets.
I agree that in the abstract maybe there are better things some cops could be doing, but it seems like a vaguely reasonable use of some traffic enforcement resources. It's not like this taking away from murder investigations.
There's a prisoner's dilemma defecting thing going on here, right? You'd want neighboring municipalities to enforce warrants out of Oak Park.
It literally does take away from violent crime investigation! Remember, I'm not making a moral argument about the legitimacy of traffic fines. In fact, that's one of our big issues in Oak Park. I'm saying that police departments make prioritization decisions, and Flock cameras structurally undo those decisions by throwing alerts on cars (which would not otherwise have been curbed) that produce warrant arrests.
The key thing to understand is that an arrest eats half an OPPD officer's work day, so if OPPD is arresting someone, you want the juice to be worth the squeeze.
Your traffic cops would otherwise be participating in murder investigations? My understanding is that these are different specializations and they don't overlap.
No real objection to "the data source is bad," but I think the solution there is improve the data source rather than willful blindness.
I didn't say "murder investigations". We have a very small number of detectives, who do not conduct traffic stops, but the overwhelming majority of our force (and of all the police work done here) is patrol, all of which do conduct stops.
We don't control this data! It's good to want things, but whether or not you think it's good that LEADS isn't good enough for real-time enforcement, it is not.
I think lots of upstanding citizens have forgotten to pay a ticket at some point (as in, I've done it, as have some other people i know, and none of us are criminals or even dangerous drivers. My ticket was for a one-day expired license plate sticker, btw). The cop doesn't even know from the license plate that the person driving is the owner of the car, and so they don't even know that the driver actually has a warrant until after they're stopped.
Mr. Flock Person, how about a feature request to alert only on 'interesting' warrants? I wonder if that's even possible — it might be a binary flag on the plate data. Hm. If so, that would be a serious bummer and something perhaps the legislature should look into remedying (such a change would require funding after all). A will-extradite flag seems like it would be useful.
I know there's Flock staff commenting on this thread (which is great, regardless of how you feel about Flock) but just for context: Flock alerts in Chicagoland municipalities are driven by LEADS and the lookups are on license plates, not people, so they can't actually filter out failure-to-appear stops.
Right, that's why I was thinking the legislature would have to get involved. An extension to available license plate data would require approval and funding.
I think law enforcement everywhere in the US would like a way to make ALPR more useful for targeting higher risk offenders and leave the revenue generation warrants to times when the subject is being arrested for a different offense. Such an extension would maximize the utility of the investment that's already been made in ALPR hardware, software, and services.
Why do you think this would work? First, even where Flock data is FOIA-able, raw camera feed data probably isn't ("probably" because I don't know the law in your state, just Illinois). Second, what do you think you'd find?
It's not just Flock anymore. Another Y Combinator startup, Blissway has been putting cameras in a lot of places in Colorado, and you can't tell me it's not going to be used for exactly the same shit.
Ooof. When I heard "android things" I knew they had a problem.
It was a google project that had little adoption and was killed only a few years after it was announced (so, better than average for google, then?).
I wonder what they estimate the "replace with newer" cost to be versus the "figure out how to deploy $modernAndroid fleet wide" costs. Bonus points if you express it as a percentage of CEO's compensation / company wide revenue.
I was recently in Atlanta GA for work and noticed these cameras were EVERYWHERE! They even have white cars that randomly drive the streets with a camera on each corner of the car, plus one on the roof. 5 total on one car!!!
I was wondering why Atlanta was so dystopian and creepy, then I Googled the guy posting here, Garrett Langley.
It makes sense now.
"Flock was founded in 2017. It was co-founded by three Georgia Tech alumni:
Garrett Langley (chief executive officer),
Paige Todd (chief people officer), and
Matt Feury (chief technology officer)."
Should've included a bit more but the title does a good job:
The Cameras Tracking You Are a Security Nightmare
It's pretty consistent across camera tracking companies. Facial recognition more broadly, like Clearview AI as well. I don't have a unifying theory other than it's a very obvious business model that naturally accrues power as well. Not unlike... selling drugs.
The model is not entirely unhelpful: selling better drugs might be one of the few practical solutions here. If cameras have undeniably visible benefits for private companies and public safety (I think they ultimately will), then the question is how to build them in a way that avoids accrual of centralized power while providing the benefits. You can attack that problem from a lot of angles, but at the moment it is undeniably hard to build video sensing in a way that doesn't rely on centralized (computing) power.
