| ▲ | Gardner police discontinue Flock cameras as license plate readers face scrutiny(kmbc.com) |
| 131 points by cocacola1 16 hours ago | 50 comments |
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| ▲ | neom 14 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| "Authorities have charged or accused at least 50 law-enforcement officers of using license-plate readers for unauthorized purposes, including to stalk women without their knowledge or consent, a Post analysis of police and court records found. In 26 of these cases, police investigators and prosecutors said the officers used the technology to spy on their wives, their girlfriends, their exes, their exes’ new partners or women they wanted to meet." https://archive.is/fxZWT And 3 more just a week ago in Georgia: https://www.cbsnews.com/atlanta/news/3-georgia-deputies-arre... If you're curious how this plays out in practice, investigation room video of an officer who confesses to using one to create an alert on a woman so he could pull her over later to get her instagram: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3UfAMzz9Lc |
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| ▲ | viccis 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | The ones here (not in Texas) were being queried by Texas cops looking for women getting out of state abortions. |
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| ▲ | atmavatar 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| "Over 1,200 vendors had access to our information through the Flock system," Steinmetz said, adding he did not know the identities of all those entities.
Even if for some strange reason you're OK with the police having access to the surveillance data (despite multiple recent articles revealing abuse), I'd like to think most people would take issue with random third parties also having access to it.Flock cameras and their ilk are not OK in a civilized, free society. |
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| ▲ | SlightlyLeftPad 14 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | For what legitimate reason would Flock be giving 1,200 vendors access to the city’s information? I don’t see how they’re going to be able to feasibly walk back from this without taking a massive punch to their business. And also great timing because Flock almost swept it all under the rug [1]: 1: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/flock-ceo-apologizes-surveillan... | | |
| ▲ | skywhopper 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | No legitimate reason, but money plus investor pressure plus lack of privacy laws goes a long way towards self-justification. |
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| ▲ | frm88 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There is an expansion to the surveillance. The cameras now get additional phone tracking abilities:
https://archive.is/Tkwc3 | |
| ▲ | sneak 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | By the exact same token, the same thing applies to payment cards and cashless systems in general, but everyone seems to be fine with universal suspicionless surveillance by a private compant in that case. |
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| ▲ | jmpman 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I've been thinking about this for a while. The only place I want flock cameras is at the entrances of the mall parking lot. I can't articulate why that seems acceptable, and yet I view everywhere else as an overstep. |
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| ▲ | throwitaway222 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Maybe we need to upgrade the system to be more like... To use this service copy and paste your authorization: 634534534535453454565646567880123843489579823374234 Thank you! Your authorization gives you permission to search for plate 5VFA213 only. Signed by Judge Ja.... The problem isn't flock either. The next system that replaces this is going to be self-charging and swapping out Drones that scan large areas 15 feet above traffic and follow people it hasn't seen on a daily basis (non-normal events). Good luck us. |
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| ▲ | aussieguy1234 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| There are multiple cases of people being falsely imprisoned because police believed Flock over actual evidence. In each case Flock was wrong. |
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| ▲ | hackernud3s 14 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Yes and in each case of people being correctly imprisoned, Flock was right. That's because it's a tautology. | |
| ▲ | tptacek 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Can you cite some of them? You'd be looking for cases where it's Flock at fault, not where police simply decided to look for the wrong car (like: "any black Honda CR-V that passed this intersection at 10AM"). | | |
