"It’s a paradigm shift where we go from having an expectation of privacy even in public spaces to its inverse. Not only do we not have a right to privacy in public; we don’t even have a right to see ourselves as the government and police might see us — a set of still moments in place and time from which they, not us, can decide what our story is."
My housemate's car was stolen in Atlanta, and because of Flock the police were able to get it and return it the same day he reported it missing. He was even able to get to work on time.
85% of stolen cars have been recovered historically, 34% same day. So anecdata about a single recovery really don't tell us much of about the benefit of living in a panopticon.
> In less than 10 years, Flock’s cameras, airborne and fixed, will eradicate almost all crime in the U.S.
It'll fit right in with the fully self driving cars we'll get in "two years" since 2012, and the manned flights to mars we'll get in "five years" since 2015
American version of capitalism and Chinese versions of socialisme seem to slowly converge, the future will be fun!
Even if true, it would only be for one of the narrowest possible definitions of "crime". What can Flock do about mail fraud? About domestic violence? About wage theft? About falsified studies that lead to substances being misclassified as harmless? About price fixing? Does the majority of criminal activity even take place in "public" spaces?
It's common for people to talk about "crime" when what they really mean is something like "street crime" or "stranger crime" - some random person I don't know hurting me or taking my stuff. It's true that other kinds of crime are common, but the solutions to them probably look pretty different than the solutions to let me safely walk around anywhere in my city after dark.
This is not a new startup. It predates the AI era. This is the company that installs cameras in public places and wires them all together with data sharing arrangements that circumvent those pesky jurisdictional separations of power. And guess which neighborhoods have the most cameras?
It’s a pre-crime company and data broker that sells to police forces and corporations (while sharing all the data between them). It’s one of the most regressive and heinous business models someone could spend their time building.
Of course a crime-fighting company "sells to police forces and corporations". Who else would you sell crime-fighting tools to?
Flock reminds me of Replit: they both predate the modern era of AI, and in some sense they were lucky to be well-positioned when advances in AI enabled their core product to become much more powerful. Of course, the harder you work, the luckier you get....
Gotta love these grandiose, attention-grabbing pie-in-the-sky mission statements. "Eliminate all crime!"
Reminds me of when I worked in the same building as Mark Zuckerberg's and his wife's health startup, whose mission statement plastered all over the building is to "eliminate all disease within our lifetimes." All disease? Really? All of them?? Every single one? Why not pick 1 disease and work on that, maybe start from there, and once you eliminate that one move on and try a few more.
This does not account for any crime committed outside of public spaces:
White collar crime and embezzlement
Murder in private places
Sexual assault in private places
Domestic abuse
Illegal drug use
Insurance fraud
Wage theft
> This does not account for any crime committed outside of public space
Do you have any reason to believe that the next steps won't be surveillance in unambiguously private spaces under the cover of "AI eliminates the privacy problem with surveillance"?
You can eliminate many crimes by decriminalizing them, too. Let people be productive junkies as long as they pose no threat or harm to society, for one.
The weakest link of the proposed technology like this is guaranteed fallibility of the folks using it, ie the judicial system and the asymmetric power dynamic against those it supposedly serves.
This is a very common scenario: a sheriffs deputy holds a biased belief against an individual. Said deputy selects and overfits data from systems like this to obtain a warrant against said individual. Individual is arrested and enters the meat grinder that is the justice system where hundreds of experienced indifferent agents and millions of dollars are put to work to support that deputies biased accusation. That original bad actor can now disengage and go about their life. Meanwhile, our Individual must spend a fortune on legal defense to prove their innocence. Individual loses time, money, peace, and reputation pursuing the best case realistic scenario—having charges dismissed (though indefinitely tainting their record). The more realistic scenario is individual is unjustly punished to some degree through plea agreements or trial (if they can afford it) which could easily ruin the rest of their life.
I’m not on the ACAB extreme, I just personally know many law enforcement officers and work in the industry adjacent to the justice system.
> A Sedgwick, Kansas, police chief used Flock Safety license plate readers to track his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend’s vehicles 228 times over four-plus months and used his police vehicle to follow them out of town, according to a city official and a report released this week by the agency that oversees police certifications.