Not all of them. At my workplace (the parent company, actually), security and privacy are among the highest priorities.
Competing with companies that don’t share these values is a “slow path.”
For instance, one of the most common requests is integrating our VMS with Chinese cameras, because of cost. While we’ve done it in the past, using a hardware device to prevent unexpected protocol communication, our CEO concluded that it was ethically questionable given our principles.
TLDR: The feature was dropped, and you can imagine that this decision had a significant impact on sales.
Assuming that one is in favor of the use of these cameras, the security issues seem like they are a big problem. The leaking of police officer personal data and locations was pretty egregious.
Would love to hear from one of the founders on what they are doing to address that.
These cameras are showing up everywhere in my state. It's creepy. I had no idea what they were, and now suddenly they're at every intersection, gas station, you name it.
I don't like that the government is tracking everyone's movements so openly. I knew they were doing this with cell phone data, but that wasn't so brazen.
Here in Austin, the city council no longer allows Flock ALPR's (automated license plate readers) on city streets, but Home Depot and other businesses still use them in their parking lots, and they scan your vehicle license plate every time you enter and exit the premises. Flock sells its data to ICE and law enforcement.
Plus they'll position them close to an intersection in the parking lot of a business so they can get around something like the restriction Austin put in.
I don't like that this is the case, but you understand that a pretty huge fraction of the country doesn't share your set of political premises that providing data for immigration enforcement is unethical, right? (I do, but that shouldn't matter for the analysis.)
It seems weird to me to hyperfocus on Flock's role here rather than the role your own local municipalities play in deciding how to configure these things. Not sharing with ICE is apparently quite doable? At least to the point of requiring a court order to get access to the data, which is a vulnerability all online cameras share.
As the CEO of Flock, don't you feel you have more information to offer this community outside of the "we do not sell data" statement you've made over and over? The fact that you do not engage here in the ethical aspects of your product doesn't look good for you and only deepens suspicion that something darker is going on behind your doors.
The comment adjacent to mine links to several findings, including from the EFF, demonstrating doubt on your assertions here. Specifically the case of Texas using Flock data outside of their jurisdiction (on a national level even) to use against abortion seekers. You have no substantial comments to make on those or any of the other active discussions that have spawned on this platform over the past year? You're obviously reading them, yet you only remain "consistent" on a technicality.
What steps is Flock taking to address the privacy overreach? Do you have data sharing agreements with Palantir? If so, do they respect the same geofencing properties that your clients supposedly have full control over?
He's not arguing that the data isn't shared. He's saying that they don't sell it. Local PDs generally want to share their data with other law enforcement agencies.
That is irrelevant to my comment. Yes, it's abundantly clear what he's saying, he's said it so many times already, I don't need to read it again. I'm asking why he's not contributing more to the actual discussions surrounding his product instead.
Every community in the nation that is home to Flock cameras should look at the user agreement between their police department (or other Flock customers) and the company, to see whether it contains a clause stating that the customer “hereby grants Flock” a “worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free free right and license” to “disclose the Agency Data… for investigative purposes.” This is the language that will govern in a community unless a department demands changes to the standard user agreement that Flock offers. That is something we absolutely urge any agencies doing business with Flock to do — and, the ACLU of Massachusetts found, is exactly what the Boston police department did.
---
What assurance does any member of the public have that your company does not and will not ever share data to which you claim a "worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free free right and license" to? Are you saying that the "customer" has the ability to choose a "do not share" flag or something? What happens when they flip that flag at some point in the future? What redress does a victim have if you share data you did not, at that point in time, have permission to share?
You are selling tools that have zero upside and a lot of downsides and that are used for structural violation of the privacy of citizens. Don't hide behind that you're trying to help people stay safe, that is not what you are doing and if you believe that you can take credit for the upsides then you really should take responsibility for the downsides.
I'm looking for convincing decoy ALPR cameras because I don't think my HOA will go for a real setup, and I've got concerns over the product's security. I want the appearance of surveillance if I can't get the real thing. Being on a Flock/ALPR tracking app/site would be a huge win.
There is no benefit to signaling one's virtue in this scenario. It's like having a sign in your yard that says "Proudly Gun-Free Household".
