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datahack 6 hours ago [-]
I didn’t vote for a crime free society and I don’t want a surveillance society. Some random ass CEO does not have the right or authority to tell the rest of us how to run our society: that’s sidestepping Democracy and not ok.
Societies have functioned for millennia without Flock, and there is nothing especially dangerous that it solves.
In fact violent crime in the United States has dropped by a record 9.3% just in 2025 (the largest single year decline in U.S. history). It’s not like there is some pressing crisis.
As far as I am concerned, this guy can get bent.
theglenn88_ 3 hours ago [-]
You misread it. What he said was "for me make more money, I have to convince you to give up your privacy"
What's funny though is the idea that giving up your privacy will remove crime. Ha.
pixeljam 20 minutes ago [-]
London has a dozen cameras per person, totalling to almost 1 million cameras.
As an ancedote to, they recently trialled face recognition cameras in the area I work in.
Given that, why did the police not do anything when my friends phone was stolen?
In comparison, in the much smaller city of Cambridge, the police assigned an officer to the case and went and tracked down my friends' stolen airpods. In London I don't think they even lifted a finger!
If the west is going to go down the authoritarian route, I'd rather it actually worked. I think we have a more fundamental issue that no one is willing to address--because it's not profitable. Removing our privacy achieves nothing for citizens.
AngryData 8 hours ago [-]
Most common crime is wage theft, don't see how they are going to do anything about that.
joshAg 7 hours ago [-]
cool. I don't want a crime-free society. It's not that I want crime, it's that at a certain point I'd rather allocate government attention/money/time at issues other than crime because the benefit to that other thing is greater than getting crime asymptotically closer to 0.
StevenWaterman 4 hours ago [-]
Yep. The optimal amount of crime is nonzero
syntaxing 8 hours ago [-]
“ Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
- Benjamin Franklin
frankvdwaal 6 hours ago [-]
Franklin was talking about freedom of the local government to tax, as in "those who surrender their right to decide who gets taxed, merely to obtain some money for immediate defence, risk losing both their political independence and their security."
Funny how a defence of representative government's authority is turned into a warning against government exercising that authority in the wrong way. :)
salawat 1 hours ago [-]
Things can mean more than their original context. Franklin, in fact, was full of bangers in that regard.
TZubiri 1 hours ago [-]
Can we have some of those bangers?
salawat 52 minutes ago [-]
You may. Go to Google, or your search engine of choice, and look up the following "wisdom aphorisms Benjamin Franklin".
You may then take the contents within and whittle away the hours delving into them and connecting to the present.
But here's a little sample.
"Security without liberty--is prison."
Also, Poor Richard's Almanac may be worth a perusal. Have fun!
For real. Has the world forgotten the USA PATRIOT Act?
donatj 2 hours ago [-]
Why would anyone want a crime free society. I think anyone but a small child understands that a ton of things now and historically have been illegal that really just shouldn't be. Society functions as a whole through lack of enforcement of a large percentage of current laws.
al_borland 8 hours ago [-]
Or just keep the people in jail who are committing most of the crime. When someone has been arrested a dozen times, we don’t need cameras tracking them to keep people safe, we need that person removed from polite society.
Flock is a poor solution to a failure of the judicial system.
Dezvous 7 hours ago [-]
We need to solve the root of why crimes happen in the first place to make any difference, not just arrest people for committing crimes.
stratos123 27 minutes ago [-]
What's the root of why in 2022, only 327 people were responsible for a third of all shoplifting arrests in NYC?
Something needs to happen between now and a cultural shift that will take decades.
Compassion for the criminals comes at the expense of the peace, safety, and well-being of everyone else. There seems to be little compassion for the vast majority who act right, but have to put up with all of it, which ends up eroding public trust and keeps us on a downward spiral.
nielsbot 5 hours ago [-]
> There seems to be little compassion for the vast majority who act right, but have to put up with all of it, which ends up eroding public trust and keeps us on a downward spiral.
Everything in here is unfounded. Unless you have sources?
tvbusy 6 hours ago [-]
The worse the crime is, the harder the punishment but only until a certain level, after which the crime is above the law.
bob1029 5 hours ago [-]
The only thing I've seen improved by flock cameras would be my local shopping experience. Retail parking lots and freeway entrances seem reasonable. Everywhere else these cameras feel like absolute oppression.
There was a period of time where walking into Home Depot was like gambling in a casino with regard to inventory not being tampered with. It was genuinely really bad. There was a day when I couldn't find any sand, despite their system indicating sufficient inventory. I have to assume people were just walking out with it on carts. You'd have to steal a lot of sand to catch a felony charge. Seeing four flock cameras as you turn the corner in front of the store is probably helping to send a strong "please don't steal from me" vibe.
Kevin_Flynn 1 hours ago [-]
There was a day when I couldn't find any sand, despite their system indicating sufficient inventory. I have to assume people were just walking out with it on carts. You'd have to steal a lot of sand to catch a felony charge.
I'm guessing the sand was on a pallet out back. It's the type of item that doesn't get stored on the top rack, like other items do. Too heavy.
