Recently was driving in the middle of nowhere in Texas.. And I saw a few flock cameras watching both ways in highways there too. So it is not just cities, states are implicated too.

Flock is a retroactive dragnet on demand. Whenever you want to, you can go back in time and put a digital dragnet in an area of your choosing in order to identify someone you now know you want to find.

The difference is that your example involves physically stopping and searching people. This is not the case with Flock, which records images in public.

The government does not and never did require any warrant or justification to record people in public spaces. Not just the government, but normal people too: you can whip out four phone and start recording people in public any time you want.

FISA basically authorises dragnet on demand - it's how XKeyscore operates.

No. It is not and to claim otherwise is hyperbole. The key difference is police stopping and/or questioning people en masse without reasonable suspicion is in fact illegal unless under extreme circumstances. Simply noting everyone’s license plate is wholly legal, and more importantly for this conversation, is drastically less intrusive and qualitatively different from a so-called dragnet. You don’t get to just conflate the two scenarios to better fit your personal preferences of what is or is not legal.

You elect to buy an Android and not an Apple I suppose.

Well, nowadays, Google location history is stored on-device. Google Maps sends your position to their servers, both for geocoding and to power their traffic estimation. Even when location history was in the cloud, you could turn it off. It even asked when you opened Maps for the first time. Most people chose the default blue button to leave it on. You could also just turn off location on your phone entirely when you didn't want Google to know where you were.

The tricky bit is the cell tower location. That cannot be disabled unless you go into Airplane mode or turn your phone off. Broad location (which tower are you associated with) is needed for the network to route your calls, while precise location is used for E911.

Private citizens filming in public and police forces setting up arrays of surveillance cameras in public somehow don’t seem equivalent. I’m not a lawyer so I can’t properly articulate what the legal difference is. And if there isn’t one then the law needs change. Clearly the majority of citizens agree with me.

Is it legal for US citizens to all put cameras on their cars and set up a network where we can all see where all police are at any given time?

Seems like a good idea at this point.

The language doesn't really cover things correctly.

You don't expect privacy in public in the sense that you might bump into other people that know who you are.

That doesn't automatically mean that you expect walking into a public area means a system will start investigating you and seeing if you match with crimes.

Assuming everyone in public is a suspect and continually investigating them, is a big change in how society works.

>There is not generally an expectation of privacy in public.

And that's the problem, because if there isn't an expectation of privacy, and we record everything that's "in public", we land in a dystopic hellscape.

The problem is really that "privacy" vs. "public" isn't a binary choice. Yes, I expect people to see me in public if they happen to walk by. That's quite different from every movement being recorded and made searchable. Most privacy laws don't really account for that being possible.

Rehnquist anticipated but unfortunately did not prevent the abuse of the third party doctrine back in 1983.

“Respondent does not actually quarrel with this analysis, though he expresses the generalized view that the result of the holding sought by the government would be that "twenty-four hour surveillance of any citizen of this country will be possible, without judicial knowledge or supervision." But the fact is that the "reality hardly suggests abuse," If such dragnet-type law enforcement practices as respondent envisions should eventually occur, there will be time enough then to determine whether different constitutional principles may be applicable.” — United States v. Knotts, 460 U.S. 276, 284 (1983)

https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/460/276

"

The third-party doctrine is a United States legal doctrine that holds that people who voluntarily give information to third parties, such as banks and phone companies, generally have "no reasonable expectation of privacy" in that information. This precedent, established in Supreme Court cases in the 1970s, allows the U.S. government to obtain information from third parties without a legal warrant and without otherwise complying with the Fourth Amendment prohibition against search and seizure without probable cause and a judicial search warrant. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine

Flock goes far beyond that, they allow the government to retroactively string together a person's history of movement. Prior cases establish that continuous and retrospective tracking like that violates a reasonable expectation of privacy and requires a warrant.

They are relevant and courts have considered the whole of a persons movements standard in terms of whether querying ALPR data constitutes a search, https://andrewpwheeler.com/2026/08/12/license-plate-reader-s...

Under current case law (Carpenter and recently affirmed in Chatrie) it will definitely be a search, IMO it is just when the sensors become dense enough according to the court (absent states do not make regulation themselves to require a warrant for historical data).

> There is not generally an expectation of privacy in public. Things in public can be recorded without consent

This is _not_ universal. Many jurisdictions take a different view on this.

> There is not generally an expectation of privacy in public.

Which is entirely different from an expectation of a generalized systematic loss of practical privacy in public.

They are not even close to the same thing.

The willingness to kneel to others baffles me. Loss of practical privacy is loss of power - to somebody(s). It may not seem so for one person. But when it is true for everyone, the system will adapt to using that power.

Throw in AI and data integration. This is clearly a B.A.D. idea.

> There is not generally an expectation of privacy in public.

