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m4ck_ 8 hours ago [-]
Doxxing is bad of course but does "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" apply here? Or is that only for us working folk?
folkrav 7 hours ago [-]
I would typically agree with the statement, but I have a lot of trouble giving a flying shit about the people literally selling Doxxing-As-A-Service getting doxxed in return.
8note 4 hours ago [-]
doxxing is about pseudonymous internet accounts, not people who are very public with their real name and lobbying the government.
this is whitepages reverse lookup
if he was just a guy chatting on the internet about cameras, sure, it would be doxxing, but he isnt. paparazzi have existed sonce forever
BatFastard 4 hours ago [-]
Question for me is "Will something you can do free now, be suspicious in the future?"
Like voting, or taking your kids to a private school, or going to an EFF meeting?
As long as you feel fine having the government know absolutely everything you do, then keep supporting surveillance. I personally have nothing to fear, but I hate the idea that I am being surveilled by a private company.
amazingamazing 6 hours ago [-]
Do you believe anyone with a surveillance camera should have the owners name and address published if in any way a “public” area is recorded?
I suppose we can start with all Blink, Ring and Nest Cams. Then we will continue with dash cam owners.
Refreeze5224 6 hours ago [-]
I don't. But I do think the CEO of a company who sells spying as a service to cops should have a taste of his own medicine.
schiffern 4 hours ago [-]
1. Installing a yard camera.
2. Building a mass surveillance dragnet and purpose-built tracking software and marketing it heavily to random local authorities.
Yep, totally the same thing...
dghlsakjg 2 hours ago [-]
If they are sharing the footage with a dragnet, tracking people across the country, and giving access to unaccountable cops with a history of abusing that data?
Yes.
If they are using it to see when their amazon package got delivered, or for bog standard security purposes?
No.
folkrav 4 hours ago [-]
You are equating installing personal security camera(s) to knowingly selling extra-judiciary mass-surveillance hardware and software to law enforcement. What's the point you're trying to make with this, exactly?
sigmarule 5 hours ago [-]
Context matters. Without it, very foolish things can be said.
5 hours ago [-]
idiotsecant 3 hours ago [-]
Are you asking if a public registry of where you're being observed by security cameras is a good thing? Sure. I wouldn't mind that.
5 hours ago [-]
mullingitover 12 hours ago [-]
I worry that Flock is going to take the fall, and some other bad actor with political connections (my money would be on Palantir) will just quietly pick up where they left off while everyone's patting themselves on the back for defeating Flock.
The stuff Flock is doing is going to be standard AI-driven surveillance in the future, and unless the actual practices are made into political third rails and made into criminal code violations, they will absolutely be legalized on some party line vote in the middle of the night.
Don't make it 'stop Flock,' make it 'criminalize AI-driven surveillance.' Denounce 'conspiracy to implement ai-driven surveillance' as an inherently immoral activity punishable by prison time.
nancyminusone 11 hours ago [-]
My money would be on Axon. They at least have a claim to the "hold police accountable" angle with bodycams and less-lethal weapons. Compared with Flock's "we'll watch you and what're you gonna do about it"
lokar 6 hours ago [-]
NPR reported they are already moving in with a competing product .
Axon's had ALPRs long before Flock existed, and the data management story is completely different. Flock was essentially a data warehouse with dark patterns around sharing settings that led to a lot of places defaulting open. Axon started out in bodycams and other direct-investigative tools, and their data management is very much focused on "the agency keeps its data" -- by default, data sharing requests have to be individually approved. You can't just type a plate number in and get hits nationwide.
The question is: will Axon enshittify their mature products in order to pursue that panopticon money?
Dig1t 6 hours ago [-]
This is still a useful first step. Once “flock” becomes eponymous and a toxic political football, it can be applied to all future companies who do the same thing.
The word “Flock” is quickly becoming toxic, in the future we’ll be able to use it as a shorthand for all companies of this type. e.g. if I call something a cleanex everyone knows what I’m talking about regardless of whether Cleanex the company actually made the item being referred to. Similarly we’ll be able to just say “flock camera” and everyone will know what it is regardless of who makes the camera.
bluefirebrand 5 hours ago [-]
I think the point you're trying to make is undermined slightly by the fact that the word I think you're looking for is "Kleenex" not Cleanex. It took me a while to figure out what you were talking about, and I did some searching online to make sure I wasn't missing something about "Cleanex" in particular
I still agree with you though ."Flock Camera" is very likely to become the general term for "public surveillance camera" and it will carry a negative weight.
snypher 4 hours ago [-]
Sometimes a misspelling is for avoiding social media vampire lawyers.
bluefirebrand 3 hours ago [-]
That's silly. :)
Manuel_D 8 hours ago [-]
> they will absolutely be legalized on some party line vote in the middle of the night.
