The other thing that's going on is that Flock is essentially an always-on "dragnet."

A "dragnet" is when you set up police checkpoints everywhere and essentially put entire cities under watch to find a fugitive. This happened in Boston after the bombings.

"Dragnets" are illegal except in extreme circumstances (like a bombing).

Flock is a "dragnet on demand." You have a digital dragnet in place not just in one city but potentially in every city, and with a single search can pull the results of the dragnet on anyone for any reason.

> users have a private relationship with Google where they elect to let Google track them and retain their information

Elect to is a bit strong here. Acquiesce to, maybe, or perhaps suffer to.

There is not generally an expectation of privacy in public. Things in public can be recorded without consent. Filming a car on a street and giving that video to the government is not the same as me giving private information to a third party, and then them giving it to the government such as Carpenter v United states covers.

Edit: Note that this is not an endorsement, rather stating that recent supreme court cases may not be applicable.

Flock is YC.

This is being done by investors for ads.

Somr govts are cutting deals, those that aren’t are banning them.

Never trust HN articles or high karma accts

I think there's a reason that they've pushed to get these things up all over the country in a very short amount of time. I feel like the more entrenched they are the less likely the Supreme Court is really going to find against them and tear up the business model, regardless of whether it would be logically consistent or not.

> In the Google case, users have a private relationship with Google where they elect to let Google track them and retain their information... but when the Police ask for that information it's a 'search' and requires a specific warrant.

Bigcorp has a tendency to treat "anonymized" data as if it were up for grabs. The moment they strip the obvious PII from a data stream, they consider it anonymized, and they can do whatever they want with it. They "value" your privacy--that anonymized data is gold. Of course, such data is such high value and they don't "sell it to third parties", so they technically uphold their pages-long EULA, should they ever be charged in court.

But the nature of a lot of high value information, like fine-grained location and telemetry data, just cannot be effectively anonymized. I mean, how do you think they get real-time traffic information? It's "anonymized" GPS location / speed data from Android phones. And it is from the location services layer, not from Google maps.

A reasonable regulation, focusing on personal freedom, would just forbid building such a network in the first place.

> It's pretty clear to be that governments shouldn't be able to 'subcontract' their way out of the limits placed on them via the constitution

At least in the US, they can't. This is already the law.

But what so many people don't understand is that the government does not and never did require a warrant or some other permission to film people in public. Flock isn't allowing the government to bypass limits placed them by the Constitution. Privacy laws, for the most part, protect what people do in private.

One thing the Flock debate had revealed is how many people simply assume everything they don't like is unconstitutional.

> In the Flock case the entire REASON the cameras are there is the the government (Police or local municipality) has contracted Flock to surveil the public

Do we know this for fact? Surely, the police are they're biggest consumers, but do they sell access to the APIs to anyone else?

YC created Flock 10 years ago.

Created it.

But who will enforce those decisions and what is the penalty for noncompliance?

I could probably be convinced that some sort of panopticon license plate reader network could be a net positive for society IF it had the necessary and demonstrably infallible audit and oversight systems - especially with respect to the 4th amendment in the United States (i.e. search warrants).

But honestly, law enforcement is the least of my concerns because the industrial surveillance complex has shown time and again that the commercial entities are the ones with the never ending thirst for squeezing ever more profit from every person they can. To me, the far more insidious problem is what happens when Flock needs to keep showing growth? What's to stop them Flock from selling data to any and all comers?

The possibilities are literally endless:

  * Perfect price discrimination. Parking garages, stores, car washes, fast food places perfectly adjusting price based on what you can afford (based on where you've been).
  * Car insurance shadow telematics. You don't want a GPS-tracker installed on your ODB? Fine. They'll still know where you drive and how fast.
  * Clinic-visit based healthcare inference. "Looks like this guy has been going to a cancer clinic. NO HIRE."
  * "Where has your spouse been?"

I feel this is assuming that the private ventures will not willingly cooperate and can't be forced to comply other than through warrants.

But what if a private company does a fourth amendment violation? What if the private company is the governing body seeking control?

America's supreme court's consistency will not protect anyone from this problem, no matter how much history says so.

> Thankfully the supreme court seems to agree here in two ways

I'm sure we're a golden statue or private jet away from the supreme court having a change of heart there.

You are of course correct, the issue with this reason and legality based arguments ignore the issue and fact that the capability is the real problem, not whether some local deputy can stalk someone. It’s something I’ve argued with several legal advocacy and rights groups, this is not the time to compromise and rely on case law.

