Can someone explain why Flock is such a politically charged topic.

I’m only now becoming aware of it, and feel like I’m out of the loop on key aspects.

The majority of the time in the US when the power of the state is expanded at the expense of the rights of voters, it's done by providing big optional benefits to voters, and starts out with strong privacy protections which are salami-sliced away.

Tracking people by their smartphones? Voters get smartphones out of it, and the state supposedly needs a warrant to track them (except when they don't). And they can always just not get one.

Tracking people's every purchase? Voters get credit cards, cashback, purchase protection and online shopping out of it. And they can always just use cash.

Tracking people's media consumption? Voters get free/super cheap ad supported media, the widest selection the world has ever seen. And they can still buy in stores with cash if they want.

Access to people's photos, no warrants required? Voters get great quality cameras on their phones, and free basic cloud backup in case their phones are ever damaged or lost. And you can always disable it.

An always-on microphone in every home? Voters get huge, incredibly cheap TVs with 4K netflix/Disney/whatever, incredibly cheap smart speakers etc. And the microphone only turns on when it hears certain things.

Flock's problem is they've done the big power transfer without providing the corresponding payoff, and too quickly.

Most people do not want to be surveilled all the time. Most police departments would like to surveil everyone all the time. City governments tend to do what the police department wants unless a lot of people get mad.

Some things that people dislike about Flock:

Flock has had a a number of security issues where people have demonstrated that the cameras could be accessed easily by anyone because of (IIRC) the use of default passwords.

Flock have said that they weren't doing this or that (I don't recall the exact details, I think initially they may have said it was just recording license plates), but then people found out they were doing a lot more than that.

Flock and police departments have been found to have been doing way more than using the cameras to investigate crime, including stalking friends and lovers and exes, and in one case one of the guys was found to have been regularly watching a young girls gymnastics gym a lot.

Because it's one of the actually visible bricks of the modern end of privacy, people are mad about it and there's multiple actions against them but it's all useless as they're here to stay and multiply. There's so many other bricks way worse and insidious, we the people simply can't fight every single brick these people are paid to develop.

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.

https://www.axon.com/

Is it really? It seems that the fight against total surveillance is bipartisan.

A private organization that is tied into governments and police departments across the country have cameras everywhere that can track license plates and have 24-hour video for tracking people and it is completely unregulated.

What I don't understand is, there are plenty of other incumbents that provide a similar service. I suspect Flock uniquely gets the treatment it does due to good branding, fast adoption, and broader association with Silicon Valley.

Most people here are missing the point.

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.