Flock is a scourge on democracy. Flock is YC. But looks like they did YC nearly ten years ago. Who knows what their pitch deck looked like? If they pivoted since then to their current sinister incarnation? I don’t see any evidence that YC is still actively supporting them.

Benefit of the doubt: Funding them for a community/city-owned traffic camera type thing seems like it would have been a much more reasonable proposition than funding Flock for their current use case of allowing police to stalk their ex girlfriends or mistresses.

Don't have the pitch deck directly, but do have some of the "what things looked like then" at https://www.ycdb.co/company/flock-safety

The front page then had "All the footage is yours. Your neighborhood 100% owns the data. Flock Safety will not share, sell, or access your data."

Unfortunately, flock has been excluded from wayback, so can't see other views of that page.

{insert Darth Vader: I'm altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.}

(+45m edit) https://bestpitchdeck.com/flock-safety appears to be the pitch deck from 2020.

> ...

> In 2019, Flock signed their first police department deal with Jersey Village, Texas.

> The slides you see here are from Langley's pitch at a venture conference one month before closing a $47M Series C round in November 2020. The following July, Andreessen Horowitz led a $150M Series D investment in Flock as a cornerstone of their American Dynamism practice. Additional slides are included from keynote and sales presentations used in 2023.

> ...

>Flock is a scourge on democracy.

Yes. Blame the pickaxe seller. Do not question the miners. Do not question the investors in the mining companies. Do not question the casual voter or internet commenter who thought all this was fine.

This isn't to say that flock not a scourge, but I think a lot of people (not saying you're one of them) could stand to look in the mirror here.

Back in ye olde dark ages of <checks notes> 2017, when YC was cutting Flock a check and when "big data" was the hot buzzword people of a certain bent couldn't get enough of this kind of stuff. Everyone was jacking off nonstop to the idea that we could just hoover up everyone's data ad then "efficiently" or "proactively" dispatch enforcement resources. People talked all sorts of big talk about stuff like cross referencing people's Home Depot spend with permit requirements, identifying small businesses that don't have healthy enough financials to be fully compliant, cross referencing invoices and delivery receipts to identify overloaded trucks, and generally finding all sorts of ways to fine the crap out of people for the pettiest of petty deviance. They considered this a noble goal.

Everyone's head was too far up their asses to look at the magic crystal ball called "history" and realize that a camera on every street corner watching who's going where all the damn time would be where it goes.

It’s not like this stuff wasn’t known to be a problem 10 years ago. We were already in Trump’s first term, it’s not like it was part of the early post 9/11 “secure everything” push. It was WAY after that.

10 years ago is no excuse.