I wish people could see that the very reason and way in which flock popped up almost immediately simultaneously all across the country is because it ids actually a domestic spying matrix, not a policing tool. It is a hostile, domestic and foreign enemy capability; not just some misguided mistake.

As long as the capability exists, it is “vulnerable” to back door access by foreign “intelligence services” that are just pass throughs to the CIA/FBI in this case through the “five eyes”+.

It may be illegal and unconstitutional to do domestic surveillance, which is still done under various “fingers-crossed and therefore the Constitution does not apply” enemy fabrications like national security laws/letters that are not even public, even if they are of course checked and approved by Judge Trust me Bro; but nothing stops, e.g., the various illegitimate American departments and agencies from asking the Australians, British, Canadians, Israelis, etc. if they happen to have any information about who you have met with over the last 5 years, or your country asking if you, foreign civil rights advocate, have met with anyone in America that might be helping spread civil rights in their country in exchange for some other NS deal with tweet another devil.

I wish we had a legitimate government that could actually be trusted with something like a verified, bullet proof Flock camera system that can only be accessed in a verifiable and auditable manner to actually prevent and solve things like abductions and drug/human trafficking and identify lost elderly; but wet love in a society dominated by devils that make deals with murderers, violate the Constitution constantly and consistently, carve out exceptions where none exist or are permitted, and are pedophiles devious criminals of every order and magnitude. I know all these things for a fact in addition to the fact that flock is not the first or the only method/network of mass surveillance that is already fully deployed around the country and world, and gaslighting, narcissistic lies are used to placate people and bribe them with shiny things and “convenience” to be ok with it.

People thought the future would look like some draconian and dystopian 1984, but in reality it is actually the Matrix or even the Minority Report, only far more hidden and with far more Soma.

The point being is that there cannot be any compromise at all, because as I will adapt what was said about the topic, “he who trades basic freedom for false security is guaranteed to receive neither.”

Were pretending we can still have a socratic discussion about this with any consequence.

There will be numerous unevidenced accusations about fraud this midterms. It will blanket the internet and air waves.

Despite republicans being incredibly nervous about trumps chances these midterms, republicans will win the house and the senate. Trump will reaffirm a supermajority, and policies he decreed will only be expanded.

Emboldened, tariffs will continue and expand. The Iran war will continue and expand. Flock cameras will continue and expand.

The supreme court will acquisence slowly piece by piece to ever more draconian constitutional violations.

This is only the beginning.

So you want the government to recreate the tech and control that flock provides.

I don't think this is going to work out like you think it will...

>It's pretty clear to be that governments shouldn't be able to 'subcontract' their way out of the limits placed on them via the constitution.

Primary example:

U.S. government officials pressuring social-media platforms through intermediaries to suppress constitutionally protected speech.

They are a YCombinator company! TIL.

I'm genuinely taken aback by that.

I can clearly see a bunch of brand new accounts brigading the thread, YCisComplict, YCisBad etc. Presumably bots or something but this is still bad even discounting those accounts.

We need more Aaron Schwartz’s in the world. Shame he's gone. Lads like that seemed kind of dorky and a bit pretentious in their pursuit of righteousness back in the day but my god their absence is noted in this day and age.

great question, which you will either not receive an answer to, or you will receive a deeply unsatisfying generic response from dang/tomhow.

in either case, it really leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

To be less cynical, I think it would require editing to original submission. I also see why editing the “bad press” company submissions could have undesirable optics. So, maybe the mods just choose to be a bit more laissez faire than normal and lets the community self moderate the related posts. Probably within some reason in the comment section, but they allow us all to be quite critical in ways that could easily be considered against the HN guidelines and they’re not squashing it either. I think that is perhaps the best stance for them to take honestly.

Surprised but not surprised. That explains a lot.

YC owns hacker news.

You know why.

Why would they do that? Venture capital isn't there to serve people like us or to protect any kind of common interest. There is only one thing they know - money.

You can’t even do that with your HN account..you think Flock, with its lucrative gov contracts…would ever?

You seem to be missing a basic fact about how the world works: there are two classes of people, those who make the rules, and those who are expected to follow the rules. These classes are largely disjoint.

No, no compromises.

Including investor data since they are a YC company?

A lot of techies have lived in China and seen how that country has stronger social harmony than the West and is gradually outpacing it, so mass surveillance clearly isn't an obstacle to the general prosperity.

