Posted by SanjayMehta 3 hours ago
There's been over 70[1] documented wins.
Don't feel like this is a lost cause, it clearly isn't. If everyone who was going to comment on this thread instead or additionally got involved by going to a city council meeting and explaining the problems to friends/family, many more cities could reject them.
I'm fond of pointing out on HN that the muni I live in is likely one of the 10 most progressive-leaning in the country (it's the most progressive-leaning municipality in Chicagoland). Even here, Flock had an ardent cheering section, of normal people who think expediting the interdiction of stolen vehicles (which are vectors of violent crime) is a perfectly reasonable thing for a city to invest in.
However:
> This makes AI powered cameras like Flock's distinct from traditional surveillance or traffic cams, which require someone to manually look over footage in order to find a specific vehicle or individual.
Is a bit misleading. These days, anyone can give an LLM footage from any source, and get this kind of information.
An LLM isn’t going to help you here, but basic Computer Vision and a SQL database has been a solution _if you have the cameras_. I wrote a license plate reader as a university project using OpenCV almost 20 years ago.
One of the risks of LLMs is that a lot of tasks go from "an expert could do this easily given a few weeks" to "anyone who thinks to ask an LLM can do this easily and get results the same day"
My friend, if you have a database of license plates extracted from single images taken by multiple cameras, YOU ARE TRACKING UNIQUE VEHICLES ACROSS A REGION.
Terabytes of data don't matter because you don't need to search terabytes, you need to search a few MB of text data. You don't even have to store the original video.
Amazing how you can move the goalposts to make things impossible, isn't it? Where in the world did "without compute" come from? Are they not even allowed a decent desktop computer?
I did this with Gemini 3, mostly for fun and to test it's capabilities. Teslausb records all dash cam videos and auto syncs it to my nas when in wifi range. Yolo and opencv extracts and does ocr on any defected license plate, and puts it all on a map, along with trip information. Not particularly useful or interesting, and not something I would have done pre-llms, but the difficulty was basically writing a one paragraph prompt and using some free tokens
There's a very important difference between "anyone could walk through my door and steal my stuff" and "this person walked in my door and stole my stuff".
Flock cameras are roughly that secure.
"I gave the person keys to my house and then I trusted they wouldn't open bathroom doors while somebody was there".
Like law enforcement is being given access to the systems, the door isn't "left open", a key was given to them.
Police setting up a 1984 monitoring system throughout your city, tracking every car, person, activity -- yields lots of questions, oversight, concerns, debate, challenges, etc.
Some private business doing the same, and then letting the same police use it at will as a paying customer -- yay, all of the invasive monitoring with none of the oversight.
Privacy laws now.
I'm frequent surprised by how many people think that privacy laws block the police from recording their activities in public. For whatever reason, Flock is getting a lot of press, but this is hardly a new field.
- Benito Mussolini
Is a bit misleading itself, to do this at scale requires all those iffy data centers.
Hopefully the absurdity of broad scale surveillance can't be so easily lost in hyperbole
The operating theory of all of these cameras is that anything happening in public sight is by its nature not private. The federal government is dumping millions and millions of dollars into grant programs for municipalities to buy it… It’s a giant federal surveillance program disguised as decisions made by individual police departments.
It’s hilarious and depressing to contrast the HN community reaction to Snowden versus the mostly meh response to flock.
Today in a hyper-urban environment, a lot of "privacy" comes from blending into the background and simply, nobody cares about the very mundane everyday activities of ordinary people.
Looking at the past--sure, you could conceal things by writing them into a book and safeguarding the book, such as your accounts or your diary/journal. You could conceal objects and keep them physically safe from others, insofar as was possible. But you could never conceal these things from governments, organized crime, or similar threat actors. And once your interactions involve more than one person, all bets are off. What is the quote--"Three men can keep a secret, if two are dead"?
Small towns and small communities have always had active rumor mills, grapevines, and gossiping neighbors. Have you ever read newspapers from 100+ years ago? They would report on ordinary visitors showing up in town to see their friends or family! There were "City Directories" that listed everyone, including their occupation and family members.
And how did the concept of an omniscient and all-seeing God come about? It wasn't to drive people to paranoia but it was simply to remind us that nothing is concealed and there really is no right to privacy at all. The bottom line is that humans are social animals, and our society becomes sick if people can keep secrets (the wrong kinds of secrets).
Sure, basic levels of privacy and confidentiality are important. The act of wearing clothes is an exercise of privacy and concealment, after all. Doing things behind closed doors, this used to have an expectation of "privacy" insofar as you would know how many humans and/or animals were present to witness things.