> Nygaard’s reasons included “suspicious” and “missing child” and “drug investigation” and “drugs” and “narcotics investigation” and “suspicious activity” and “drug invest” and “drug use,” according to the KSCPOST order.
> Nygaard won’t face any charges, but he did lose his police certification.
Oh I'm VERY interested in seeing how this will eliminate white collar crimes like wage theft, embezzlement, ponzi schemes and the like. Or do they mean the kind of crimes THOSE OTHER PEOPLE do?
Paraphrasing from an Oakland police officer reflecting on the spike in crime 3 years ago to today: "Flock has been a game changer. The officers who use it are getting results. Criminals will steal a car, drive through a neighborhood and rob someone. Pretty quickly we can look up 'black BMWs driving around this location'. Maybe 10 come back, you figure out which is the likely one, and then can see where it shows up in the next few hours. Then you have officers on patrol in that area look out for it. The criminals get a police car tailing them & they ditch the vehicle. Instead of doing 5 or 6 robberies with a stolen car, they can do 1 or 2. That makes it much less worth it to do the crimes."
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 47.1 ms ] thread"It’s a paradigm shift where we go from having an expectation of privacy even in public spaces to its inverse. Not only do we not have a right to privacy in public; we don’t even have a right to see ourselves as the government and police might see us — a set of still moments in place and time from which they, not us, can decide what our story is."
https://cardinalnews.org/2025/03/28/i-drove-300-miles-in-rur...
It'll fit right in with the fully self driving cars we'll get in "two years" since 2012, and the manned flights to mars we'll get in "five years" since 2015
American version of capitalism and Chinese versions of socialisme seem to slowly converge, the future will be fun!
It’s a pre-crime company and data broker that sells to police forces and corporations (while sharing all the data between them). It’s one of the most regressive and heinous business models someone could spend their time building.
Flock reminds me of Replit: they both predate the modern era of AI, and in some sense they were lucky to be well-positioned when advances in AI enabled their core product to become much more powerful. Of course, the harder you work, the luckier you get....
The ones with highest amount of crime?
But it could also be the opposite: the neighbourhoods of the well off, who are willing to pay for this kind of service.
I really don't know, since both options seem likely.
Reminds me of when I worked in the same building as Mark Zuckerberg's and his wife's health startup, whose mission statement plastered all over the building is to "eliminate all disease within our lifetimes." All disease? Really? All of them?? Every single one? Why not pick 1 disease and work on that, maybe start from there, and once you eliminate that one move on and try a few more.
This does not account for any crime committed outside of public spaces: White collar crime and embezzlement Murder in private places Sexual assault in private places Domestic abuse Illegal drug use Insurance fraud Wage theft
Off the top of my head
Do you have any reason to believe that the next steps won't be surveillance in unambiguously private spaces under the cover of "AI eliminates the privacy problem with surveillance"?
This is a very common scenario: a sheriffs deputy holds a biased belief against an individual. Said deputy selects and overfits data from systems like this to obtain a warrant against said individual. Individual is arrested and enters the meat grinder that is the justice system where hundreds of experienced indifferent agents and millions of dollars are put to work to support that deputies biased accusation. That original bad actor can now disengage and go about their life. Meanwhile, our Individual must spend a fortune on legal defense to prove their innocence. Individual loses time, money, peace, and reputation pursuing the best case realistic scenario—having charges dismissed (though indefinitely tainting their record). The more realistic scenario is individual is unjustly punished to some degree through plea agreements or trial (if they can afford it) which could easily ruin the rest of their life.
I’m not on the ACAB extreme, I just personally know many law enforcement officers and work in the industry adjacent to the justice system.
Or no warrant at all, the chief just wants to stalk his ex: https://www.kansas.com/news/politics-government/article29105...
> A Sedgwick, Kansas, police chief used Flock Safety license plate readers to track his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend’s vehicles 228 times over four-plus months and used his police vehicle to follow them out of town, according to a city official and a report released this week by the agency that oversees police certifications.
> Nygaard’s reasons included “suspicious” and “missing child” and “drug investigation” and “drugs” and “narcotics investigation” and “suspicious activity” and “drug invest” and “drug use,” according to the KSCPOST order.
> Nygaard won’t face any charges, but he did lose his police certification.
I guess instead we get Machines of Loving Grace's boot stamping on a human face-- forever.