The problem isn't zero upside, as other commenters have pointed out. The cameras have legitimate, lawful, and useful purposes. You will not gain any traction with the public or with lawmakers as long as your arguments ignore that reality.
The problem is that the downside is unbounded.
We clearly don't have the control over our governments, in either direction or degree, that would be needed to ensure that the unbounded downside of ubiquitous networked cameras won't manifest itself.
This is part of the problem with Flock, IMO. Lack of adherence to or support of norms. Psychopathy actualized as a corporation.
The societal impact of disruption of trust, of personal privacy, is under-appreciated by the corporation. It's concerned with winning profit.
(Meta) It's an inspecific argument I'm lazily laying out, yes, however the problem is ridiculously obvious.
We should not have to ask to be respected, and here we are.
Democratic decline (both the systems and participation in), truth, self respect/understanding of one's own rights ... those qualities are dying at the relentless toxic, ethically under-explored capitalization of our laws and resources. (Especially USA, compare to corporate social responsibility countries, I suspect)
Tech disruption is amazing to watch, and participate in, like a fire consuming the forest. "But what about the children?"
Seems like a broad dismissal of the claim made upthread ("Flock sells its data to ICE and law enforcement"). Why do you think it is excessively specific?
Because the specific part here is selling the data and them doing it.
Flock does not sell data, they willingly give it away for free. And, technically, they don't do it - their customers do, and Flock knows and lets them.
Personally, in my view, this is worse. But they don't specifically sell data.
"Alexro, there are clear and large signs about the cameras at the entrance to our neighborhoods.
"Our neighborhoods are not large public roads, they are typically 100-400 home communities. You would never have to enter the community."
Now, it's clear that the cameras are not always obviously marked, they are not always in small communities, and they are often now on public thoroughfares. i go past at least one every day and it is not within a subdivision, rather it's on a main thoroughfare. It is marked, but a sign that is readable at 5 MPH is not necessarily readable at 35 MPH. It doesn't help to mark it "Flock" because I don't know who it is for.
Presumably, someone who has permission to the data can use it for legitimate investigations. Or they can use it for illicit investigations. Or share it with others for their own investigations. Or exchange it for other data they care about. And since we're not the "customer", what can we do about it? We're the target.
did you know that flock has a data sharing contract with ring cameras? amazon’s panopticon is much larger. i believe it is on by default and users have to manually opt out, but i don’t have a ring camera to verify.
Only sharing specific clips is opt-in¹, but the program and its notifications are on by default. Maybe not surprisingly, consumers aren't asked if they want to participate, and the option is buried enough that most people will never see it.
¹ I'm being generous here. Police can still obtain Ring footage via warrants or "emergency" requests that don’t involve the user choosing to share anything.
hey, while I have you here Mr CEO, why are you comfortable allowing abusive cops the tech to stalk and harass former partners, I've met women that had ex husbands in the FBI that kept chasing them across country to continue the abuse and your camera systems help enable those acts.
This map of Flock cameras[0] is pretty neat. It actually utilizes OpenStreetMap data. It was controversial but at some point in the last decade OSM decided to allow annotating surveillance cameras. You can add all sorts of characteristics including what they're mounted to and which direction they're facing. As well as the manufacturer which is what that map is based on.
The open-source project Every Door has been a really convenient on-the-go tool for contributing these annotations[1]
[0] https://banishbigbrother.com/flock-camera-map/
[1] https://every-door.app/
"Find Nearby Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR)" (70 comments), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487452
Adversarial computer vision and DIY OSS $250 RPi Hailo ALPR (2M views), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ
"Tire Pressure Sensor IDs: Why, Where and When (2015)" (30 comments), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45490202
Could someone who’s been successful at getting these banned at the local level speak to how they did it?
(We’ve recently had some high-profile political fundraisers in my town. Our state’s FOIA is halfway powerful, and a few of us were considering publishing maps of the routes they and they security details took, to illustrate how these products compromise our safety. But that strikes me as more of a fun publicity stunt than anything that would force the county.)
I have been able to get them deactivated in two cities. They have not yet been physically removed but that is looking like a likely near-term outcome.
