Would be a great angle as a buyer's agent to proactively show clients flock camera locations. At the same time, would be an interesting way to hinder the sale of a property by falsely reporting flock cameras where none are.
Beside the mass surveillance issues that are very real, let me just add that HOAs need to be made illegal except for condo buildings that obviously need to maintain and manage that building. There is absolutely no reason why a single family house needs to be in a mandatory HOA.
We've all heard or experienced the silly rules about how your house must look and the fines associated with it. None of that should be legal.
The one thing HOAs do is trash pickup but that should be a municipal government function. It is it everywhere else in the developed world.
And why do they exist? If you find yourself asking that about anything uniquely American the answer is almost always "systemic racism". And that's the case here. HOAs became popularized in the 20th century with racially restrictive covenants (ie to prevent the owner selling to black people) [1].
So where are we now? Instead of the HOA president spending their day driving past "problem" houses to look for any rules violations, are we going to have them doing that with Flock cameras instead? What a dystopian nightmare.
I’m sorry but this kind of thinking is non-sense. There are surely a few cases where someone lets power go to their head, but that happens in every place where humans have any power.
I’m on an HOA board because no else wants to because it’s boring. We maintain a large green space with walking paths and a community pool, and garbage pickup. We have whites, blacks, asians, hispanics, etc and nobody cares. Sometimes there is shared land in a development that has to be managed and somebody has to do it.
Most neighborhoods don't have these, and that's kind of the problem. The city should be constructing and maintaining parks and recreation, and they should take an egalitarian approach. Meaning, don't stuff all the nicest parts in the richest areas.
Also, the history of HOAs is explicitly racist. That doesn't mean all HOAs are racist now, although I think it would be naive to assume we've 100% eliminated all the racism. Sort of the same perspective on Voter ID. It was created for racism, only racism. Now, maybe it's not but... do we really think everyone forgot?
I can’t comment on HOAs being historically racist - I’ve not seen it. But how would that work? They don’t (at least now) get to vote on who is allowed to buy. So how would they keep out whoever they decided was undesirable? Were there bylaws about skin color?
I know most of these flock cameras are going up in low income black neighborhoods [1] to "protect" them, but don't these wealthy neighborhoods need "protection" too?
Completely frivolous comment: people who insist on capitalizing “realtor” are hilarious. I know “Realtor” is a registered trademark, but that just makes it funnier to me.
On topic, we’ve stopped going to a popular pizza place near us because the owner put a Flock camera up.
Can someone explain to me why you wouldn't want a camera accessible to police monitoring the comings and goings of your residence? Seems it would make it trivial to catch any criminal behavior.
And the pool makes sense as well as pools are incredibly dangerous. If children are regularly breaking in and swimming at night, which has been known to happen, it's a huge liability to residents not to mention the possibility of someone drowning
I guess it could be private effort (everyone I know has a ring or Google home type system monitoring their residence 24/7), but I think the hysterics around Flock is mostly an online phenomenon.
> Why would you want to live in an area that has that creepy of a tech product facing the pool? I wouldn’t want the hoa or an enterprising creep of a cop spying on my kids or myself either.
You've all spent two decades strapping microphone/camera/gps combos to the side of your head and filling your homes/cars/tvs/fridges with big tech cameras and microphones but this is the line apparently.
I'm not well versed in American privacy expectations but it seems kind of arbitrary from an outsiders perspective.
Flock isn't just a private mass surveillance corporation that leases cameras and infra to police departments. We've had that since digital cameras and the internet.
What Flock sells as its core product is "AI" surveillance and policing. What that actually means is that Flock trains their own statistical models on the data their cameras passively collect. Flock sells access to those models as a "one click" crime solver.
The result is not only the massive expansion of public surveillance, but the replacement of actual detective work with statistical modeling. By using a statistical model to "solve crime", police departments get to launder their responsibility away to the magic AI black box.
It seems reasonable that Axon, the #1 police body camera vendor, would benefit from a national social media wave of hate towards it's competitor Flock.
People who get angry enough to tear down the Flock cameras in their area get rounded up and classified by the Feds as "leftist terrorists".
Axon gets a major boost to it's revenue by landing fat .gov contracts for it's own version of 24/7 surveillance.
Government employees who approve the contracts get rich on insider trading.