What would be legalized? You realize that recording people in public is already legal, right? I'm puzzled where people are getting the idea that Flock is doing something illegal.
rc5150 5 hours ago [-]
you're being deliberately daft. Its not the recording, its the surveillance dragnet with zero regulation or oversight that creates an instant dossier on whatever datapoints are searched for, by whomever decides to search for them who has paid for access.
Honestly the nuance isn't that intellectually taxing and having to explain it to people in the tech space is tiresome.
Manuel_D 5 hours ago [-]
You're calling me daft yet you couldn't be bothered to answer the question. What is going the be legalized, as the above commenter wrote? What law is Flock breaking presently?
Like it or not recording and photographing people in public, then selling that information is not illegal. Paparazzi do it all the time. You can point a webcam out your window, run ALPR software on the video feed, and sell access to query that information. Nothing about that is illegal. If it is, then please reference the laws that prohibit this.
People talk about privacy laws being violated, but in general privacy laws do not cover public activity. Privacy laws mostly focus on protecting communications and activities carried out in private.
refactorAbraxas 2 hours ago [-]
That will notion of an individual’s right to photograph a person in public held against the rights of the person being photographed, to conduct their business and affairs undisturbed, is likely to be challenged successfully before the Supreme Court when it can be shown a majority of people are under perpetual persistent technical surveillance.
Manuel_D 2 hours ago [-]
You assume that some future Supreme Court case will rule that governments' use of Flock violated the Fifth Amendment, but at present Flock is violating now laws. Like I said in the my original reply: nothing is good to be legalized because nothing Flock is doing violates the law.
There's a big difference between "X is illegal" and "X is presently legal, but my prediction is that the Supreme Court will, in the future, rule that X is illegal."
nemosaltat 8 hours ago [-]
Exactly my thoughts. Flock has been brazen on so many things, that second-movers with a modicum of political savvy can come assuage all the major Flock-FUD, while in fact being significantly worse.
cucumber3732842 11 hours ago [-]
>they will absolutely be legalized on some party line vote in the middle of the night.
Or they'll be legalized piecemeal and you'll get sneered at by the useful idiots for opposing each incremental step based on principal.
superxpro12 11 hours ago [-]
they'll find a particularly violent crime and use that as the strawman... "Oh you dont want this? well i guess you support violent immigrant mass murderers then!"
and then before you know it the state has implemented its mass surveillance apparatus across the entire country. And we though china's social credits were bad? just IMAGINE what those predatory tech bros are cookin up.
nemosaltat 8 hours ago [-]
As a higher level comment points out, my fear is that Flock will end up being the straw man, happily torn down in favor of more outwardly palatable but privately onerous player(s).
tyingq 8 hours ago [-]
They could even start identifying "pre-crime" :)
Not as far fetched as it sounds even. Plenty of not-quite-a-crime things they could track if desired.
jquery 10 hours ago [-]
I mean, is that even a strawman? You can oppose mass AI surveillance and acknowledge the price of that is more crime.
toomuchtodo 12 hours ago [-]
Legislation guardrails around surveillance technology are a necessary component to defend against future corporate surveillance apparatus establishment and operation, as this surveillance could take many forms (video, audio, geolocation, RF signatures, etc). Flock and Axon today, whatever unsavory folks come along in the future.
“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work together for the benefit of all.” —- John Maynard Keynes
> The order came as The Texas Tribune was preparing to publish an investigation detailing how a state agency has devoted at least $30 million to building the state’s Flock surveillance network.
Our local governments are enabling Flock. Get involved in your local politics. Find out who made the decisions to put these cameras in the neighborhoods and hold them accountable. Until that happens they will just find another vendor if Flock folds. Just like Flock will find a new CEO if theirs is forced to resignation.
randycupertino 12 hours ago [-]
I noticed he requested to hide his house street view on google maps.
consumer451 10 hours ago [-]
I have to say, I wish we lived in a society where tools like Flock were not problematic, due to abuse and other factors.
