It sure would be interesting if suddenly all of the Flock employees coming to work were being constantly watched by a network of crowdfunded private cameras. Might drive home the point of invasion of privacy if its someone other than them watching...them. Or if all of the neighbors of the CEO of Flock suddenly joined some service like this so that everyone could track his activity at all times. I'm sure he'd wouldn't mind the entire world knowing exactly what he or his family are doing always.
It's a very important tool to figure out which people in positions of authority are coordinating for authoritarian purposes or just plain old corruption.
I'm instantly suspicious of anyone in government who is critical of this idea.
I mean they don't hide much anymore. Our current admin is simply awash in corruption, and nothing happens because a majority of lawmakers are also in on it, getting rich, and just aren't required to do anything. Our police rob and murder the populace, and on the rare occasion they see any consequences at all, it's paid for by the same taxpayers they abuse. And even more broadly worldwide, corporations trade in human suffering by the ton, our planet continues to be destroyed by people who will be dead long before the consequences of their greed come to fruition, and the wealthy trade children to exploit either by way of their blood or much, much darker things.
We don't need a citizen surveillance network, we already know what they're doing, perhaps not all of it but far more than enough to justify mass civil unrest. They just figured out all they had to do was get us exhausted, overwhelmed and of course fighting each other enough to make certain we wouldn't. The globe is various kinds of prison for the majority of humanity, in degrees of horror, and a theme park for the 1%.
All of that may be true but I think that it's moot.
The overall goal with these kinds of projects should be to maintain parity between the citizenry and people in positions of power.
Even if it's little stuff like a person calling out "Hey how come he doesn't have to wait in line?" when small town city councillor gets special treatment at a local restaurant. We want to close the gap between the every-man and people with power wherever we see it.
In the bigger picture as it pertains to this kind of sousveillance introducing as much friction in these kinds of things as possible causes the people you're opposing to need to exert more force to do what they're doing and it distracts them and throws them off guard. It's a death by a thousand cuts sort of thing.
Take the opposition to datacentres and the protests and resistance to it, if the protesters really wanted to gum up the works they'd target the finite number of anonymous professionals who are involved in the approval and development process for these megaprojects. There are a lot of paper-pushing accountants, lawyers, and civil engineers who just want to cash a fat cheque and make it to retirement who will back the fuck out the second they hear about people publishing the full org-chart and comings and goings of the professionals involved in these projects.
> The overall goal with these kinds of projects should be to maintain parity between the citizenry and people in positions of power.
Oh for sure, I'm not disagreeing with the principle being discussed, I'm saying in our current social moment this feels like saying the floor trim on the bridge of the Titanic needs some paint.
The president has been convicted of 39 felonies and is (trying to?) sell advance access to his stock market manipulating tweets for a subscription.
Parity at this point feels like a joke. I'd settle for literally any consequences at all for someone in power right now.
Vibecode an app that builds a list of corrupt law enforcement officials and that finds their mistresses or other unscrupulous behaviour. Have it determine when the exact most damaging moment to release this information to their families and /or the public is.
Every administration since JFK has been awash in corruption. No exceptions. America hasn't had an America-first President since JFK. The people who obsess over Trump need to read 1984 again and pay particular attention to Emmanuel Goldstein.
Our awful government includes most of Congress, 93% of which take pro-Israel bribes. If you want to find the problem, look East at our mortal enemy that brands itself as our greatest ally in their hasbara.
How would the video captured from those cameras be used? These people are already driving on the same streets you and I do, so how would they not also be in the Flock footage? If you capture TBs of video footage and nobody sees it, what's the point? Are you going to start sending harassing posts to employees with footage of the car driving by your camera?
The anti-flock movement is real, but half baked ideas don't really serve a purpose to actually doing anything. Not sure how I feel about those destroying Flock cameras, but that's action moving the needle a lot further than establishing an entirely new anti-Flock camera network.
great, so now what? who are you giving access to that data that will mean anything? the cops aren't going to do anything with it as it does not pertain to anything within the purview. the only thing I could think that would be done with that information is not good with people showing up to their house or some such.