There is pressure on both sides of the issue. A lot of people prioritize security over privacy. My subdivision has a single entrance. I've been lobbying the HOA members to support installing a prominent camera there to dissuade thieves. It's less important to me that it works then that it is visible. (I have one at my driveway entrance; the one at the subdivision entrance would help the whole community.)
I would certainly not support a Flock camera wired into their network, but do support a camera limited to HOA control. It would make me feel a little easier about trips away. The potential loss of privacy in my comings and goings seems like a reasonable price to me.
It's "X". The only people left there are either required to have an account for their jobs, or they love this fascist shit. Why else would anyone stay on that shit hole of a platform now that Musk is running it?
I find this unsettling. When a private entity buys Flock, how do they _use_ it? Is it more than ALPR? Are they sharing the data with the network and offer it to the police? Can they watch footage?
Knowing the types that gravitate towards HOA boards and the like, I take the least charitable view possible. Simply a system that is ripe for abuse and it's hard to justify any of the use cases as necessary. We've ceded control of our lives entirely to tyrants both small and large.
I would never want to buy a house near Flock cameras. That's worse than having an HOA. That one has both! That's a special kind of dystopian hellscape.
I would have to. (Well, I wouldn't even bother looking further into the property once I learned it involved an HOA, but for the sake of argument...) The presence of these cameras is wholly and entirely objectionable.
First off, I don't enjoy the intense kind of Internet surveillance we have today; the advertiser tracking and logging of everywhere we go and everything we see. I think most sessions should be kept private, just between me, my ISP, and Google/Microsoft.
However, I am perfectly fine with Flock (or other) cameras existing and providing services on behalf of government. If the tech exists to watch public spaces all the time and massively process the data, then so be it; who can stop it? So there are abuses: any system can be abused, so improve the controls and stop corruption at its root, not its symptoms.
I bet that most anti-Flock people lobby hard for bodycams on police, and they thrive on those amateur social-media videos that appear to depict "police brutality" or "ICE overreach" on the streets. It only seems fair, that if amateur video can be leveraged to whip the public into a righteous frenzy, that professional video networks should be in place as well.
Lastly, I don't mind the folks who are chopping down Flock trees. I think it's kind of adorable, actually. I believe that Flock should've used better care and highway safety standards to install the things, rather than hastily throwing them in any open space. You kids with your axes like President Washington's cherry trees! Power to the people!
Why anyone else should give a shit what you think, I don't know. Hey, chance for personal growth: maybe if a flock camera catches you near a crime scene you'll have a chance to enjoy the detention without trial and forced feeding that a lot of innocent migrants are being subjected to. I would love that for you.
What, you endorse torture too? Not too surprising I suppose but disappointing.
It's still not going to get you any real friends. Sorry to tell you that. A calculator isn't going to fill that role either but I can get the appeal - calculators don't push back, they don't call you out, they don't tell you to fuck off when you're being annoying.
It’s funny, aside from AI, I think our views are more aligned than you might think, on Trump, Musk, Israel, ICE, etc. You seem to be a little more towards the progressive end of the scale than me, but generally aligned. Even similar breadth and depth of experience in tech over the last 25 years. Just kind of ironic.
For the record, just thought it was funny to see you castigating me for looking at your comments, then to find one where you did the same (plus wished torture on someone because they have wrongthink).
Again, I hope you find some peace, and let go of this pointless rage about AI. It’s just a tool. Not worth building your personality around, either for or against.
> For the record, just thought it was funny to see you castigating me for looking at your comments, then to find one where you did the same (plus wished torture on someone because they have wrongthink).
I do want to set the record clear on this - the “wrongthink” in this case was calling torture “life affirming healthcare”, so it’s not really wishing suffering on them, so much as karma.
Oh, no, not torture. It's "life-saving health care" remember?
Again, if you don't look at context you won't understand what's being said.
> What do you even stand for at that point?
Justice. Karma. Ironic resolutions to the shitty things some people openly support.
I believe people should fully experience the things they wish for the poorest amongst us. Otherwise, what do they even stand for?
I don't believe anyone should be tortured - but if someone endorses torture and calls it healthcare, I believe it is just for them to experience the thing they are defending. This is no different from the talking heads back during Bush 2 - happy to endorse torture of helpless farmers, terrified to ever experience it.
What goes around comes around is a concept older than time.