The problem with mass surveillance rollouts in the West is that they are incomplete: the cameras might go up, but not all infractions caught on camera are actually punished. Meanwhile, in China vandals and other disruptive people do get traced back to where they live and apprehended. I think that if such a vigorous policy were applied in other countries, even on a contrarian forum like this one you wouldn't see much opposition to the cameras.

Yeah, there is a suspicious amount of down-voting of anti-surveillance comments in here. I'd say there's about a 99% chance Flock is paying astroturfers.

I still am opposed to anything capable of mass surveillance because of how easily it is abused. But living in Seattle, my car has been broken into 4 times this summer alone (with nothing taken, because we leave nothing there), thiefs dug up the side of my house to steel copper wires, on my block someone dumped gasoline all over a tree and lit it on fire just because, people went around the neighborhood smashing front flower pots, many of the local businesses have had their windows smashed by robbers twice this year. Last year someone broke into my garage using a lock pick and stole a bunch of tools and my car license plate (and the cops actually caught him because he was driving in the hov lane with my reported-stolen license plate on lol).

My wife is at the point where she would probably like a flock camera on our street. I’m at the point where I wouldn’t mind a patrol car circling the area, like a damn police state. What else would you suggest people support when they are harassed by crime this much?

(Edit to expand): instead of just complaining I’ll meta-point. People will vote for things like flock cameras when society is unsafe, or they feel unsafe. Right now, in the USA, lots of places are visibly unsafe and people deal with actual threats from bad actors much more often than they deal with police overreach. If you want people to vote against mass surveillance then you need to support policy that makes mass surveillance unnecessary, and you need to do it now instead of “in a future communist utopia there will be no crime” kind of policy (I use this because it’s what I see a lot of in Seattle). Weak on crime is anti-urban, weak on crime is pro police state.

Well, this has become one of the most pro-china forums around so it shouldn't be too surprising.

Probably people who don't know history and trust the robberment.

Multiple things can be true at the same time... do you think the seller doesn't want a closely surveilled world with no exits?

Besides, money keeps businesses in the economy afloat, it's an artificial good with (more or less) constant value. Money's a systematic means to an end and rarely an end goal, its purpose is the transportation of value, and not the communication of value.

This is the drug-dealer justification -- "if I don't [sell drugs|provide mass surveillance at an unprecedented scale|crush these kittens] someone else will"

There are buyers who want drugs for recreational reasons, murders for emotional reasons, or spy cams on hotel rooms for business reasons. But those are simply 3 instances where existent demand doesn't mean we should be allowing any offer to exist.

I'd personally agree to put Flock-levels of civil vigilance in the same bag.

HN and YC are complicit by painting it as “the government” who literally bans the cameras when it’s only the investors who want them for ads.

There is a societal consensus that driving is a privilege which can be restricted or revoked, not that you give up your rights by driving. In fact the opposite is true, the courts have found that drivers have fourth amendment rights for instance.

It can track devices via their Bluetooth radiation. A lot of devices use randomized MAC addresses though, but probably not all.

Tracking vehicles lets you strongly infer who's driving them. Individual people have already gotten into trouble over their vehicles being spotted by Flock. If it could not be used to track people, the technology would be almost useless. Just because driving is a privilege (it's more of a requirement in the US, but the US at large doesn't really understand coercion) doesn't let you do anything you can come up with to people possessing that privilege.

They do track people and their systems are capable of searching by identifiers including skin color and clothing. You are either disingenuous or not informed enough to discuss this issue.

It's even actively advertised as a feature: https://www.flocksafety.com/products/flock-freeform

https://www.404media.co/how-cops-use-flock-to-track-people-n...

"Flock only tracks cars and not individual people."

prove it.

Those battles are only ever won over decades. The problem is that technology has vastly outpaced our ability to regulate and respond to it, and the system meant to provide checks and balances has been vastly corrupted.

Look at the recent Meta settlement. Society in general has known that Facebook and social media as imagined by the tech industry as an algorithmic targeting platform is largely harmful, but instead of holding them to account the US allowed them to settle with some small fines (18B is a lot, but only 10% of the gains they made from settling the case).

Now, Meta will make changes again, and then violate the rules and expectations while claiming cover from following the rules and it will take another decade of investigations, complaints and negotiation before there is an improvement.

> I've been very pleased to see the reaction to Flock in the US.

I've been involved in civil liberties for over three decades. I was a member of the EFF and ACLU when I could afford it, and follower of the early cypherpunks. Like a lot of EFF members, I was advocating against the Patriot Act a d the methods used to pass it after 9/11.