| ▲ | ceejayoz 15 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | https://www.riaclu.org/news/flock-safety-image-led-to-false-... https://reason.com/2026/08/13/flock-cameras-and-license-plat... https://katv.com/news/local/sherwood-stop-sparked-after-floc... For the edit specifically: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/11/human-toll-alpr-errors > Turns out that the ALPR had misread a ‘3’ as a ‘7’ on Green’s license plate. But what is even more egregious is that none of the officers bothered to double-check the ALPR tip before acting on it. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | Thanks! Reading now. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | The third of these is exactly what I'm looking for: a case where a Flock camera was off by one letter, and mismatched a car as stolen when it wasn't. The driver wasn't arrested, but being stopped for a stolen vehicle is terrifying --- it happened several times where I live as well (due to stale Illinois LEADS entries). The first two don't seem like Flock issues at all. In the first, police used Flock cameras as they would have a closed-circuit camera. They got a vague look at the person driving a suspect car, and they got another lead on the owner of the car, tracked him down on Facebook, and picked out a person from his friends list that looked like the picture on the camera. In the second, there was a fatal hit-and-run accident involving a Dodge Durango; the police did a dragnet search for Dodges Durango and literally picked the first one they could find parked on the street. They then papered the case backwards to match it to the accident, claiming it had telltale damage (it did not). Both those cases are police malfeasance, to be sure. But they're not the police believing Flock against all other evidence; they're police essentially manufacturing evidence to clear a case. | | |
| ▲ | veec_cas_tant 14 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | There seems to be a very sizable number of people who believe cameras should not be used as evidence because the footage could implicate an innocent person or be misinterpreted. OCR can be wrong, just as a person can make a mistake or fat-finger a data entry, and so on. We should absolutely expect law enforcement to understand the gravity of their actions and use this technology appropriately. I don't agree that getting rid of cameras is the answer here, far from it. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 14 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Right, the "OCR" issue here is what I'm interested in --- Flock's vision models just straight-up making mistakes. There's a whole other issue of police not being well-trained in how to use these things, which leads to problems like "indict the first Dodge Durango we can find", but those are police policy issues more than they are ALPR issues. | | |
| ▲ | veec_cas_tant 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | Does OCR accuracy even matter much here? I would expect, and maybe this is unrealistic, that anything even close to “this plate represents a stolen vehicle” would have at least one human involved. If I send in video evidence and someone just uses iOS OCR on a screenshot without checking it, I am definitely not blaming Apple. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | In theory. Cards on the table, my prior on this is that these kinds of "OCR" errors are in fact very rare. I think that because we did a deep dive on every car curbed by a Flock camera here, as part of the process that led to us eliminating the cameras, and this just never happened. There is, at least in Illinois, a pervasive and difficult-to-solve accuracy problem with these systems, which is that Illinois LEADS is full of stale data; it wasn't designed with the expectation that it'd be matched against plates in real time, but rather with patrol cars calling in plates when they pulled them over. |
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| ▲ | _DeadFred_ 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49262204
"Flock amplifies existing bugs. Sounds like Flock is the error." |
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| ▲ | aussieguy1234 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I can imagine if it was a person of colour driving the "stolen" car, their experience with the police would likely be quite different to that of a white person. | |
| ▲ | slowin 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | How are they not Flock issues? If Flock cameras didn't exist, they wouldn't have happened. Flocks (and all other mass surveillance cameras) allow many parties to violate your rights and generally behave sociopathically. This is why people want them all removed. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | If you want to make the argument that all cameras are problematic, I won't necessarily agree, but it's not the thing I'm asking about. One problem in these discussions is that it's virtually impossible to have a conversation or to explore the topic in any depth because every single comment on the thread is read purely as advocacy. I'm in some part responsible for getting the cameras pulled from my own municipality, as I've discussed many times here. | | |
| ▲ | slowin an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > If you want to make the argument that all cameras are problematic Yes I think all cameras are problematic. I don't want to be recorded in public, especially by the state and it's commercial "partners". It's pretty wild that this is even up for debate at this point, scary times. | |
| ▲ | ofjcihen 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > I'm in some part responsible for getting the cameras pulled from my own municipality, as I've discussed many times here. This along with the tone of your first comment comes more across as “Not in my backyard”. | |
| ▲ | Forgeties79 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I believe you and your follow up comments to the one earlier seemed to point that direction, but there is a bit of a tone in your first comment that could reasonably be misconstrued as undue skepticism in favor of flock. I would just be mindful of how you talk about the subject, if you’re looking for feedback. If not, just ignore me I guess ha | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | I don't think this kind of metadiscussion is productive on these kinds of threads, sorry. Just a personal preference to avoid it as much as possible. | | |
