Posted by chaps 12/22/2025
Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1-uiUlHTo – This Flock Camera Leak is like Netflix For Stalkers
Or how it has become increasingly trivial to identify by face or license plate such that combining tools reaches "movie Interpol" levels, without any warrant or security credentials?
If Big Brother surveillance is unavoidable I don't think "everyone has access" is the solution. The best defense is actually the glut of data and the fact nobody is actively watching you picking your nose in the elevator. If everyone can utilize any camera and its history for any reason then expect fractal chaos and internet shaming.
If it's inappropriate for any pedo to see when kids are in a park then certainly it should inappropriate when those pedos just happen to be police officers or Flock employees. The nice thing about the "everyone has access" case is that it forces the public to decide what they think is acceptable instead of making it some abstract thing that their brains aren't able to process correctly.
People will happily stand under mounted surveillance cameras all day long, but the moment they actually see someone point a camera at them they consider that a hostile action. The surveillance camera is an abstract concept they don't understand. The stranger pointing a camera in their direction is something they do understand and it makes their true feelings on strangers recording them very clear.
We might need a little bit of "everyone has access" to convince people of the truth that "no one should have access" instead.
Sure. It also lets parents watch. Or others see when parents are repeatedly leaving their kids unattended. Or lets you see some person that keeps showing up unattended and watching the kids.
> Or how it has become increasingly trivial to identify by face or license plate such that combining tools reaches "movie Interpol" levels, without any warrant or security credentials?
That already exists and it is run by private companies and sold to government agencies. That’s a huge power grab.
> The best defense is actually the glut of data and the fact nobody is actively watching you picking your nose in the elevator. If everyone can utilize any camera and its history for any reason then expect fractal chaos and internet shaming.
This argument holds whether it is public or not. It is worse if Flock or the government can do this asymmetrically than if anyone can do it IMO, they already have enough coercive tools.
... which is the expected, default use-case for a playground ...
If you leave your kids unattended at a playground I don't see how the camera changes the risk factor in any meaningful way. Either a pedophile can expect there to be unattended children or not.
Most people don’t like the idea that strangers could easily stalk their child remotely.
It’s the easy of access to surveillance technology that is different. Has nothing to do with the park being safe or not.
Try to think like an evil person with no life and very specific and demonic aims if you’re still having trouble seeing why this would be an issue.
That person already has incredible power to stalk and ruin someone's life. Making Flock cameras public would change almost nothing for that person. It fascinates me how fast people jump to "imagine the worst person" when we talk about making data public.
We have the worst people, they're the ones who profit off of it being private, with no public accountability, who don't build secure systems. The theater of privacy is, IMO, worse than not having privacy.
Stalking someone from your desk vs. IRL is a whole different ball game. Not sure why this needs explanation… anyways, the main difference is how easy it do things from your desk. For example, no one see you when you’re stalking someone from your desk. Think of the success of 4chan investigations vs. those in authority to actually do so. It’s empowering.
We live in a world of strangers, and unfortunately a % of those are the type to kill/rape other strangers. Why enable them?
Not sure who else would be empowered by making all public camera accessible at the click of a button, but I’m interested in who you think that population is.
Certainly we can agree most normal folks will not spend their time looking camera feeds of strangers?
I’m fascinated by people who stick to their theoretical principles (‘all data should be public’, etc.) no matter the real world implications, but we all have our own interests :).
Turns out, 95% of the predators already know exactly where the victims are, usually because it's their kid. Probably we want to worry about that a lot more.
Doubly so since, y'know, this only works if the predator lives close enough to act on the information before it changes - so the tiny possibility of a predator, a tiny possibility that they didn't already know this, and a tiny possibility of being able to act on the information...
I imagined a "white list" though (or whatever the new term is—"permitted list"?) so that only certain license plates are posted/tracked.
Or, at the very least, that we can go back and look later.
> I know in theory we all can continuously download and datamine these video feeds but can everyone really?
To which my response is "this is like OSS." What I mean by that is that, in theory, people audit and review code submitted to OSS software, in reality most people trust that there are other people who do it.
> Public feeds would enable someone to document and sell people's whereabouts in real time. The fact that I could do the same or go back and look later is no defense.
This is a different argument to me and one that I'm still torn about. I think that if the feeds exist and the government and private entities have access to them, the trade-offs may be better if everyone has access to them. In my mind this results in a few things:
1. Diffusion of power - You said public feeds would "enable someone to document and sell people's whereabouts in real time." Well, private feeds allow this too. I'd rather have everyone know about some misdeed than Flock or the local PD blackmail someone with it.
2. Second guessing deployment - I think if the people making the decisions know that the data will be publicly available, they're more likely to second guess deploying it in the first place.
3. Awareness - if you can just open an app on your phone and look at the feed from a camera then you become aware of the amount of surveillance you are subject to. I think being aware of it is better than not.
There's trade-offs to this. The cameras become less effective if everyone knows where they are. It doesn't help with the location selection bias - if they're only installed in areas of town where decision makers don't live and don't go, the power is asymmetric again. Plenty of other reasons it is bad. None of them worse than the original sin of installing them in the first place.
I do buy your argument that open access could help check the worst abuses. But, if widespread, it'd be so catastrophic for national security that I can't see how it would ever fly.
If I were an enemy nation state, flock would definitely be a target.