Flock operates on the foundational constitutional model of "Our cameras are in public, there is not an expectation of privacy in public, therefore we can capture anything/everything our camera sees in any way possible" (including LPR logging and even video recording).
And thus, so does any other system of recording public activity and processing/storing data collected from it.
It quite literally does not matter what people do or don't do with the information. If someone does use the information for something illegal (like stalking) them the police aught to take a police report filed by said Flock employee seriously and perform an investigation within the bounds of the law and constitution.
So then flock employees are unlikely to care at all since they are already being tracked by flock. The it will concern them once some crazy person is driven to the point of enacting real world violence. The entire point of this project is to collect that data in hopes that someone acts on it.
I think the presumption of harassment is a little telling, but if your post was in good faith, merely advertising people's cars (as in the group pays for ad space etc) freely and legally very much like the musk plane tracking app would have the desired effect
Fun fact: in some municipalities you can FOIA for the GPS records of police vehicles. Here's Chicago Police's. They removed 0-15mph for, erm, privacy reasons.... but it's not the worst.
The speed limit in neighborhoods is usually 25, so... 0-15mph limiting seems useless? I imagine some level of police <-> home address / general home area is in that data.
Right there's another gotcha with the data. They gave 15-60mph data in :30 minute increments.
"This would still identify officers blocks or get within a couple blocks of their home for those with take home cars. Would speeds of 15 miles per hour or more but only pings on the :30 minute mark, so one ping per hour from 2019 until the end of April work for you?"
Even gave them this SQL to run to get around that problem but they never got back to me, heh:
WITH immobile_pings as (
select count(*), vehicleid, round(xcoord::numeric, 3) as xcoord_rounded,
round(ycoord::numeric,3) as ycoord_rounded,date_trunc('day', datetime) as day
FROM gps_table
WHERE speed = 0
GROUP BY
vehicleid,
xcoord_rounded,
ycoord_rounded,
day
having count(*) > 1440), --4 hours
day_counts as (
select count(*), vehicleid, xcoord_rounded, ycoord_rounded
from immobile_pings
group by vehicleid, xcoord_rounded, ycoord_rounded having count(*) > 15 -- 15 days
)
select gps_table.* from gps_table s inner join day_counts i
ON i.vehicleid = s.vehicleid
AND array[round(s.xcoord::numeric, 3), round(s.ycoord::numeric, 3)] != array[i.xcoord_rounded,i.ycoord_rounded]
AND speed > 15; -- 15mph
If you don't know how to answer this question yourself, you certainly aren't able to read the source code to determine whether it's trust worthy in the first place, so what does it matter to you?
All public servants should have all their info publicly available, some safety measures can be put like some delays or similar, but as the name implies, public servant! Police for example should be watched and they should feel they are actively being watched by the public, also their badge numbers should be available on these maps so you just click and you can report them if needed.
To the wonderful creators, who will presumably find this thread: did you know that sparrows had at least two full millenia of being associated with lust and depravity, rather than the connotation used here and in the final book of ISOIAF (Game Of Thrones)? Well... now you do! I beg of you to fit an easter egg to this effect somwhere in this site, for us followers of the old ways out there.
To get a bit more on-topic: this is a perfect example of the missing scale in HN's "no politics" rule. There are facets of politics that you simply cannot ignore while still being an individually-minded technologist (closest thing this community has to a shared ethos).
It sure would be interesting if suddenly all of the Flock employees coming to work were being constantly watched by a network of crowdfunded private cameras. Might drive home the point of invasion of privacy if its someone other than them watching...them. Or if all of the neighbors of the CEO of Flock suddenly joined some service like this so that everyone could track his activity at all times. I'm sure he'd wouldn't mind the entire world knowing exactly what he or his family are doing always.