| ▲ | slowin an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | You actually started the meta discussion and they were just replying to you: > One problem in these discussions is that it's virtually impossible to have a conversation or to explore the topic in any depth because every single comment on the thread is read purely as advocacy. People "advocate" in these threads because we don't want to live under mass surveillance. This has already been discussed in depth in books like 1984. | |
| ▲ | Forgeties79 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | hey take it or leave it, no worries |
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| ▲ | ofjcihen 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I like that you told him what you wanted him to find to give to you so that you could read it. The point was his to prove I guess but I can’t help but wonder if you were actually interested in being convinced you wouldn’t have just taken the time to do a quick GPT/Google search. |
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| ▲ | sneak 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| * Flock (YC S17) https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety |
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| ▲ | blackoil 14 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Is this the reason why this story is flagged and pushed down to 2nd page? | | |
| ▲ | veec_cas_tant 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | Probably because there’s a new Flock-bashing post every day or two on here, and there’s barely any tech relevance for a global audience. |
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| ▲ | ofjcihen 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | YC has somehow managed to be affiliated with some of the most egregiously crap companies along with the okay ones. | | |
| ▲ | SlightlyLeftPad 14 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | YC funds the “idea.” Despite having deep issues with this particular business, looking at global trends, I really only see one of two possible outcomes. 1) They’ll survive through this hopefully with some kind of significant reform (on paper at the very least) 2) Flock will suffer from the PR and fail, with the idea being filed under “before its time.” Ultimately, the idea persists. Mass surveillance and LPR tech will continue to roll out under a different name or structure. | | |
| ▲ | sneak 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes, that’s the issue I have with YC here. Unless Flock started with a birdwatching app and later pivoted to mass surveillance, I can’t imagine anyone ethical deciding to profit from nation-scale warrantless mass surveillance. It’s deplorable. |
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| ▲ | TylerE 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | VCs are cancer. YC is one of the biggest VCs. What do you expect? |
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| ▲ | e2le 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Isn't it a bit disingenuous to refer to them as merely license plate readers? |
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| ▲ | esalman 14 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | They're not, according to "Authorities". > Authorities believe the at-large criminals snuck up behind the cameras with spray foam canisters and sprayed the lenses before the cameras had a chance to ID them. https://www.facebook.com/100064614555569/posts/1467922555371... | |
| ▲ | lemoncookiechip 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Cop-issued spousal trackers. 50 cases and counting. | | |
| ▲ | ceejayoz 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | 50 known cases. edit: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/08/19/we-foun... > At least 69 police officials have been accused, charged with or convicted of misusing Flock’s system or other license-plate readers for unauthorized purposes, The Post has found, and in at least 15 of these cases, someone outside of the police department — including victims, activists and journalists — first identified the potential misuse. > Records and interviews show that departments across the country do not regularly audit their officers’ Flock use, a practice recommended by the company, and some law enforcement agencies have no formal training programs or written policies describing how the technology should be used. | | |
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| ▲ | protocolture 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Isnt it a bit disingenuous to imply that license plate readers aren't infringing enough to be a problem? |
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| ▲ | arkhiver 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| They will just switch to Axon |
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| ▲ | asteroidburger 15 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Does Axon offer the same sort of national, single-database that Flock does? I'm far more inclined to trust my local department to manage their own database vs. a single database that everyone contributes to and reads from. | | | |
| ▲ | ncr100 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Then society may just regulate the technology. | | |
| ▲ | ihsw 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | Society must regulate the people using Flock cameras. Guns don't kill people, people do. Automated license plate readers don't stalk jilted ex's, people do. Pole-mounted facial recognition cameras don't spy on children in swimming pools, people do. |
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| ▲ | sneak 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | My angle grinder is vendor-agnostic. |
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