Surely we can agree the point of this technology is to change the level of privacy one should reasonably expect in public?

Prompting a system to give a history of a person’s movements (even if they’re movements “in public”) is not something that has any historical analogy. The law has slapped down the “it’s in public” argument in cases like this, see eg Baltimore’s ubiquitous aerial surveillance (they put a wide-angle lense on a surveillance plane and recorded everything, so they could rewind and search anyone’s locations.)

I don't think that's actually true. Follow someone around reading their phone over their shoulder and see how people react.

Yes, there is an expectation in the history of free society that the government is not proactively observing every person on every block, asking for ID, and following them down the streets, then documenting that and correlating it with other people's activities and making it accessible to law enforcement personnel without a warrant across the country.

I retch when people say there is no expectation of privacy in public as some naive defense of the panopticon.

All that means is that the ends (and not the means) are the determining factor.

A private company can have plenty of legitimate reasons to film in public spaces, and to incidentally film people.

Flock's ends are to explicitly track people, and to use that data to accuse them of criminal activity. Those are the ends that the 4th amendment is written to explicit protect us from that, and not exclusively from governments, either.

> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Isn't there a difference between getting picked up on someones Tik Tok "broadcast" and a private/public surveillance operation?

In human terms, frequency, impact, and scale matter. If my little dog puts a few ounces of pee in some random person's front yard, it's seen as a micro-infraction at best. Vs. Flock's ideal is more like a factory farm just up the hill, with ever-leaking urine retention ponds.

Without any real privacy laws, Americans should not have the expectation of privacy in private spaces either. Your search history, real time location, biometric data, consumer habits etc. are all for sale to anyone who wants it.

Cool we should maybe change those laws then, these definitions of privacy came about in a world where there weren't cameras on everyones face and front porch.

The US government, the 4th reich, cannot be trusted with these tools, especially their law enforcement.

Do not know about their competitors (and other countries/regulations), but Id guess this going to be a critical product for governments in the future?

Checks. I didn’t believe it at first, because I’ve always considered YC, in spite of its flaws, to be politically astute.

Flock will be a big curriculum that tarnishes YC. Already under YC videos, comments are related to the Flock scandal. Denizen will want to make it a pain for YC until they fix their ethical problem.

All that karma farmed with paywall bypass posts. Kinda greasy.

You just need to reasonably predict the future 20 years ago.

How would you specify this regulation?

It’s very hard to regulate outcomes when the component steps are legal. Not saying we shouldn’t try, just saying that path is well-trodden and rarely works. See: media consolidation, etc

IMO it is much more practical to regulate and penalize the activity of using such a network than to preempt its creation. Heck, BitTorrent can be seen as a surveillance network. But intent and usage make it obvious it’s not.

Ask YC - they funded Flock

> To me, the far more insidious problem is what happens when Flock needs to keep showing growth?

To me, this was always the armored gauntlet underneath the velvet glove of any private entity with strong technical locks, Apple included.

The best you can reliably say about any private entity is that they're treating their users well at the moment.

Ultimately, profit always trumps user alignment.

It exists to give an information asymmetry enabling a maximally extractive market at the cost of inefficiency.

It's the sort of thing that could only exist beneficially in some sort of communist system where deal with crime in some sort of fair way and where access to the information on these networks was regulated and equally available and the non crime information could be used to instead feed a command economy.

It may surprise many that we don't live in that world.

>. To me, the far more insidious problem is what happens when Flock needs to keep showing growth?

>The possibilities are literally endless:

Zero chance of any of those examples happening when they already have contractual relationships with municipalities they can leverage. They can simply just extend their services to civil enforcement. Follow the concrete trucks and the contractor vans and everything else around with the cameras and drones and then fine everyone for everything. "You were seen wheeling a water heater out of Home Depot. You got a permit for that". "It sure looks like you bought a lot of Henny last time you were in tax free NH, are you sure none of that wound up in your brother's restaurant."

There's already screenshots of "Your 80k registered truck was seen on a road not open to this traffic with no corresponding overweight permit, pay up" mail violations floating around (I have not vetted them).

And unlike price discrimination, the useful idiots will cheer, because the victims will have on paper broken the rules and can be construed as <checks list of buzzwords> "scofflaws", "antisocial" and "not paying their fair share" even if they have done nothing morally wrong.

Elison and Oracle are a big threat, they have an obsession with holding as much data as possible, for every single US citizen they can get their hands on, and it is no coincidence they not only sell electoral targeting demographic data, but also are trying to install dystopian level servers under the whitehouse.

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It’s called a deluxe motor-coach and it’s the most important currency in our democracy, apparently.

And a lot of other things too. It's kinda the whole point of their existence.

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

It doesn't seem slow to me.

Clearly not, but even that would be better than unaccountable corporations having the tech.