However, if we lived in such a society, we wouldn't want tools like Flock to begin with.
edit: to be clear, we are far too corrupt a society to have things like Flock. The point of my comment was this irony.
hightrix 10 hours ago [-]
We do not need Flock in this current iteration of society.
In utopia, we would also not need Flock.
Privacy should be a human right.
Gigachad 6 hours ago [-]
We don’t _need_ many things. But there are real problems that it solves and solves better than anything else.
I feel like the best solution is very tightly regulating and auditing this technology so it can only be used to benefit society.
consumer451 6 hours ago [-]
We are so far away from that even being a possibility.
We live in a world that is most corrupt and above the law, at the very top. Why would anyone trust that world? Trust is required for this technology to be willingly adopted.
consumer451 10 hours ago [-]
Agreed. I now realize that my initial comment did not make my position clear.
frogperson 5 hours ago [-]
i have a RIGHT to privacy, and so does everyone on American soil. end of argument.
8 hours ago [-]
ChrisArchitect 11 hours ago [-]
Related:
Flock CEO gets his house blurred out on Google Maps and Zillow
Our founding fathers addressed this: "What country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two?
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
legitster 11 hours ago [-]
Founding father. Singular.
I can appreciate Jefferson as much as the next guy but thank goodness his voice just one amongst many.
ramon156 12 hours ago [-]
as always it entirely depends on context. rationality is out the door when tbe power is out of your hands. its pretty clear flock wont take your criticism seriously
barbazoo 8 hours ago [-]
I would imagine that the worst thing the vast majority of people have done is probably orders of magnitude less bad than what this guy has enabled and profited from. So it'd probably be safe under that regime.
whateveracct 11 hours ago [-]
CEOs aren't just people. They can have fun dealing with it :)
Computer0 11 hours ago [-]
CEO's aren't people. When you pretend they are, you allow them to live normal lives where they seem deserving of the same social protections we all enjoy.
spl757 11 hours ago [-]
The CEO of a company that spies on people, and now detects signals from your phone to connect the car to a driver, got scared and had Google blur his house. That is the height of hypocrisy. His home address is also public information, available from the City Clerks office for free. People won't need to find the exact address, just look for the only blurred house on his street. It's all utterly ridiculous. Clearly the citizens of the USA do not want flock in their communities so the CEO of the company isn't going to be popular, but he could fix that by removing flock from the communities that ban it.
rc5150 5 hours ago [-]
You're talking about violence like its some imaginary thing that isn't already being amplified by the government against its citizenry. The violence is already here and the surveillance state exacerbates it.
testing22321 8 hours ago [-]
Who said violence?
We just need a ton of people to film his house and whereabouts 24x7 for a while so he gets a taste of his own medicine.
It would be horrible if he didn’t like it.
Note celebrities have to put up with the paparazzi. At this point he’s a celebrity.
toomuchtodo 12 hours ago [-]
I believe the folks cutting down Flock cameras and voting out reps who won't have them removed are well within their rights. Fundamentally, Flock Safety is incompatible with US constitutional rights, their enterprise value can drain slowly, or quickly. We're just arguing time horizon.
> If you want violence, you better be prepared for it. You just can't complain when someone doesn't like what you are doing and comes right to your door.
I don't condone violence in this context, and besides perhaps a few individuals (humans are tricky), I haven't seen anyone else loudly or overtly calling for it (provide sources if I am wrong). My assumption is his address is being shared to demonstrate the asymmetry and hypocrisy. "If you have nothing to hide" argument.
(but you know, its the usual authoritarian tech bro "I wanna get rich and have control while the plebs get stuck with the harm and externalities" story)
legitster 11 hours ago [-]
I know this is an extremely hot take, but it's not the license plate reading service that bothers me.
A license plate is specifically a tracking number to identify a registered vehicle on a public road. The 4th Amendment gives you privacy inside of your car, but your car is not itself guaranteed privacy. Before Flock, police departments already had informally aggregated data from speed cameras, red light cameras, and toll booths. The distinction being that any evidence collected in such a way is purely circumstantial and still requires a warrant to investigate.
The big irony though of Flock plate readers is that because they're just tracking license plates, they're not actually that useful at solving meaningful crime. Realistically there are a small number of hit-and-runs that could be solved, and they can make certain investigations a bit shorter. And most of what we read about is officer directed stalking or harassment activities.