But this feels different. The fact that there is large support feom the left behind this makes me very cautious.

The examples of police stalking is another thing that adds up to something fishy.

I'm very glad that dangerous stalking by those with authority and power is being addressed and dealt with. But I have to wonder if the true people with power aren't using this to create laws tailored to them around future citizen surveillance methods.

I had a possible opportunity to work in a really interesting space with wildlife management and sensor networks, including cameras. It would have been a dream, because it was an awesome space to bring educational material to families about the world around them. Interactive embedded sensors and media integration thst let them learn about nature.

I didn't take that position because of healthcare and medical issues. Bit as a kid who grew up exploring science museums, I would have loved to have given back to the community. I am heartbroken for the result.

But with Flock and the crackdown on cameras, the company is also directly in the path of the legislative and public consciousness shift.

I know whatever they build will keep up with their focus on customer safety, humane wildlife management and public safety. But there's now going to be extra focus on protecting the public from employees of the firm. It shifts the narrative.

It takes focus away from just educating the public. But I guess there are other large companies who can do a better job just focusing on education and inspiration.

It makes me sad. I don't expect those new people against Flock to understand. I'm personally happy about the focus on privacy. But it's not just privacy and education now. The early cypherpunk view has been subtly co-opted.

Do you have any idea what it would mean for society if people routinely resolved political disagreements by destroying each other's property? I think celebrating that kind of behavior is deeply wrong.

Were you very pleased to know Flock is a YC company and HN helps them lie

Honestly, most the flock cameras are installed on a fence post that is easily vandalized. This movement will be matched by sturdier construction and the resistance will likely sigh, get bored, and move onto something else.

I do like the spirit of it all though.

Well, good luck there and I mean that.

Where were those activists when it was already clear what these companies are doing, but before the famous ad? I am not trying to be nasty, if one wants to be outraged about something bad happening, its 24/7 job and then some more.

Whack-a-mole with problems is fine, but better to unplug the machine or something similarly drastic if you want to see some sort of permanent improvement and general direction change.

Behavior you describe is some sort of well meant extremism (isn't all of it well meant from certain perspective?). Not something you easily win masses with, just add polarization into society. Clear win would be flock simply going bankrupt since their revenue becomes close to 0 consistently.

I generally actually agree with you. The real issue with these cameras is the network effect that allows them to stalk anyone anywhere.

Were I to draft legislation, the first thing I'd do is ban any sort of surveillance network from giving data to non-governmental 3rd parties. Google and mcdonalds don't need to know exactly who I am and what sort of places I like to visit or products I buy.

The next thing I'd do is require a search warrant for each access. If a crime is committed then the cops need to go to a judge and say "A crime was likely committed here and we need a warrant to figure out who was there and where they went". None of this "well, here's the same case number I use for all my searches".

I would probably classify the likes of traffic cameras as something different than a surveillance network as there's not much of a real network. They are all watching one location for violations and reporting them when they happen. That to me is fine (though, again, they shouldn't share that data with private 3rd parties).

And this goes beyond surveillance networks, but I'd setup a national registry of police misconduct and bar cops who abuse their authority from ever getting a job as law enforcement again. All these cases of cops stalking exes would result in those cops needing a new career where they can't abuse the public's trust.

>I'd be interested to see if opponents of mass surveillance could draft good legislation to curb potential abuses

Isn't this just warrants? We have infrastructure in place, if police have reasonable suspicion a crime has occurred, they go to a judge and convince them they have enough evidence and the judge gives them a warrant. The problem is police and Flock are constantly arguing they shouldn't need a warrant to use the data, and it creates a system designed for abuse.

Just wait til we have an administration in the White House (I’m guessing not this one?) which directly threatens your freedoms in such a way that they can easily use cameras to prosecute those who they disagree with.

Current governments have used the mass surveillance to go after people for abortions and for being too foreign-seeming (even if here legally). If those don’t affect you, surely you can think of something that the next wave of government officials might be opposed to, which could use a surveillance network to take away from you.

Having laws to prevent abuses doesn’t help when the lawmakers change and can just revoke those laws, while the full infrastructure exists to do whatever they want.

> Red light cameras, for example, strike me as unalloyed good.

This actually makes me think that your post is satire, due to the heavy debate on whether these cameras actually improve safety [0]. Lots of studies that contradict each other on that. I agree we need to prevent the recklessness of drivers, and there is an argument to be made here. But it’s not at all obvious like you imply.