“What goes around comes around” is about having the same thing done to you that you have DONE to another. Cheering for someone to get tortured because they say WORDS you don’t like is fucked up, and just reveals that you actually don’t give a shit about justice (nor understand karma). You’re just angry and frustrated, so you toss out something hateful and extreme because you can’t find a better way to make your point, or cope with your sense of powerlessness. It’s all over your comments.
Lotta wasted words on that psychoanalysis there, lmao. You're still here, trying as hard as you can to misinterpret every comment just to make yourself feel better. I voiced my opinion, and you've been whining about it for 2 days.
I hope you can eventually accept that other people have stronger convictions and different opinions than you, and that sometimes calls for justice will sound scary when you're on the side of the oppressors. When you finally internalize that, you might be able to let things like this go. Until then, it's going to live in the back of your mind forever. Rent free. Because you know that ultimately - I'm right.
If you take the time to introspect and ask yourself where all these big feelings are coming from, you may find something ugly within yourself to confront. Give it a try, it may help you find some peace. I hope that helps.
Glad to see the shift in tone from angry and abusive to just condescending. Guess the warning from the mods was effective. Your arguments aren't any better, but baby steps.
Well, I started to feel bad for you. It’s obvious that someone having a strong opinion is really difficult for you to deal with.
It’s sad to see, but you just can’t help some people. You’re dead wrong about LLMs, but seem to psychologically need them to be equivalent to humans so you can pretend your social needs are filled. That’s sad, it speaks to a sort of emptiness - being ready to accept a mirror as if it were a person.
You claim to hold strong moral values, but are frightened of both truth and offended by justice, outing yourself as a pretender. It’s always hard to see, but there are many people in society like that - going through life without any strong convictions or beliefs, without any plans to build a better future, desperate for connection but too objectionable for people to grow close too.
I don’t know, it’s really just pity now. I hope things get better for you <3
38 comments
[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 10.2 ms ] threadWe've all heard or experienced the silly rules about how your house must look and the fines associated with it. None of that should be legal.
The one thing HOAs do is trash pickup but that should be a municipal government function. It is it everywhere else in the developed world.
And why do they exist? If you find yourself asking that about anything uniquely American the answer is almost always "systemic racism". And that's the case here. HOAs became popularized in the 20th century with racially restrictive covenants (ie to prevent the owner selling to black people) [1].
So where are we now? Instead of the HOA president spending their day driving past "problem" houses to look for any rules violations, are we going to have them doing that with Flock cameras instead? What a dystopian nightmare.
[1]: https://www.bostonfairhousing.org/timeline/1920s1948-Restric...
I’m on an HOA board because no else wants to because it’s boring. We maintain a large green space with walking paths and a community pool, and garbage pickup. We have whites, blacks, asians, hispanics, etc and nobody cares. Sometimes there is shared land in a development that has to be managed and somebody has to do it.
Also, the history of HOAs is explicitly racist. That doesn't mean all HOAs are racist now, although I think it would be naive to assume we've 100% eliminated all the racism. Sort of the same perspective on Voter ID. It was created for racism, only racism. Now, maybe it's not but... do we really think everyone forgot?
Y Combinator invested in Flock Safety in 2017.
1: https://www.wvtf.org/news/2026-08-14/flock-cameras-trigger-p...
On topic, we’ve stopped going to a popular pizza place near us because the owner put a Flock camera up.
And the pool makes sense as well as pools are incredibly dangerous. If children are regularly breaking in and swimming at night, which has been known to happen, it's a huge liability to residents not to mention the possibility of someone drowning
I guess it could be private effort (everyone I know has a ring or Google home type system monitoring their residence 24/7), but I think the hysterics around Flock is mostly an online phenomenon.
> Why would you want to live in an area that has that creepy of a tech product facing the pool? I wouldn’t want the hoa or an enterprising creep of a cop spying on my kids or myself either.
You've all spent two decades strapping microphone/camera/gps combos to the side of your head and filling your homes/cars/tvs/fridges with big tech cameras and microphones but this is the line apparently.
I'm not well versed in American privacy expectations but it seems kind of arbitrary from an outsiders perspective.
I’m only now becoming aware of it, and feel like I’m out of the loop on key aspects.
Flock isn't just a private mass surveillance corporation that leases cameras and infra to police departments. We've had that since digital cameras and the internet.
What Flock sells as its core product is "AI" surveillance and policing. What that actually means is that Flock trains their own statistical models on the data their cameras passively collect. Flock sells access to those models as a "one click" crime solver.