Flock has been a "side project" that's been eating about as many hours as a part-time job since late June. I have spoken at city council meetings in two cities, met individually with city councilors, met with a chief of police, presented to city councilors in Portland, am in almost daily conversations with ACLU Oregon, have received legal advice from EFF, done numerous media interviews, and I have an upcoming presentation to the state Senate Judiciary Committee. I may also be one of the reasons that Ron Wyden's office investigated Flock more carefully over the Summer and recently released a letter suggesting that cities terminate their relationship with the company.
All of which is to say I've been in it for a while now and have had some wins.
Good and bad news: it's a lot easier to fight it now than it was in June, but it's still going to take more effort than you probably imagine.
You'll need a team. I'm one member of a community working group. We have a core group of about a half-dozen active organizers. We have filed (and paid thousands in fees for) tons of public records requests, done a lot of community organizing and outreach, built partnerships with adjacent activist organizations, and done original technical research.
There are a couple of different strategies to pursue that can kick these things out of a community. My recommendation is to find the one that you like best, and find other people that like other ones, and pursue them in parallel.
Depending on your local police department, you may find them to be surprisingly cooperative, or you may find that they dig in and start putting in an equal amount of effort to block yours. I've had both. Odds are that your city councilors are not aware at all of what Flock is or how it works, so your first step is to raise awareness. I strongly recommend starting with an approach that makes you seem like a reasonable, honest, and reliable member of your community.
I realize this comment isn't super helpful by itself. I'm a bit distracted at the moment and I don't think I could figure out how to write a helpful, comprehensive, and yet concise comment here on this. I need to put together an info packet for people that want to get efforts like this one started in their own community. In the meanwhile, you should be able to email contact@eyesoffeugene.org and I'm happy to provide advice and assistance to anyone that wants to take this up in their city.
Would you be open to consulting for a group that's trying to do the same in west Wyoming?
> There are a couple of different strategies to pursue that can kick these things out of a community
Would love to hear more about these, even if it's just a wall of links or brief thoughts.
> Would you be open to consulting for a group that's trying to do the same in west Wyoming?
Absolutely!
Re: Strategies
- Public records requests (aka FOIAs, though FOIA is technically for federal stuff): this has been a big one for us. File a request for the contract, a request for the locations, a request for communications, requests for the network audit, and more. PRRs take practice, but I can put you in touch with someone that's become an expert at them. Some requests may come with price tags attached and in some cases they can be expensive. Usually that means either the agency is fighting you or something in the request needs to be reworded.
- Comms: set up a site (go with something quick and easy for multiple people to use), we've had good luck setting up a community chat on Signal (now with almost 100 participants). I've spent a pile of hours just assembling different slide decks that digest lots of Flock info into smaller bits for people learning about it for the first time.
- Show up: things got rolling here when a couple of people used the public comment period at local city council meetings. Local media often monitor city council meetings, and if you're a new face and you're saying something interesting, there may be a brief interview afterward.
- Gather intelligence: we've gotten to know our local politicians pretty well. You'll want to keep some notes on where everyone stands on it, who can be moved, who prefers individual meetings, talking points they may be responsive to.
- Engage with other local activist groups. Flock s a problem that affects people with lots of different political opinions.
- Try meeting with your local police department chief and just initiate a conversation about it. They may not be as pro-Flock as you'd expect. You at least want to figure out where they stand on it and let them see you as not a direct opponent from the get-go.
- Make contact with your local chapter of the ACLU. In our case, they've filed a lawsuit on our behalf over a public records request that the city refused to fulfill and the county DA denied on appeal.
- Write lots of emails to local officials, offer to meet them for coffee. They can be hard to reach initially, but once you get that initial meeting, if it goes well, they know who you are and they'll answer your texts. We are now having frequent text chats with city councilors and police commissioners and even state legislators.
This is all just off the top of my head real quick, I am probably forgetting at least one important strategy. But each of these can take a lot of time and each benefits from different skill sets, so that's where having a small group of people is really helpful.
Rather than trying to set up a hierarchical, official organization, we decided early on to just run as an ad-hoc informal "working group", and each of us would just pick up whatever tasks we were most interested in. That has worked out really well.
I've written about how we did it in Oak Park, IL:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40227280
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41927777
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45506690
Cards on the table that I was not a full-throated supporter of cancelling our Flock contract, for complicated reasons, but past that I'll take a fair bit of credit for the harm-reduction work we did, which ultimately created the procedural tracks we used to kill the contract.