ForHackernews 4 hours ago [-]
I don't think tweakers robbing home depot sand to buy meth care about cameras.
m463 6 hours ago [-]
or move to japan, which does thing a different way
I remember being in a fast food restaurant. A lady left her purse on her table and went to the bathroom. 8 year old kids walk to school in the city (with backpacks almost as big as they are).
or another way of thinking of it: what will be done for you will be done to you
juiceland 48 minutes ago [-]
Japan is a totalitarian state where the enforcers are the citizens. This is great for tourists, who are happy to stick out like sore thumbs for the novelty of it and Japanese are all to happy to oblige in limited circumstances. Make no mistake, though, if you are not 100% Japanese, born in Japan, you will never be Japanese. You will never be accepted fully. You will always be excluded or out right discriminated against, and it’s legal.
The US has many flaws, including its most recent speed run into out and out fascism. But it is also the greatest immigrant integrator ever.
xtajv 8 hours ago [-]
Infringing on 4th amendment rights sounds like a crime to me.
silverFork 8 hours ago [-]
Well there are many issues and that is ownership and who gets to see the data and who gets to delete the data. If it is ever going to work, the ownership has to be public and not private. The videos should be impossible to delete.. The camera spread should be the same everywhere and would collect data non-selectively and only in public spaces. The data could only become visible to viewers only if certain criteria's are met and not continuous.
nielsbot 5 hours ago [-]
hint: it's not going to work
silverFork 2 minutes ago [-]
They have it in UK and Australia you know.
Jamesbeam 7 minutes ago [-]
> Flock's CEO thinks this is all worth it, if you want a society "where, if you commit a crime, you have a higher probability of being held accountable.
He is fundamentally wrong, and so is his business model.
Prevention is the key concept in dealing with crime.
Flock does nothing to prevent serious crime.
People kill, steal and rape others even when a camera is running, all the time. So the camera as an instrument of prevention is utter bullshit and clearly not working.
But the truth is, the folks at Flock do not care if you become the victim of the crime at all, you becoming the victim of a crime, is how they get paid.
They don’t want to prevent it, they just want to record it or at least the perpetrator.
If there is no crime, the police officers had no job to pay the bills, they are not interested in no longer be able to feed their families, so the police as an organization, many individuals there still have proper values, is not interested in seriously funded crime prevention, by design, because it would make them largely obsolete.
That is why the people in charge of the police rather buy tools that do improve the crime-solving rate, so the statistics look better as every generation of officers gets noticeably stupider, and therefore they get paid better, instead of not getting paid at all, because the crime prevention rate is closer to 100% , instead of the current rate.
After the crime happens, we used to pay people to give valuable information that would lead to the apprehension of the perpetrator, or trust good old police work where real humans, hopefully not hallucinating a third of their shift, do a proper investigation.
Now Flock sees a chance to monetize and control the flow of information that leads to an arrest. And because they do it nationwide and what they sell is your most private data, how and where you freely move, who you associate with etc, they of course don’t want you to have any rights to that data, because that would prevent them from making money from it.
Even afterwards the same group of people cash in, because all those prisoners need to go somewhere.
How lucky are we that there seems to be an endless supply of private jails and companies providing services to keep all those incarcerated humans alive as profitably as possible who are not connected to any senators and congressmen at all.
And Flock is the company that plans to enable a constant stream of fresh bodies into those systems for whatever the administration might deem jailworthy or, if you’re lucky, rather get publicly executed live on Amazon Prime TV for this week.
You will for sure not get a crime-free country with Flock’s approach, instead, you will get more unfree and constantly surveilled, and your social behaviour constantly checked to the current administration’s standards.
You will clap when the King makes a joke and work, and be happy until the day you die.
And if not, a Flock camera will find the perfect moment where no one else is looking at you so you can get removed permanently from the flock they are building, pure and compliant.
feverzsj 7 hours ago [-]
Says who hides his house on google map.
spottedmarley 1 hours ago [-]
A false premise
Mass surveillance itself is a high crime. A society without crime will have no mass surveillance.
fifilura 7 hours ago [-]
So much stupidity from people who make every choice binary.
Woodi 7 hours ago [-]
Somehow "Minority Raport" was about crime... And stupidity build into oversight system.
And under eg. communism where oversight is balooned to society self-harm you still have crime. And "bribery" is alias for communism and other dictatorships.
So, it is just better to give up on Flock spy[hard]ware.
8 hours ago [-]
jesterson 6 hours ago [-]
This is such a weird framing.
The problem with Flock and similar solutions is not about what they collect, but more about who and how uses it. The same applies to pretty much all government surveillance - it is acceptable it is collected, but absolutely unacceptable that it often accessed and used in ways obscure to person of interest.
verdverm 8 hours ago [-]
I'll take freedom and the cons that come with it. I doubt very much that crime-free is even possible, especially the oligarchy crimes
antibull 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
bjorn_identity 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
rdevilla 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
nickphx 6 hours ago [-]
he is a real thought leader.. /s
bdangubic 8 hours ago [-]
He’s right, the countries that have lowest crime rates have flock cameras everywhere and zero privacy, this is the way /s
Societies have functioned for millennia without Flock, and there is nothing especially dangerous that it solves.