Cities will remove Flock cameras at the first council meeting that sits after council-members learn their families can be stalked.
The thing is, a lot of ordinary people in tech are naive, gullible, more intelligent than wise, easily flattered, limited to first-order thinking socially-speaking, and obsessed with rules and systems. Then there’s another stratum of actors on top who are all of the above, and sociopathic to boot.
I don’t know, I think it’s just the way it is. I’ve become very disillusioned with the ability of ‘tech people’ as a class to work for good.
Good thing nobody tried to pop a shell on the camera OS and move laterally through the network. That would be bad.
I'm sure it's all very secure though.
And this would absolutely work at scale too. Streetlights are already being vandalized for their copper and most cities cannot afford to hire more technicians to even keep up with streetlight repair. I believe I’ve seen the backlog for streetlight repair in LA is over 10x what the current street services crew is capable of repairing in a year of constant work and growing by the day.
Municipalities and these technology companies cannot keep up against a motivated crew and can’t afford to scale either. Totally asymmetric.
Therefore if only say one of a thousand gets caught, it still costs the people doing it more than the state on average (unless their life/time is worth basically nothing for years on end).
If the goal is just to enrich their contractors, they might even be happy they're getting vandalized.
If they're going to exist, it may be better for that to be spread among the public than to be left in the hands of the few.
You don't even need to drop an air tag now, you can use the license plate reader to track them everywhere they go. There is no hiding.
It also makes it easy to say, track a person's movements to an abortion clinic if your state would like to prosecute that (this is happening).
What you're staring at is the gateway tech that brings in a dystopian society. At first stuff like this is fairly benign, but slowly over time it ramps up into truly awful outcomes.
There are Flock-specific bad things happening here, but you have to dig through the video to get to them, and they're not intuitive. The new Flock "Condor" cameras are apparently auto-PTZ, meaning that when they detect motion, they zoom in on it. That's new! I want to hear more about that, and less about "I had tears in my eyes watching this camera footage of a children's playground", which is something you could have done last week or last year or last decade, or about a mental health police wellness detention somewhere where all the cops were already wearing FOIA-able body cams.
If open Flock cameras gave you the Flock search bar, that would be the end of the world. And the possibility that could happen is a good reason to push back on Flock. But that's not what happened here.
Often it is more impactful to address one major/tangible player in a particular space than it would be to "boil the ocean" and ensure that we are capturing every possible player/transgressor. I agree that some of the video was overly breathless, but if that's what wakes people up to the dangers of unsecured cameras/devices then so be it.
This response would make sense if I was saying "why focus on Flock, there are so many other ALPR cameras out there" (also true, but not relevant to my point).
But this is a video that is mostly about things that are true of all IP cameras, of the kind that we've had staring out onto public streets for decades, plural decades. People celebrated those cameras, thought they were super neat, built sites indexing them. All of them do most of the same things this video says those Flock cameras did, the tiny minority of Flock cameras you can access publicly.
The video in question is linked from the toptext above.)
Just to give you a sense of the kind of company we're dealing with, the CEO of Flock called the guy who made a Flock camera map an "antifa terrorist". He's unhinged.
The other video is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ but I don't recall which one goes more into it.
It's also possible I'm just remembering Flock-specific stuff from other sources, and the things he shows in these videos are more general issues with security camera companies (using Flock as the example).
It would be great if this stuff was (also?) published as blog posts so that it could be easily skimmed...
In case it helps: my thing here is, the video we were commenting on thread seems to be about all public cameras, not just AI-assisted smart cameras or even security cameras more broadly. That was my complaint.
It's not that I don't think there's a video to do about 60 open Flock admin consoles; I'm sure there is. I'm just not sure what the implications are, because that video spent all its time talking about stuff that is trivially true of all public cameras, many of which are indexed on Google already, not through Google-dork searches for open console but instead with searches like "open IP camera live streams".
(I was struck by this in part because I vividly remember when Russia invaded Ukraine flipping between dozens of different live camera streams in places like Mariupol; that's obviously not the US, but you can do very similar stuff in the US, and on a lot more than 60 random misconfigured Flock cameras).
I think there may be something to the PTZ on the new Flock cameras that makes this worse? I just think he should make a better, sharper video case against them.
Thank you for giving me a link!
But I hear what you're saying about public cameras.
Other camera companies would like to see steady year-over-year growth in camera sales. Flock would like to see the world blanketed in 24/7 surveillance.
They make themselves a lightning rod as a business strategy.
(I helped get Flock cancelled in Oak Park, where I live, and before that led the passage of what I believe to be the most restrictive ALPR regs/ordinance package in the country. I'm not an ALPR booster.)
But I'm going to keep saying: my thing about this video is that he's describing mostly things that are true of all public IP cameras. There are zillions of those!
It was not some nerd† principled stand against "surveillance". My experience working on the public policy of this stuff is that when you take a stand against "surveillance", normal people --- and I'm in what I believe to be one of the 10 most progressive municipalities in the country, the most progressive municipality in Chicagoland --- look at you like you're a space alien.
† I am, obviously, a nerd, fwiw.
While both are a problem I am far more concerned about the power this gives our, increasingly authoritarian, government than about individual stalkers/creeps.
Of course no liability will be faced by the company, and none for the police departments who violate our constitutional rights.