It's all of Flock's other advertised services that should really freak people out. The facial recognition, the audio scanners, the individual-level tracking databases - right now they're a fancy VIN lookup service. It's all the other stuff they're trying to sell departments on that are getting into really egregious 4th Amendment violations.
mullingitover 10 hours ago [-]
Recent WIRED[1] article goes in depth on this exact problem:
> Another prompt instructs the system to list everyone arrested more than twice in two years for “any offense,” exempting only narcotics arrests, and then says to map where those people live, retrieve the calls for service at their homes, and “do a workup on the top three individuals.” The prompt begins with everyone in the area who has an arrest record and ends with dossiers on three of them, chosen by the software.
> A “workup,” in Flock’s terminology, is a one-command background check. It starts with a name and a date of birth and returns what the department’s records and commercial data hold: vehicles, prior listings as a suspect, and, on a second screen, relatives, phone numbers, and online accounts.
This stuff is beyond the wildest fantasies of East Germany's Stasi, and it's going to be a whack-a-mole game dealing with all the baby Flocks that spring up if Flock itself can be shut down.
For a more modern example, China already has this and a lot more. The public seems largely supportive of it though because most street crimes stopped.
The potential for abuse is obviously massive, but the benefit to society is too.
legitster 10 hours ago [-]
> This stuff is beyond the wildest fantasies of East Germany's Stasi
I feel like that's a bit of a false equivalency. The soviet secret police had surprisingly little hard evidence on anyone - part of the terror of these regimes is that they could act decisively with little more than a rumor or gossip and be free from scrutiny for any mistakes.
mullingitover 10 hours ago [-]
You're right: the current US regime has been gleefully weaponizing the legal system against political enemies, and the difference is that they don't care about scrutiny for mistakes because there have been zero consequences for anyone involved. The Soviets were at least somewhat worried about bad PR.
My thinking is if we can stop pervasive AI-driven surveillance we might be saved from a totalitarian regime who views The Handmaid's Tale as an instruction manual, and instead be able to settle for a run-of-the-mill corrupt authoritarian one.
dghlsakjg 2 hours ago [-]
Look up some of the Flock horror stories.
There's the one where a guy was surrounded by cops with their guns pointing at him because of a flock fuckup. He had a partial plate match (as in, some of the digits matched, but not an exact match) with a plate that was lost or stolen (as in the plate itself was stolen, not the car it was attached to.) That one went viral because the guy was an editor at a magazine driving a loaner car
There's this one where a lady was pulled out of her car at gunpoint after flock flagged her as a murder suspect. This happened twice in a weekend. She was never suspected of murder, it was a mistaken flag. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/aug/28/milwaukee-p...
Flock doesn't require evidence for an alert to be put in their system. If you have access you can apparently just put out an alert saying someone is a murder suspect, and some police department will repeatedly drag a woman out of her car until the media embarrasses them publicly
dmitrygr 10 hours ago [-]
> everyone arrested more than twice in two years
Purely statistically, this is a good first-pass filter if you are looking for perps. Chance a random adult is arrested in a 8-year window: ~5%. Chance a former convict gets arrested in an 8-year window: ~49%. So, it is ~10x the rate. Makes sense, statistically, to start there.
They aren't just tracking license plates though. They're tracking people - let me explain. Their 'ALPR' cameras (purposefully misleading to call them ALPR btw) capture the footage and send it off to their servers where it's retained - building a long-term historical location history on every vehicle. Advanced analysis is performed on the data to provide features to their customers such as the ability to search for vehicles based on a description of its characteristics (no plate needed), real-time route prediction, location heatmaps, and identifying vehicles that travel together (convoy search). Here's the important part - data is also ingested into another service they run called 'Nova', which is essentially a people search tool that connects the vehicles they capture directly to people and their PII. Access to their platforms (Flock OS, Nova, etc.) is sold via a subscription to law enforcement where they can perform searches for individuals or vehicle whereabouts for any reason, without a warrant, and practically no oversight or regulations.
8note 4 hours ago [-]
retained data means they arent just tracking vehicles
as the ml improves, its tracking absolutely everything. they could rwll you the migration paths of the local racoons and coyotes, for instance
phendrenad2 3 hours ago [-]
So would you be okay with this is Flock demanded a warrant before showing police the information?
dghlsakjg 2 hours ago [-]
I, personally, would feel better about it.