Short answer for how we did it: message board nerding.
You're interested in getting the cameras taken down in a Wyoming muni. One advantage we had in Oak Park that you might not in WY is that our cost function priced bogus stops of Black drivers very high. So, if I was strategizing killing cameras in a major metro suburb, my strategy would be:
(1) Create procedural rails to collect your own transparency data on stops.
(2) Do the analysis to trace "real" stops to crimes meaningful to your muni (for us: enforcing failure-to-appear warrants for neighboring suburbs was not high-value work for OPPD, so many of the "legit" stops had negative value).
(3) You'll be left with some subset of real crimes cameras were involved with, and in only a subset of those will the cameras have been meaningful.
One thing that complicates Flock deployments in Illinois is that they depend on the ISP LEADS database as their hotlist of stolen vehicles, and LEADS is not maintained well enough to use as a real-time information source (or even a week-by-week granular source), so we had a bunch of bogus stops.
A super important thing I think everybody should know about Flock cameras:
You do not in fact need to be enrolled in Flock's sharing system to get data from neighboring muni cameras. In fact, I think Flock even has a product you can buy that just gives you access to sharing data without even owning cameras.
Since "we need to share our data to get access to other muni's data" is the only reason to have sharing enabled on these things, it should be pretty easy, as a political lift, to turn sharing off.
Why would a stop for an outstanding warrant have negative value for your community? If word got out that OPPD will come down hard on anyone with warrants, perhaps people with warrants would stay away from your community. I'm not sure I see the downside; deterrence is a good thing.
Analogy: criminals know Target stores have a policy to prosecute all shoplifters, so when there was still a shoplifting subreddit that fact would be regularly trotted out and criminals were warned by their peers (the best kind of testimonial) to stay away. I would love it if my neighborhood had that reputation.
A failure to appear warrant is generally someone not showing up to court to pay a traffic ticket. It's essentially municipal debt collection work. I'm not saying it's bad to catch people with outstanding warrants; i'm saying that OPPD curbing a car and making an arrest has a simple logistical cost, and that cost swamps the minuscule value of helping a neighboring suburb collect ticket revenue.
Our police have real work to do. If we had a special magic beepy device in all the police cruisers that lit up when someone with an outstanding warrant drove past, we would not prioritize that enforcement work to the exclusion of the real work. But since OPPD doesn't know that they're going to end up burning 5 hours on a failure-to-appear warrant when they curb a car on a Flock alert, that's what Flock essentially had us doing.
I honestly think this argument is probably pretty portable to a lot of different municipalities. It's not a function of anything Flock itself deliberately does, but rather a simple function of pretextual or preemptive stops on cars: you are probably going to end up making a whole bunch of failure-to-appear arrests. And I think in pretty much every community where killing camera contracts is on the table, failure-to-appear enforcement will be perceived as net-negative, a distraction from preventing serious crime.
The thing I like about this argument is that it's insensitive to people's priors about law enforcement. Whether or not you like your PD (I very much like OPPD), this argument should have weight!
The key observation here, again, is that any arrest has a very high fixed cost.
I don't know, I think paying your traffic tickets is about the least you can do downstream of very occasionally being caught for habitual dangerous driving behavior. Breaking the "municipal debt collection" breaks the deterrent effect of traffic tickets.
I agree that in the abstract maybe there are better things some cops could be doing, but it seems like a vaguely reasonable use of some traffic enforcement resources. It's not like this taking away from murder investigations.
There's a prisoner's dilemma defecting thing going on here, right? You'd want neighboring municipalities to enforce warrants out of Oak Park.
It literally does take away from violent crime investigation! Remember, I'm not making a moral argument about the legitimacy of traffic fines. In fact, that's one of our big issues in Oak Park. I'm saying that police departments make prioritization decisions, and Flock cameras structurally undo those decisions by throwing alerts on cars (which would not otherwise have been curbed) that produce warrant arrests.
The key thing to understand is that an arrest eats half an OPPD officer's work day, so if OPPD is arresting someone, you want the juice to be worth the squeeze.
Your traffic cops would otherwise be participating in murder investigations? My understanding is that these are different specializations and they don't overlap.
No real objection to "the data source is bad," but I think the solution there is improve the data source rather than willful blindness.