From [0]:

> When the Houston cameras were removed, angle accidents increased by 26 percent. However, all other types of accidents decreased by 18 percent. Approximately one-third of all Houston intersection accidents are angle accidents. This suggests that the program’s drawbacks canceled out its benefits.

> Our study showed no evidence that cameras reduce the total number of accidents. We estimate that total accidents are reduced by a statistically insignificant 3 percent after the cameras are turned off.

> Likewise, there’s no evidence that the camera program reduced the number of traffic-related injuries or the likelihood of incurring an incapacitating injury.

[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/red-light-cameras...

Even red light cameras have a substantial potential for abuse. The revenue stream incentivizes messing with the light timing to cause more violations.

> draft good legislation to curb potential abuses

No such thing. Unless it is mathematically impossible for the government to abuse you, then you will be abused.

> Red light cameras, for example, strike me as unalloyed good.

I get where you're coming from, but there's a big problem: our laws did not evolve to be enforced effectively. They are appropriate when they are enforced selectively, with discretion. Many are wholly inappropriate if simply enforced 100% of the time to the letter of the law.

That's not to say we couldn't change laws to work if enforced near-100% of the time, but it would take our legal institutions quite a lot of time to adapt.

Lots of people are opposed to Ring. Sentiments grew much stronger after their Superbowl commercial creeped people out. Many tech minded people moved towards cloudless solutions for their home cameras.

Ring cameras don't record and index every single license plate that it sees and hand that data over directly to law enforcement. There's a huge difference between surveilling your own private property, and a massive network of ALPRs feeding data directly into government systems.

Mass deployment on public property and the network effect that having them all connected and using things like license plate readers is all pretty new.

Largely the US hasn’t had widespread surveillance, it’s been private property ownership of CCTV type systems for security reasons which Americans are ok with. Reading my license plate, face, gait, etc every 100 meters as I move across a large distance loses the security reason and entered the world of mass surveillance. Which while many of us struggle with caring about, is seen as infringing on our right to privacy which itself has a complex legal interpretation of and where systems like this cross a line into what is acceptable. The fact that law enforcement can query flock to learn of an individual’s location without any warrant is often seen as directly opposing a constitutional protection from government search. It might also be important to know that the US Constitution is seen as a law of physics in some areas and that most laymen that read the Fourth Amendment would come to the conclusion that this is not allowed and thus unconstitutional at its core. There’s of course legal things that have happened since that clarify interpretation of the constitution so the wiggle room they have to operate, especially when it’s something the government wants to exists, is enough for now. The Supreme Court would be the ones to eliminate grey area. They recently issued a ruling taking a heavier privacy stance. Meanwhile, people on the street have grown deep distrust in tech and government which is visible as they are destroying these cameras.

The fact that they allow unlimited access to any law enforcement organization, where they can surveil anyone across the entire country. Police have used it to stalk ex-partners, for example. The number of cameras are also an order of magnitude higher. I can't leave my driveway without being tracked.

The former. Look at cities winding back shotspotter.

With an asterisk on citizens, of course, that excludes Ellison.

Do this to him and you'll likely be in deep trouble.

> "You're thinking Chinese surveillance. US-based surveillance helps victims and prevents more victims" [1]

- Garry Tan

[1] https://xcancel.com/garrytan/status/1963310592615485955

The best part is when he’s talking about them going to the bathroom

”We don’t really turn it off… without a court order”

The best deterrent to crime is to make people not want to commit crime in the first place. Education. Social cohesion. Prosperity. Safety nets.

Depends on how much you trust the government's ability to restrain itself once the capability for mass surveillance is out there and widely deployed.

I love this but "Follow us on Instagram!" is maybe a little counterproductive.

YC invested in flock

From 0 ("rain on my wedding day") to 10 ("Oedipus fulfilling his prophecy by evading it"), I'd give this a 2

Here's my understanding (please someone correct me if I'm wrong). Flock sells license plate reading cameras. Lots of cities and states bought these and no one noticed.

Then there were some expose pieces about how the data is routinely used by police to do things like track people's everyday whereabouts (which should require a warrant). There were also a variety of other issues:

- They misidentified someone's license plate consistently, leading to him being harassed by the police.

- There were big security vulnerabilities which meant people could live stream the video from some the cameras and access some of the data.

- They have been used by police officers to stalk people for romantic/sexual reasons.

- They are being used to enforce a lot of laws that people think are unjust (abortion bans, immigration laws, etc.).