The result is not only the massive expansion of public surveillance, but the replacement of actual detective work with statistical modeling. By using a statistical model to "solve crime", police departments get to launder their responsibility away to the magic AI black box.
People who get angry enough to tear down the Flock cameras in their area get rounded up and classified by the Feds as "leftist terrorists".
Axon gets a major boost to it's revenue by landing fat .gov contracts for it's own version of 24/7 surveillance.
Government employees who approve the contracts get rich on insider trading.
https://www.axon.com/
I would certainly not support a Flock camera wired into their network, but do support a camera limited to HOA control. It would make me feel a little easier about trips away. The potential loss of privacy in my comings and goings seems like a reasonable price to me.
Really shouldn't have clicked the link or signed in to this cesspool...
You will be hard pressed to find a block without them. What’s stopping a company from paying these people for their footage in return for “safety”?
I don't understand the hatred for Flock. And I don't think the complainers see the irony of tweeting complaints about Flock from their iPhones.
However, I am perfectly fine with Flock (or other) cameras existing and providing services on behalf of government. If the tech exists to watch public spaces all the time and massively process the data, then so be it; who can stop it? So there are abuses: any system can be abused, so improve the controls and stop corruption at its root, not its symptoms.
I bet that most anti-Flock people lobby hard for bodycams on police, and they thrive on those amateur social-media videos that appear to depict "police brutality" or "ICE overreach" on the streets. It only seems fair, that if amateur video can be leveraged to whip the public into a righteous frenzy, that professional video networks should be in place as well.
Lastly, I don't mind the folks who are chopping down Flock trees. I think it's kind of adorable, actually. I believe that Flock should've used better care and highway safety standards to install the things, rather than hastily throwing them in any open space. You kids with your axes like President Washington's cherry trees! Power to the people!
Well of course you are, you also endorse torture!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49323719
Why anyone else should give a shit what you think, I don't know. Hey, chance for personal growth: maybe if a flock camera catches you near a crime scene you'll have a chance to enjoy the detention without trial and forced feeding that a lot of innocent migrants are being subjected to. I would love that for you.
It's still not going to get you any real friends. Sorry to tell you that. A calculator isn't going to fill that role either but I can get the appeal - calculators don't push back, they don't call you out, they don't tell you to fuck off when you're being annoying.
For the record, just thought it was funny to see you castigating me for looking at your comments, then to find one where you did the same (plus wished torture on someone because they have wrongthink).
Again, I hope you find some peace, and let go of this pointless rage about AI. It’s just a tool. Not worth building your personality around, either for or against.
I do want to set the record clear on this - the “wrongthink” in this case was calling torture “life affirming healthcare”, so it’s not really wishing suffering on them, so much as karma.
The rest isn’t worth a response.
Again, if you don't look at context you won't understand what's being said.
> What do you even stand for at that point?
Justice. Karma. Ironic resolutions to the shitty things some people openly support.
I believe people should fully experience the things they wish for the poorest amongst us. Otherwise, what do they even stand for?
I don't believe anyone should be tortured - but if someone endorses torture and calls it healthcare, I believe it is just for them to experience the thing they are defending. This is no different from the talking heads back during Bush 2 - happy to endorse torture of helpless farmers, terrified to ever experience it.
What goes around comes around is a concept older than time.
As I said, I hope you find some peace.
I hope you can eventually accept that other people have stronger convictions and different opinions than you, and that sometimes calls for justice will sound scary when you're on the side of the oppressors. When you finally internalize that, you might be able to let things like this go. Until then, it's going to live in the back of your mind forever. Rent free. Because you know that ultimately - I'm right.
If you take the time to introspect and ask yourself where all these big feelings are coming from, you may find something ugly within yourself to confront. Give it a try, it may help you find some peace. I hope that helps.
It’s sad to see, but you just can’t help some people. You’re dead wrong about LLMs, but seem to psychologically need them to be equivalent to humans so you can pretend your social needs are filled. That’s sad, it speaks to a sort of emptiness - being ready to accept a mirror as if it were a person.
You claim to hold strong moral values, but are frightened of both truth and offended by justice, outing yourself as a pretender. It’s always hard to see, but there are many people in society like that - going through life without any strong convictions or beliefs, without any plans to build a better future, desperate for connection but too objectionable for people to grow close too.
I don’t know, it’s really just pity now. I hope things get better for you <3