I didn't say "murder investigations". We have a very small number of detectives, who do not conduct traffic stops, but the overwhelming majority of our force (and of all the police work done here) is patrol, all of which do conduct stops.
We don't control this data! It's good to want things, but whether or not you think it's good that LEADS isn't good enough for real-time enforcement, it is not.
I think lots of upstanding citizens have forgotten to pay a ticket at some point (as in, I've done it, as have some other people i know, and none of us are criminals or even dangerous drivers. My ticket was for a one-day expired license plate sticker, btw). The cop doesn't even know from the license plate that the person driving is the owner of the car, and so they don't even know that the driver actually has a warrant until after they're stopped.
That's interesting, and makes sense.
Mr. Flock Person, how about a feature request to alert only on 'interesting' warrants? I wonder if that's even possible — it might be a binary flag on the plate data. Hm. If so, that would be a serious bummer and something perhaps the legislature should look into remedying (such a change would require funding after all). A will-extradite flag seems like it would be useful.
I know there's Flock staff commenting on this thread (which is great, regardless of how you feel about Flock) but just for context: Flock alerts in Chicagoland municipalities are driven by LEADS and the lookups are on license plates, not people, so they can't actually filter out failure-to-appear stops.
Right, that's why I was thinking the legislature would have to get involved. An extension to available license plate data would require approval and funding.
I think law enforcement everywhere in the US would like a way to make ALPR more useful for targeting higher risk offenders and leave the revenue generation warrants to times when the subject is being arrested for a different offense. Such an extension would maximize the utility of the investment that's already been made in ALPR hardware, software, and services.
This is the most serious effort I've seen:
https://ij.org/press-release/judge-rules-lawsuit-challenging...
Not exactly trying to get new legislation passed but working within the courts to set some boundaries.
This article might point to a way: https://neuburger.substack.com/p/cities-panic-over-having-to...
request every shot taken outside of police depts and compile a list of private plate numbers for all the cops, watch shit change hella fast
Why do you think this would work? First, even where Flock data is FOIA-able, raw camera feed data probably isn't ("probably" because I don't know the law in your state, just Illinois). Second, what do you think you'd find?
It's not just Flock anymore. Another Y Combinator startup, Blissway has been putting cameras in a lot of places in Colorado, and you can't tell me it's not going to be used for exactly the same shit.
Would the local laws banning Flock also apply to Blissway?
Ooof. When I heard "android things" I knew they had a problem. It was a google project that had little adoption and was killed only a few years after it was announced (so, better than average for google, then?).
I wonder what they estimate the "replace with newer" cost to be versus the "figure out how to deploy $modernAndroid fleet wide" costs. Bonus points if you express it as a percentage of CEO's compensation / company wide revenue.
I was recently in Atlanta GA for work and noticed these cameras were EVERYWHERE! They even have white cars that randomly drive the streets with a camera on each corner of the car, plus one on the roof. 5 total on one car!!!
I was wondering why Atlanta was so dystopian and creepy, then I Googled the guy posting here, Garrett Langley. It makes sense now.
"Flock was founded in 2017. It was co-founded by three Georgia Tech alumni:
Garrett Langley (chief executive officer), Paige Todd (chief people officer), and Matt Feury (chief technology officer)."
The camera companies always end up having a lot in common:
https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/2123068verkadac...
…what’s the commonality?
Should've included a bit more but the title does a good job:
It's pretty consistent across camera tracking companies. Facial recognition more broadly, like Clearview AI as well. I don't have a unifying theory other than it's a very obvious business model that naturally accrues power as well. Not unlike... selling drugs.The model is not entirely unhelpful: selling better drugs might be one of the few practical solutions here. If cameras have undeniably visible benefits for private companies and public safety (I think they ultimately will), then the question is how to build them in a way that avoids accrual of centralized power while providing the benefits. You can attack that problem from a lot of angles, but at the moment it is undeniably hard to build video sensing in a way that doesn't rely on centralized (computing) power.
Will public safety improve or will big brother have a stronger grip on your digital life?
lack of security it looks like
Not all of them. At my workplace (the parent company, actually), security and privacy are among the highest priorities.
Competing with companies that don’t share these values is a “slow path.”