I'm not centrist, but I think I can give a reasonably fair account. I was among the first to organize against Flock (YC S17).

Flock was accepted into YCombinator's Spring 2017 batch. Prior to YC, Flock CEO Garrett Langley had had a couple of fair-to-middling business successes and was looking for his next opportunity, which included better toilets. The story goes that he got the idea for Flock after a local police interaction where he happened to have helpful video footage. [1]

Flock quietly expanded into HOAs and neighborhood associations [2], and by 2020 had begun developing partnerships with police departments across the country and fusion centers [1], which are regional clearinghouses of data from multiple sources assembled together for law enforcement purposes.

By 2025, Flock had managed to grow to 80,000 cameras operational across the country. In June of that year, 404 Media, an independent journalistic outfit comprised in part from former Vice journalists, broke a story about Flock being used in the investigation of a woman who had self-administered an abortion in the state of Texas [3]. Flock quickly released a statement trying to "clarify" the situation, but everyone involved was lying through their teeth [4].

Up to this point, Flock had spread across the country in a pretty clever way: they built direct partnerships with police departments through sites and resources they commonly used, like https://www.police1.com/, and by hiring former police officers for sales positions. Police departments were coached to consider Flock an "ALPR" (which it very arguably isn't), which would make it not "new" technology under most local police technology procurement processes, which meant that police departments could purchase it without city council or other local agency review. To make the purchases, Flock helped to connect police departments with public money in the form of grants. For example, funds might be available for programs meant to reduce "organized retail theft", and Flock would say, "well, we qualify!", and then police departments would not use the systems to investigate organized retail theft. [5]

Throughout the Summer of 2025, people started asking questions about these weird cameras popping up everywhere, and 404 Media managed to produce one widely-shared article after another about Flock [6]. Other media outfits started to pick it up, and stories getting national attention included law enforcement officers using Flock to stalk former romantic partners or love interests or anyone else they wanted to (because Flock was built without any controls in place to prevent that kind of abuse; Langley himself repeatedly said it wasn't their job to do); Flock sharing direct access to data with federal agencies; Flock lying about the direct access that federal agencies had; then federal agencies using Flock's data-sharing capabilities to easily get around the really thin limitations that were put on that after reporting about it; Flock being used to surveil protestors; and on and on and on.

Essentially, Flock became a textbook case study for every single abuse of state surveillance power you can imagine.

Garrett Langley attempted to navigate all of this by absolving Flock of any responsibility, denying any wrongdoing, outright lying in some cases, and referring to people running crowd-sourced maps of Flock installations as "terrorists" -- which, many months later, he would get around to walking back. A little bit.

Some groups were able to legally acquire some devices and found that they had really, really poor security generally, and also that they had capabilities that weren't being advertised to the public. The prime example of this is that Flock would coach police departments to tell the public that Flock was "just an ALPR" and "only captured pictures of license plates", but meanwhile the software on the devices was written to capture images of people and bicycles and cats and dogs. On the one hand, the public would be told that the system could only track vehicles; on the other, Flock's own marketing materials advertised the ability to find pedestrians by a description of their clothing, and police departments were being trained on how to use the system to follow bicyclists. In another case, Flock representatives would say the system didn't have a "heat map" capability (showing a density of hits for a particular license plate in a particular area over time), and then it would turn out that not only did they have that capability, but internal trainings with law enforcement departments were explicitly describing how to use the system to predict where a particular person might be at a particular day and time (called a "pattern of life" search).

In 2026, public opposition to Flock has become a national conversation, and states like Oregon have started developing more restrictive legislation around the use of it and similar technology.

Flock wasn't the first ALPR company. The technology has in fact been around for a while and there are other established players in the space. However, Flock quickly had all of the hallmarks of "surveillance capitalism" -- an effort by investors like YCombinator, Founders Fund, Andreesen Horowitz, and others, to build out a national realtime surveillance network of everyone's movements and then monetize it, most obviously by providing access to an increasingly authoritarian federal administration. Americans, surprisingly, have found the will and energy to organize against this in large numbers that cross the typical political divisions.

[1]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/talon-flock-safety-cameras-p...

[2]: https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/09/03/early-stage-this-surv...

[3]: https://archive.ph/8wl6n

[4]: https://archive.ph/6KsZP

[5]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNqZ-Yrzh1o

[6]: https://www.404media.co/tag/flock/

Hah. Europe's Chat Control proposal would exclude politicians from being monitored. Because of course it would.