"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."
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
"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.
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]:
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.
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.
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.
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").
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
1. We shouldn't have to wait for regulation to accept this. It should be locked down before going live. It's reasonable for people to want it gone until it's thoughtfully and *transparently* rolled out.
2. I agree that there are legitimate use cases and I still don't want it to exist. I do not trust our government or police force to use this properly, as demonstrated by the abuse that has already happened.
Currently there is a US Green Card holder—a legal permanent resident—who is facing deportation for protesting Palestine apartheid. Not for supporting Hamas, not for called for terrorism, not for attacking anyone. Simply for protesting their homeland being occupied and bombed.
This government is not trustworthy. Police can't be trusted with this ability. There are trade-offs for not having it, fine, but there are trade-offs for having it. The erosion of privacy and liberty is too costly.
Regarding number one, that seems like a common frustration, but one I don't understand.
How would something be regulated without doing the work of actually passing the regulation?
In order to have the laws we want, we have to create them. It takes work and it would be nice if we didn't have to do it, but that seems like yelling at the clouds.
> How would something be regulated without doing the work of actually passing the regulation
I think the point GP was making is that the cameras should not be deployed until the legal regulations around how the data is used and such is hashed out
Instead what is happening with many of these projects is a "move fast and break things" attitude. Cameras being deployed before the regulatory environment can catch up, leading to the busted situation we have now where people are lashing out and cutting cameras down
If there was any due diligence upfront with regulating this before the cameras were installed, then maybe we wouldn't be here
Who's responsible for doing the diligence up front? Who's responsible for doing it now?
This isn't a new topic.
Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) have been in use and legal since the 90s.
Facial recognition scanners have been in use in public spaces and legal since the early 2000s.
How long should one wait for regulations to catch up?
At least to me, this seems like a situation where public sentiment rapidly shifted, and now people are much more angry about the legal status that they were either okay or ignorant of a one or two years ago.
It doesn't really strike me as a move fast and break things situation. Flock itself is 10 years old at this point.
Situations change, and people can absolutely change their mind about the technology, for example if they don't trust the current Administration. That said, it seems like there's a lot of revisionist history and FUD going around.
There's a lot of people that have been having their face scanned every time they go to a concert or get on a plane who who are up and arms. People have been using a license plate readers to pay their toll on the way to work everyday are suddenly advocating for cutting down cameras.
Technically, most people came at it with no strong perspective. The pushback developed when it became undeniably clear the the devices were being abused, and there was no accountability. In particular, Flocks CEO has handled this extremely poorly.
I’m all for the positive use cases, and have been involved with several similar products, but in this case Flock has completely mishandled the situation and created the situation they now find themselves in.
This is a clueless take, tbh. There is no regulation that can stop these being misused at scale to violate people's rights. None. It's the same with FAA702.
"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
The ones here (not in Texas) were being queried by Texas cops looking for women getting out of state abortions.
Flock cameras and their ilk are not OK in a civilized, free society.
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...
No legitimate reason, but money plus investor pressure plus lack of privacy laws goes a long way towards self-justification.
There is an expansion to the surveillance. The cameras now get additional phone tracking abilities: https://archive.is/Tkwc3
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.
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.
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.
There are multiple cases of people being falsely imprisoned because police believed Flock over actual evidence. In each case Flock was wrong.
Yes and in each case of people being correctly imprisoned, Flock was right. That's because it's a tautology.
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").
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.
Thanks! Reading now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49262204 "Flock amplifies existing bugs. Sounds like Flock is the error."
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.
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.
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.
> 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”.
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
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.
hey take it or leave it, no worries
[flagged]
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.
* Flock (YC S17)
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety
Is this the reason why this story is flagged and pushed down to 2nd page?
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.
YC has somehow managed to be affiliated with some of the most egregiously crap companies along with the okay ones.
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.
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.
VCs are cancer. YC is one of the biggest VCs. What do you expect?