Warrants (are supposed to) have judicial oversight and are limited in their scope. There's also a paper trail attached to information obtained from a warrant.
this is whitepages reverse lookup
if he was just a guy chatting on the internet about cameras, sure, it would be doxxing, but he isnt. paparazzi have existed sonce forever
As long as you feel fine having the government know absolutely everything you do, then keep supporting surveillance. I personally have nothing to fear, but I hate the idea that I am being surveilled by a private company.
I suppose we can start with all Blink, Ring and Nest Cams. Then we will continue with dash cam owners.
2. Building a mass surveillance dragnet and purpose-built tracking software and marketing it heavily to random local authorities.
Yep, totally the same thing...
Yes.
If they are using it to see when their amazon package got delivered, or for bog standard security purposes?
No.
The stuff Flock is doing is going to be standard AI-driven surveillance in the future, and unless the actual practices are made into political third rails and made into criminal code violations, they will absolutely be legalized on some party line vote in the middle of the night.
Don't make it 'stop Flock,' make it 'criminalize AI-driven surveillance.' Denounce 'conspiracy to implement ai-driven surveillance' as an inherently immoral activity punishable by prison time.
https://www.npr.org/2026/08/22/nx-s1-5931446/flock-fallout-c...
The question is: will Axon enshittify their mature products in order to pursue that panopticon money?
The word “Flock” is quickly becoming toxic, in the future we’ll be able to use it as a shorthand for all companies of this type. e.g. if I call something a cleanex everyone knows what I’m talking about regardless of whether Cleanex the company actually made the item being referred to. Similarly we’ll be able to just say “flock camera” and everyone will know what it is regardless of who makes the camera.
I still agree with you though ."Flock Camera" is very likely to become the general term for "public surveillance camera" and it will carry a negative weight.
What would be legalized? You realize that recording people in public is already legal, right? I'm puzzled where people are getting the idea that Flock is doing something illegal.
Honestly the nuance isn't that intellectually taxing and having to explain it to people in the tech space is tiresome.
Like it or not recording and photographing people in public, then selling that information is not illegal. Paparazzi do it all the time. You can point a webcam out your window, run ALPR software on the video feed, and sell access to query that information. Nothing about that is illegal. If it is, then please reference the laws that prohibit this.
People talk about privacy laws being violated, but in general privacy laws do not cover public activity. Privacy laws mostly focus on protecting communications and activities carried out in private.
There's a big difference between "X is illegal" and "X is presently legal, but my prediction is that the Supreme Court will, in the future, rule that X is illegal."
Or they'll be legalized piecemeal and you'll get sneered at by the useful idiots for opposing each incremental step based on principal.
and then before you know it the state has implemented its mass surveillance apparatus across the entire country. And we though china's social credits were bad? just IMAGINE what those predatory tech bros are cookin up.
Not as far fetched as it sounds even. Plenty of not-quite-a-crime things they could track if desired.
“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work together for the benefit of all.” —- John Maynard Keynes
Guardrails because we cannot trust the human.
> The order came as The Texas Tribune was preparing to publish an investigation detailing how a state agency has devoted at least $30 million to building the state’s Flock surveillance network.
Lawmakers added $1 to Texans’ car insurance policies. That money paid for thousands of Flock cameras. - https://www.texastribune.org/2026/08/28/texas-flock-cameras-... - August 28th, 2026
Pennsylvania state senator planning bill to ban Flock, ALPR cameras - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49482256 - August 2026
https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/pa-state-senato...
However, if we lived in such a society, we wouldn't want tools like Flock to begin with.
edit: to be clear, we are far too corrupt a society to have things like Flock. The point of my comment was this irony.
In utopia, we would also not need Flock.
Privacy should be a human right.
I feel like the best solution is very tightly regulating and auditing this technology so it can only be used to benefit society.
We live in a world that is most corrupt and above the law, at the very top. Why would anyone trust that world? Trust is required for this technology to be willingly adopted.
Flock CEO gets his house blurred out on Google Maps and Zillow
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49467750
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
I can appreciate Jefferson as much as the next guy but thank goodness his voice just one amongst many.
We just need a ton of people to film his house and whereabouts 24x7 for a while so he gets a taste of his own medicine.
It would be horrible if he didn’t like it.
Note celebrities have to put up with the paparazzi. At this point he’s a celebrity.