For instance, one of the most common requests is integrating our VMS with Chinese cameras, because of cost. While we’ve done it in the past, using a hardware device to prevent unexpected protocol communication, our CEO concluded that it was ethically questionable given our principles.
TLDR: The feature was dropped, and you can imagine that this decision had a significant impact on sales.
Pretty bold move, honestly.
Because of things like that, that's why I stay.
Assuming that one is in favor of the use of these cameras, the security issues seem like they are a big problem. The leaking of police officer personal data and locations was pretty egregious.
Would love to hear from one of the founders on what they are doing to address that.
Make Classwarfare MAD Again
We're talking about cameras my dude. They see everybody.
not everybody sees what the cameras see, what's your point
I'll just leave this one here
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15075384
These cameras are showing up everywhere in my state. It's creepy. I had no idea what they were, and now suddenly they're at every intersection, gas station, you name it.
I don't like that the government is tracking everyone's movements so openly. I knew they were doing this with cell phone data, but that wasn't so brazen.
Here in Austin, the city council no longer allows Flock ALPR's (automated license plate readers) on city streets, but Home Depot and other businesses still use them in their parking lots, and they scan your vehicle license plate every time you enter and exit the premises. Flock sells its data to ICE and law enforcement.
Plus they'll position them close to an intersection in the parking lot of a business so they can get around something like the restriction Austin put in.
> they'll position them close to an intersection
Does Flock control where the cameras are positioned?
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Correct. Flock sells cameras and platform access, but gives data from their shared, nationwide surveillance utility to ICE and law enforcement.
https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-massachus...
https://www.404media.co/ice-taps-into-nationwide-ai-enabled-...
https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/surveillance-com...
I don't like that this is the case, but you understand that a pretty huge fraction of the country doesn't share your set of political premises that providing data for immigration enforcement is unethical, right? (I do, but that shouldn't matter for the analysis.)
It seems weird to me to hyperfocus on Flock's role here rather than the role your own local municipalities play in deciding how to configure these things. Not sharing with ICE is apparently quite doable? At least to the point of requiring a court order to get access to the data, which is a vulnerability all online cameras share.
Later
s/company/country, thanks for the correction!
Did you mean country?
>but gives data from their shared, nationwide surveillance utility to ICE and law enforcement
I don't think anyone with a network like that can not "give" the contents to the feds for very long without drawing ire.
Ah yeah the poor businessmen, god forbid they draw ire. Much better to just act unethically.
As the CEO of Flock, don't you feel you have more information to offer this community outside of the "we do not sell data" statement you've made over and over? The fact that you do not engage here in the ethical aspects of your product doesn't look good for you and only deepens suspicion that something darker is going on behind your doors.
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The comment adjacent to mine links to several findings, including from the EFF, demonstrating doubt on your assertions here. Specifically the case of Texas using Flock data outside of their jurisdiction (on a national level even) to use against abortion seekers. You have no substantial comments to make on those or any of the other active discussions that have spawned on this platform over the past year? You're obviously reading them, yet you only remain "consistent" on a technicality.
What steps is Flock taking to address the privacy overreach? Do you have data sharing agreements with Palantir? If so, do they respect the same geofencing properties that your clients supposedly have full control over?
He's not arguing that the data isn't shared. He's saying that they don't sell it. Local PDs generally want to share their data with other law enforcement agencies.
That is irrelevant to my comment. Yes, it's abundantly clear what he's saying, he's said it so many times already, I don't need to read it again. I'm asking why he's not contributing more to the actual discussions surrounding his product instead.
From the ACLU article above:
Every community in the nation that is home to Flock cameras should look at the user agreement between their police department (or other Flock customers) and the company, to see whether it contains a clause stating that the customer “hereby grants Flock” a “worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free free right and license” to “disclose the Agency Data… for investigative purposes.” This is the language that will govern in a community unless a department demands changes to the standard user agreement that Flock offers. That is something we absolutely urge any agencies doing business with Flock to do — and, the ACLU of Massachusetts found, is exactly what the Boston police department did.
---
What assurance does any member of the public have that your company does not and will not ever share data to which you claim a "worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free free right and license" to? Are you saying that the "customer" has the ability to choose a "do not share" flag or something? What happens when they flip that flag at some point in the future? What redress does a victim have if you share data you did not, at that point in time, have permission to share?
This is totally disingenuous.