The term you're looking for is sousveillance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance
It's a very important tool to figure out which people in positions of authority are coordinating for authoritarian purposes or just plain old corruption.
I'm instantly suspicious of anyone in government who is critical of this idea.
What are they hiding?
I mean they don't hide much anymore. Our current admin is simply awash in corruption, and nothing happens because a majority of lawmakers are also in on it, getting rich, and just aren't required to do anything. Our police rob and murder the populace, and on the rare occasion they see any consequences at all, it's paid for by the same taxpayers they abuse. And even more broadly worldwide, corporations trade in human suffering by the ton, our planet continues to be destroyed by people who will be dead long before the consequences of their greed come to fruition, and the wealthy trade children to exploit either by way of their blood or much, much darker things.
We don't need a citizen surveillance network, we already know what they're doing, perhaps not all of it but far more than enough to justify mass civil unrest. They just figured out all they had to do was get us exhausted, overwhelmed and of course fighting each other enough to make certain we wouldn't. The globe is various kinds of prison for the majority of humanity, in degrees of horror, and a theme park for the 1%.
"I mean they don't hide much anymore."
heh as a foia nerd, heh.
All of that may be true but I think that it's moot.
The overall goal with these kinds of projects should be to maintain parity between the citizenry and people in positions of power.
Even if it's little stuff like a person calling out "Hey how come he doesn't have to wait in line?" when small town city councillor gets special treatment at a local restaurant. We want to close the gap between the every-man and people with power wherever we see it.
In the bigger picture as it pertains to this kind of sousveillance introducing as much friction in these kinds of things as possible causes the people you're opposing to need to exert more force to do what they're doing and it distracts them and throws them off guard. It's a death by a thousand cuts sort of thing.
Take the opposition to datacentres and the protests and resistance to it, if the protesters really wanted to gum up the works they'd target the finite number of anonymous professionals who are involved in the approval and development process for these megaprojects. There are a lot of paper-pushing accountants, lawyers, and civil engineers who just want to cash a fat cheque and make it to retirement who will back the fuck out the second they hear about people publishing the full org-chart and comings and goings of the professionals involved in these projects.
> The overall goal with these kinds of projects should be to maintain parity between the citizenry and people in positions of power.
Oh for sure, I'm not disagreeing with the principle being discussed, I'm saying in our current social moment this feels like saying the floor trim on the bridge of the Titanic needs some paint.
The president has been convicted of 39 felonies and is (trying to?) sell advance access to his stock market manipulating tweets for a subscription.
Parity at this point feels like a joke. I'd settle for literally any consequences at all for someone in power right now.
Be the change you wish to see in the world.
Vibecode an app that builds a list of corrupt law enforcement officials and that finds their mistresses or other unscrupulous behaviour. Have it determine when the exact most damaging moment to release this information to their families and /or the public is.
Agentic muckraking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmetropolitan
>Our current admin is simply awash in corruption
Every administration since JFK has been awash in corruption. No exceptions. America hasn't had an America-first President since JFK. The people who obsess over Trump need to read 1984 again and pay particular attention to Emmanuel Goldstein.
Our awful government includes most of Congress, 93% of which take pro-Israel bribes. If you want to find the problem, look East at our mortal enemy that brands itself as our greatest ally in their hasbara.
Just wait until the hearings start
How would the video captured from those cameras be used? These people are already driving on the same streets you and I do, so how would they not also be in the Flock footage? If you capture TBs of video footage and nobody sees it, what's the point? Are you going to start sending harassing posts to employees with footage of the car driving by your camera?
The anti-flock movement is real, but half baked ideas don't really serve a purpose to actually doing anything. Not sure how I feel about those destroying Flock cameras, but that's action moving the needle a lot further than establishing an entirely new anti-Flock camera network.
you don't store TBs of video footage... You process it and store the instances of each object/license plate detection.
great, so now what? who are you giving access to that data that will mean anything? the cops aren't going to do anything with it as it does not pertain to anything within the purview. the only thing I could think that would be done with that information is not good with people showing up to their house or some such.