Flock Camera CEO Asks Americans to “Compromise” on Privacy After Growing Backlash - https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/flock-camera-ceo-asks... - August 27th, 2026
Flock CEO calls for ‘compromise’ as surveillance company faces growing backlash - https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/23/flock-ceo-calls-for-compro... - August 23rd, 2026
Flock Safety CEO calls for national 'compromise' amid camera sabotage and public revolt - https://www.foxnews.com/media/flock-safety-ceo-calls-nationa... - August 22nd, 2026
> If you want violence, you better be prepared for it. You just can't complain when someone doesn't like what you are doing and comes right to your door.
I don't condone violence in this context, and besides perhaps a few individuals (humans are tricky), I haven't seen anyone else loudly or overtly calling for it (provide sources if I am wrong). My assumption is his address is being shared to demonstrate the asymmetry and hypocrisy. "If you have nothing to hide" argument.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument
(but you know, its the usual authoritarian tech bro "I wanna get rich and have control while the plebs get stuck with the harm and externalities" story)
A license plate is specifically a tracking number to identify a registered vehicle on a public road. The 4th Amendment gives you privacy inside of your car, but your car is not itself guaranteed privacy. Before Flock, police departments already had informally aggregated data from speed cameras, red light cameras, and toll booths. The distinction being that any evidence collected in such a way is purely circumstantial and still requires a warrant to investigate.
The big irony though of Flock plate readers is that because they're just tracking license plates, they're not actually that useful at solving meaningful crime. Realistically there are a small number of hit-and-runs that could be solved, and they can make certain investigations a bit shorter. And most of what we read about is officer directed stalking or harassment activities.
It's all of Flock's other advertised services that should really freak people out. The facial recognition, the audio scanners, the individual-level tracking databases - right now they're a fancy VIN lookup service. It's all the other stuff they're trying to sell departments on that are getting into really egregious 4th Amendment violations.
> Another prompt instructs the system to list everyone arrested more than twice in two years for “any offense,” exempting only narcotics arrests, and then says to map where those people live, retrieve the calls for service at their homes, and “do a workup on the top three individuals.” The prompt begins with everyone in the area who has an arrest record and ends with dossiers on three of them, chosen by the software.
> A “workup,” in Flock’s terminology, is a one-command background check. It starts with a name and a date of birth and returns what the department’s records and commercial data hold: vehicles, prior listings as a suspect, and, on a second screen, relatives, phone numbers, and online accounts.
This stuff is beyond the wildest fantasies of East Germany's Stasi, and it's going to be a whack-a-mole game dealing with all the baby Flocks that spring up if Flock itself can be shut down.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/flock-safety-os-investigate/
The potential for abuse is obviously massive, but the benefit to society is too.
I feel like that's a bit of a false equivalency. The soviet secret police had surprisingly little hard evidence on anyone - part of the terror of these regimes is that they could act decisively with little more than a rumor or gossip and be free from scrutiny for any mistakes.
My thinking is if we can stop pervasive AI-driven surveillance we might be saved from a totalitarian regime who views The Handmaid's Tale as an instruction manual, and instead be able to settle for a run-of-the-mill corrupt authoritarian one.
There's the one where a guy was surrounded by cops with their guns pointing at him because of a flock fuckup. He had a partial plate match (as in, some of the digits matched, but not an exact match) with a plate that was lost or stolen (as in the plate itself was stolen, not the car it was attached to.) That one went viral because the guy was an editor at a magazine driving a loaner car
There's this one where a lady was pulled out of her car at gunpoint after flock flagged her as a murder suspect. This happened twice in a weekend. She was never suspected of murder, it was a mistaken flag. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/aug/28/milwaukee-p...
Flock doesn't require evidence for an alert to be put in their system. If you have access you can apparently just put out an alert saying someone is a murder suspect, and some police department will repeatedly drag a woman out of her car until the media embarrasses them publicly
Purely statistically, this is a good first-pass filter if you are looking for perps. Chance a random adult is arrested in a 8-year window: ~5%. Chance a former convict gets arrested in an 8-year window: ~49%. So, it is ~10x the rate. Makes sense, statistically, to start there.
https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/recidivism-am...
as the ml improves, its tracking absolutely everything. they could rwll you the migration paths of the local racoons and coyotes, for instance
Warrants (are supposed to) have judicial oversight and are limited in their scope. There's also a paper trail attached to information obtained from a warrant.