Isn't it a bit disingenuous to refer to them as merely license plate readers?
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...
Cop-issued spousal trackers. 50 cases and counting.
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.
Exactly. One cop used it to track his almost 800 times in a few months.
While citing bogus reasons that were actual crimes.
Isnt it a bit disingenuous to imply that license plate readers aren't infringing enough to be a problem?
They will just switch to Axon
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.
They connect into the flock network.
https://investor.axon.com/2020-04-02-Axon-Partners-with-Floc...
EDIT: There is a claim they terminated their partnership by last year..but who knows.
https://www.404media.co/cities-are-ditching-flock-immediatel...
Then society may just regulate the technology.
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.
My angle grinder is vendor-agnostic.
[dead]
[flagged]
1. We shouldn't have to wait for regulation to accept this. It should be locked down before going live. It's reasonable for people to want it gone until it's thoughtfully and *transparently* rolled out.
2. I agree that there are legitimate use cases and I still don't want it to exist. I do not trust our government or police force to use this properly, as demonstrated by the abuse that has already happened.
Currently there is a US Green Card holder—a legal permanent resident—who is facing deportation for protesting Palestine apartheid. Not for supporting Hamas, not for called for terrorism, not for attacking anyone. Simply for protesting their homeland being occupied and bombed.
This government is not trustworthy. Police can't be trusted with this ability. There are trade-offs for not having it, fine, but there are trade-offs for having it. The erosion of privacy and liberty is too costly.
Regarding number one, that seems like a common frustration, but one I don't understand.
How would something be regulated without doing the work of actually passing the regulation?
In order to have the laws we want, we have to create them. It takes work and it would be nice if we didn't have to do it, but that seems like yelling at the clouds.
> How would something be regulated without doing the work of actually passing the regulation
I think the point GP was making is that the cameras should not be deployed until the legal regulations around how the data is used and such is hashed out
Instead what is happening with many of these projects is a "move fast and break things" attitude. Cameras being deployed before the regulatory environment can catch up, leading to the busted situation we have now where people are lashing out and cutting cameras down
If there was any due diligence upfront with regulating this before the cameras were installed, then maybe we wouldn't be here
Who's responsible for doing the diligence up front? Who's responsible for doing it now?
This isn't a new topic.
Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) have been in use and legal since the 90s.
Facial recognition scanners have been in use in public spaces and legal since the early 2000s.
How long should one wait for regulations to catch up?
At least to me, this seems like a situation where public sentiment rapidly shifted, and now people are much more angry about the legal status that they were either okay or ignorant of a one or two years ago.
It doesn't really strike me as a move fast and break things situation. Flock itself is 10 years old at this point.
Situations change, and people can absolutely change their mind about the technology, for example if they don't trust the current Administration. That said, it seems like there's a lot of revisionist history and FUD going around.
There's a lot of people that have been having their face scanned every time they go to a concert or get on a plane who who are up and arms. People have been using a license plate readers to pay their toll on the way to work everyday are suddenly advocating for cutting down cameras.
Technically, most people came at it with no strong perspective. The pushback developed when it became undeniably clear the the devices were being abused, and there was no accountability. In particular, Flocks CEO has handled this extremely poorly.
I’m all for the positive use cases, and have been involved with several similar products, but in this case Flock has completely mishandled the situation and created the situation they now find themselves in.
It is 100% impossible to secure the system and its use sufficiently to provide reasonable privacy for the public.
Obvious? How do you propose adopting and regulating the technology in a way that the public wants and that allows reasonable privacy?
That's the obvious solution in a perfect world.
Another part of that obvious solution is to take them down until those sufficient regulations and civilian oversight of police are in place.
Is it obvious that regulation will fix this? I never want to be filmed in public constantly. Ever. There's no reason that would justify that.
No more cameras.
This is a clueless take, tbh. There is no regulation that can stop these being misused at scale to violate people's rights. None. It's the same with FAA702.
I remember when conservatives were anti-mass police surveillance.