This is irrelevant.
Flock operates on the foundational constitutional model of "Our cameras are in public, there is not an expectation of privacy in public, therefore we can capture anything/everything our camera sees in any way possible" (including LPR logging and even video recording).
And thus, so does any other system of recording public activity and processing/storing data collected from it.
It quite literally does not matter what people do or don't do with the information. If someone does use the information for something illegal (like stalking) them the police aught to take a police report filed by said Flock employee seriously and perform an investigation within the bounds of the law and constitution.
So then flock employees are unlikely to care at all since they are already being tracked by flock. The it will concern them once some crazy person is driven to the point of enacting real world violence. The entire point of this project is to collect that data in hopes that someone acts on it.
I think the presumption of harassment is a little telling, but if your post was in good faith, merely advertising people's cars (as in the group pays for ad space etc) freely and legally very much like the musk plane tracking app would have the desired effect
Fun fact: in some municipalities you can FOIA for the GPS records of police vehicles. Here's Chicago Police's. They removed 0-15mph for, erm, privacy reasons.... but it's not the worst.
Have a glance:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/hj4jtcag2i9qvl4sj6mg2/AF6c9r7...
The speed limit in neighborhoods is usually 25, so... 0-15mph limiting seems useless? I imagine some level of police <-> home address / general home area is in that data.
What? Removing 0-15 mph is to remove places where they camp or loiter with the engine on either for tickets, naps, or other purposes.
Right there's another gotcha with the data. They gave 15-60mph data in :30 minute increments.
"This would still identify officers blocks or get within a couple blocks of their home for those with take home cars. Would speeds of 15 miles per hour or more but only pings on the :30 minute mark, so one ping per hour from 2019 until the end of April work for you?"
Even gave them this SQL to run to get around that problem but they never got back to me, heh:
select gps_table.* from gps_table s inner join day_counts i ON i.vehicleid = s.vehicleid AND array[round(s.xcoord::numeric, 3), round(s.ycoord::numeric, 3)] != array[i.xcoord_rounded,i.ycoord_rounded] AND speed > 15; -- 15mph>other purposes.
Just say "Stalking their ex partners" its fine we all know about it in 2026.
That's indeed a very fun fact!
{"error": "internal error"}, when trying to open the live map.
Seconding this. I wonder if the server got hugged to death by the HN front page
same here
Are the .exe to install a always on computer as part of a open source repo I can verify with a hash? Otherwise I am not going to trust it.
If you don't know how to answer this question yourself, you certainly aren't able to read the source code to determine whether it's trust worthy in the first place, so what does it matter to you?
Nvm, just clicked on the link and took me to the GitHub. I guess that’s what I get from skimming the website.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Eye_Is_on_the_Sparrow
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/His_Eye_Is_on_the_Sparrow
I keep saying if it's legal for Flock to make Flock it's legal for anyone else to make Flock.
Most of the cameras are showing offline.
Link says they send data for non-LEO vehicles, just less data. Why send any at all?
All public servants should have all their info publicly available, some safety measures can be put like some delays or similar, but as the name implies, public servant! Police for example should be watched and they should feel they are actively being watched by the public, also their badge numbers should be available on these maps so you just click and you can report them if needed.
To the wonderful creators, who will presumably find this thread: did you know that sparrows had at least two full millenia of being associated with lust and depravity, rather than the connotation used here and in the final book of ISOIAF (Game Of Thrones)? Well... now you do! I beg of you to fit an easter egg to this effect somwhere in this site, for us followers of the old ways out there.
To get a bit more on-topic: this is a perfect example of the missing scale in HN's "no politics" rule. There are facets of politics that you simply cannot ignore while still being an individually-minded technologist (closest thing this community has to a shared ethos).
This is what I like to see AI used for. Thank you Claude Opus 5