In fact violent crime in the United States has dropped by a record 9.3% just in 2025 (the largest single year decline in U.S. history). It’s not like there is some pressing crisis.
As far as I am concerned, this guy can get bent.
What's funny though is the idea that giving up your privacy will remove crime. Ha.
As an ancedote to, they recently trialled face recognition cameras in the area I work in.
Given that, why did the police not do anything when my friends phone was stolen?
In comparison, in the much smaller city of Cambridge, the police assigned an officer to the case and went and tracked down my friends' stolen airpods. In London I don't think they even lifted a finger!
If the west is going to go down the authoritarian route, I'd rather it actually worked. I think we have a more fundamental issue that no one is willing to address--because it's not profitable. Removing our privacy achieves nothing for citizens.
- Benjamin Franklin
Funny how a defence of representative government's authority is turned into a warning against government exercising that authority in the wrong way. :)
You may then take the contents within and whittle away the hours delving into them and connecting to the present.
But here's a little sample.
"Security without liberty--is prison."
Also, Poor Richard's Almanac may be worth a perusal. Have fun!
Flock is a poor solution to a failure of the judicial system.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/15/nyregion/shoplifting-arre...
Compassion for the criminals comes at the expense of the peace, safety, and well-being of everyone else. There seems to be little compassion for the vast majority who act right, but have to put up with all of it, which ends up eroding public trust and keeps us on a downward spiral.
Everything in here is unfounded. Unless you have sources?
There was a period of time where walking into Home Depot was like gambling in a casino with regard to inventory not being tampered with. It was genuinely really bad. There was a day when I couldn't find any sand, despite their system indicating sufficient inventory. I have to assume people were just walking out with it on carts. You'd have to steal a lot of sand to catch a felony charge. Seeing four flock cameras as you turn the corner in front of the store is probably helping to send a strong "please don't steal from me" vibe.
I'm guessing the sand was on a pallet out back. It's the type of item that doesn't get stored on the top rack, like other items do. Too heavy.
I remember being in a fast food restaurant. A lady left her purse on her table and went to the bathroom. 8 year old kids walk to school in the city (with backpacks almost as big as they are).
or another way of thinking of it: what will be done for you will be done to you
The US has many flaws, including its most recent speed run into out and out fascism. But it is also the greatest immigrant integrator ever.
He is fundamentally wrong, and so is his business model.
Prevention is the key concept in dealing with crime. Flock does nothing to prevent serious crime.
People kill, steal and rape others even when a camera is running, all the time. So the camera as an instrument of prevention is utter bullshit and clearly not working.
But the truth is, the folks at Flock do not care if you become the victim of the crime at all, you becoming the victim of a crime, is how they get paid.
They don’t want to prevent it, they just want to record it or at least the perpetrator.
If there is no crime, the police officers had no job to pay the bills, they are not interested in no longer be able to feed their families, so the police as an organization, many individuals there still have proper values, is not interested in seriously funded crime prevention, by design, because it would make them largely obsolete.
That is why the people in charge of the police rather buy tools that do improve the crime-solving rate, so the statistics look better as every generation of officers gets noticeably stupider, and therefore they get paid better, instead of not getting paid at all, because the crime prevention rate is closer to 100% , instead of the current rate.
After the crime happens, we used to pay people to give valuable information that would lead to the apprehension of the perpetrator, or trust good old police work where real humans, hopefully not hallucinating a third of their shift, do a proper investigation.
Now Flock sees a chance to monetize and control the flow of information that leads to an arrest. And because they do it nationwide and what they sell is your most private data, how and where you freely move, who you associate with etc, they of course don’t want you to have any rights to that data, because that would prevent them from making money from it.
Even afterwards the same group of people cash in, because all those prisoners need to go somewhere.
How lucky are we that there seems to be an endless supply of private jails and companies providing services to keep all those incarcerated humans alive as profitably as possible who are not connected to any senators and congressmen at all.
And Flock is the company that plans to enable a constant stream of fresh bodies into those systems for whatever the administration might deem jailworthy or, if you’re lucky, rather get publicly executed live on Amazon Prime TV for this week.
You will for sure not get a crime-free country with Flock’s approach, instead, you will get more unfree and constantly surveilled, and your social behaviour constantly checked to the current administration’s standards.
You will clap when the King makes a joke and work, and be happy until the day you die.
And if not, a Flock camera will find the perfect moment where no one else is looking at you so you can get removed permanently from the flock they are building, pure and compliant.
Mass surveillance itself is a high crime. A society without crime will have no mass surveillance.
And under eg. communism where oversight is balooned to society self-harm you still have crime. And "bribery" is alias for communism and other dictatorships.
So, it is just better to give up on Flock spy[hard]ware.
The problem with Flock and similar solutions is not about what they collect, but more about who and how uses it. The same applies to pretty much all government surveillance - it is acceptable it is collected, but absolutely unacceptable that it often accessed and used in ways obscure to person of interest.