God has always seen everything. You don't have any secrets he doesn't know. If that frightens you, or makes you anxious or angry, that is a "you" problem and not a problem with this world. Some of us simply live with the assumption that everything has already been seen and known, and everything will be revealed in justice, and life is too short to worry about cameras and microphones revealing our faults to one another.
Yeah, if you live in a tiny medieval village or a small town in the middle of nowhere in 1980 there was little "privacy" but Jeffrey Dahmer was fucking dudes (back when that wasn't ok) and eating people in his apartment for years before anyone caught on. In more suburban settings there truly was privacy to a large practical extent.
Furthermore, these argument lie through their teeth to portray privacy from those who you mostly voluntarily associate, vs privacy from government systems that can seek you out, have power over you and can fairly unilaterally screw you with little recourse and you cannot choose not to associate with.
Having people not associate with you in 1980, or 1280, because you did something sly or immoral is fundamentally different from being combed over by the government because you hit some unknowable proprietary criteria that triggered them to go over you with a fine tooth comb.
Well, duh. It doesn't know your plate from anyone elses so your plate gets recorded along with everyone else. If you go about a normal person's business then there is no harm and nothing happens.
I'm sure someone will decide harm is being done even when nothing happens.
Skeptical me seriously doubts this is an effective solution for crime. But maybe that's because this country has a history of being willing to do a million expensive and privacy violating things, and only if it's a punitive measure.
I don't think anyone other than the manufacturers have made claims of cameras reducing crime. You can put all the AI bells and whistles on them, but they're still just cameras.
They're a fallback option, not a dragnet. The police are generally reactive to reports of crime, not proactively trying to piece together the details of everyone's lives and nail them the moment their dog poops on the sidewalk. No AI can even do that anyway and it would be a waste of money.
There are two vocal camps of people on these threads that are eroding HN: fearmongerers and grifters. I don't understand how it got this bad, but that's the real crisis here.
I have relatives who are cops and lawyers and city councilmen. No cop is sitting in a back room somewhere tracking all the cars on every street trying to do, uh, whatever it is people here are claiming they are going to do to them.
Cameras recording tour activity in malls, and on public roads has been the case since the 90s. Flock became a lightning rod of attention due to ICE, but they don't actually represent any change from the status quo.
The way to beat this isn't vandalism, it's getting them banned from every municipality and county in the country, while fighting at state levels for more bans.
It's also silly talk from kids online, just like "Don't vote, burn your local Wal-Mart" is only meant to impress other online children. The rest of us know that you'll neither vote, nor burn down the Wal-Mart.
As others have pointed out, they're not just ALPRs or traffic cameras, and their use-cases, official and unofficial, are extremely dynamic and expanding fast. They are not the only thing of their kind, but they justly earned the lightning rod status for their conspicuous cooperation with the administration's immigration thuggery and the douchy--but highly consequential--pronouncements of their CEO. Moreover, there's a ticker tape of daily news about police misuse of Flock's database, mainly for stalking exes and things like that.
This _is_ a stop on the way to a Chinese-style surveillance state, and there's nothing inevitable about it. But it will happen if we allow it to happen.
Ben Johnson's video on the security vulnerabilities, linked in the article, always deserves an explicit shout-out. It's likely to intrigue the tinkerers here:
So the Nth generation group of townies that run any given rural shithole will happily slap them up, the government represents them as far as they're concerned.
And meanwhile in some snooty inner ring Chicago suburb that fancies themselves "progressive" (but in what direction?) they slap up the same damn cameras because they see it as a means to make more efficient the enforcement of the myriad of rules on which their enclave depends and they are wealthy and well represented so they have no fear of it being used against them.
Rural Georgia probably has a little of column A, little of column B going on.
There is an expectation you are not constantly tracked everywhere you go by a nationwide surveillance apparatus, that your location is not constantly monitored, indexed and shared. Unless you expect to live in an Orwellian distopia.
Flock is a clever workaround that should be illegal, but before that can happens we can get them removed at the city council level.
Traffic cameras, by comparison, only record people's in public. A police officer isn't violating privacy laws by standing at an intersection and writing down the plates of cars passing by is he? Flock is just automating that task.
The whole reason why we have license plates is to facilitate monitoring cars. If we really think that people have a right to keep their vehicular activities private, then surely the bigger privacy violation is the fact that we require cars to display unique identifiers in a prominent manner?
No law is that simple. You can be photographed when you’re out in public most places, yet stalking is also illegal most places.