You are selling tools that have zero upside and a lot of downsides and that are used for structural violation of the privacy of citizens. Don't hide behind that you're trying to help people stay safe, that is not what you are doing and if you believe that you can take credit for the upsides then you really should take responsibility for the downsides.
Zero upside? LOL, no.
I'm looking for convincing decoy ALPR cameras because I don't think my HOA will go for a real setup, and I've got concerns over the product's security. I want the appearance of surveillance if I can't get the real thing. Being on a Flock/ALPR tracking app/site would be a huge win.
There is no benefit to signaling one's virtue in this scenario. It's like having a sign in your yard that says "Proudly Gun-Free Household".
My neighborhood is very safe and we have no such cameras. What problem are you trying to solve and why do you think cameras are the only solution?
The problem isn't zero upside, as other commenters have pointed out. The cameras have legitimate, lawful, and useful purposes. You will not gain any traction with the public or with lawmakers as long as your arguments ignore that reality.
The problem is that the downside is unbounded.
We clearly don't have the control over our governments, in either direction or degree, that would be needed to ensure that the unbounded downside of ubiquitous networked cameras won't manifest itself.
>Welcome feedback or new ideas to make our communities safe.
Nuture not control.
Living wage.
Access to day care.
Not sharing data with ICE would immediately make my entire city safer
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Royal we.
This is part of the problem with Flock, IMO. Lack of adherence to or support of norms. Psychopathy actualized as a corporation.
The societal impact of disruption of trust, of personal privacy, is under-appreciated by the corporation. It's concerned with winning profit.
(Meta) It's an inspecific argument I'm lazily laying out, yes, however the problem is ridiculously obvious.
We should not have to ask to be respected, and here we are.
Democratic decline (both the systems and participation in), truth, self respect/understanding of one's own rights ... those qualities are dying at the relentless toxic, ethically under-explored capitalization of our laws and resources. (Especially USA, compare to corporate social responsibility countries, I suspect)
Tech disruption is amazing to watch, and participate in, like a fire consuming the forest. "But what about the children?"
that's an odly specific answer.
Seems like a broad dismissal of the claim made upthread ("Flock sells its data to ICE and law enforcement"). Why do you think it is excessively specific?
Because the specific part here is selling the data and them doing it.
Flock does not sell data, they willingly give it away for free. And, technically, they don't do it - their customers do, and Flock knows and lets them.
Personally, in my view, this is worse. But they don't specifically sell data.
I think complaints about real things make a more persuasive argument than, you know, falsehoods.
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Here was the CEO back in 2017:
"Alexro, there are clear and large signs about the cameras at the entrance to our neighborhoods.
"Our neighborhoods are not large public roads, they are typically 100-400 home communities. You would never have to enter the community."
Now, it's clear that the cameras are not always obviously marked, they are not always in small communities, and they are often now on public thoroughfares. i go past at least one every day and it is not within a subdivision, rather it's on a main thoroughfare. It is marked, but a sign that is readable at 5 MPH is not necessarily readable at 35 MPH. It doesn't help to mark it "Flock" because I don't know who it is for.
Presumably, someone who has permission to the data can use it for legitimate investigations. Or they can use it for illicit investigations. Or share it with others for their own investigations. Or exchange it for other data they care about. And since we're not the "customer", what can we do about it? We're the target.
did you know that flock has a data sharing contract with ring cameras? amazon’s panopticon is much larger. i believe it is on by default and users have to manually opt out, but i don’t have a ring camera to verify.
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Only sharing specific clips is opt-in¹, but the program and its notifications are on by default. Maybe not surprisingly, consumers aren't asked if they want to participate, and the option is buried enough that most people will never see it.
¹ I'm being generous here. Police can still obtain Ring footage via warrants or "emergency" requests that don’t involve the user choosing to share anything.
So your concern here is spam of unsolicited requests from LE to consider sharing data related to some local event?
Feel free to place a disclosure that you are a cofounder of Flock.
hey, while I have you here Mr CEO, why are you comfortable allowing abusive cops the tech to stalk and harass former partners, I've met women that had ex husbands in the FBI that kept chasing them across country to continue the abuse and your camera systems help enable those acts.
I hope you lose sleep like those women do.
Texas cops used your data to harass abortion recipients. FBI agents used it to abuse former partners.
You want to make the world safer? Shut down your company.