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It’s pretty depressing to see every ostensibly American value be replaced by profit-driven utilitarianism. “It improves X problem marginally and it makes money, so why not?” seems to be the reasoning for just about everything anymore. No discussion of values, of the society we want to build, or anything else. That’s the world the tech industry is building.
It really feels like there is no debate anymore when it comes to things actually being implemented, they are just thrust upon us and maybe discussed later after there have already been consequences
> You're thinking Chinese surveillance
> US-based surveillance helps victims and prevents more victims
— Garry Tan, Sept 03, 2025, YC CEO while defending Flock on X.
https://xcancel.com/garrytan/status/1963310592615485955
I admire Garry but not sure why there can’t be a line that we all agree not to cross. No weapon has ever been made that was not used to harm humanity.
"Flock safety currently solves ... %10 of the crime Nation Wide"
Pretty bold statement without citing data to back that up. I have already received a speeding warning letter from one of these things. Does that count as a crime Flock solved?
I tire of all this binary thinking. It is true that surveillance helps victims. It is also true that the same surveillance can endanger civil liberties. We should have some say in how much we will allow our liberties to be endangered.
Sounds like someone watched too much Person of Interest
Flock cameras don't issue citations at all and don't appear to include speed radar.
Don't need radar to calculate speed with multiple photographs. And yes technically the city issued the warning.
Speed radar is unlikely but average speed is possible.
If you were in one place at 13:00 and 5 miles down the road at 13:10 you must have gone at least 30mph at least once.
> I admire Garry
Isn't it getting harder to say this, hearing this kind of rhetoric? "My bombs only kill the bad guys" is either hopelessly ignorant, or willfully malicious.
Way too many people in this industry value professional achievement over ethical considerations. And in doing so provide cover for obvious bad actors.
I don't know and DNGAF about Garry, but that argument is specious and reflects the conflict his business fundamentally creates for him. The smart move would be to be silent, not sure what you "admire".
A CEO of YC - the site you're currently on...
How exactly is that relevant? I doubt most people who use Amazon admire Andy Jassy.
That does not make them immune from criticism.
I give it 1-2 years max before he hands over the personal login emails / IP of every user on this site to the thought police. There’s nothing admirable about mercenary capitalists.
And? Do you want me to memorize the management and organizational structure of every website that I use?
I am perfectly capable of using this site and not giving a flying shit about the CEO of YCombinator
I spent several years doing a bunch of work in my local muni that drastically restricted, and eventually booted (I'm not happy about this; long story) Flock. I feel like my Flock bona fides are pretty strong. I understand people not being comfortable with Flock. I do not understand this idea that it's an obvious red line.
People disagree about this technology. I live in what I believe to be one of the 5 most progressive municipalities in the United States† and I can tell you from recent experience that our community is sharply divided on it.
† (we're a small inner-ring suburb of Chicago; I'm "cheating" in that Chicago as a whole is not one of the most progressive cities in the country, but our 50k person muni is up there with Berkeley and represented by the oldest DSA member in Congress)
> I do not understand this idea that it's an obvious red line.
It's an invasive surveillance technology that contributes to building the pervasive surveillance day to day reality.
You're muddying the waters asking "why are you against this" without even hinting at an argument why anyone should not be against this.
You can already see the progression. What was sold as "only listens to gunshots" now no longer listens only to gunshots. The deal constantly gets altered.
No I'm not. I actually do real political work on this issue, ran the commission process that restricted our cameras and created the only restrictive ALPR police General Orders in Chicagoland, and got us to pass an ACLU CCOPS ordinance --- the first municipality in Illinois to have one.
Whatever else I am, I'm not "muddying the waters". I'm commenting in good faith from actual experience. You're going to find my bona fides here are pretty strong.
> I actually do real political work on this issue
And Catholic priests preach. Some things aren't mutually exclusive and a lot of people are capable of holding conflicting ideas in their head.
> I'm commenting in good faith from actual experience.
All good but you didn't say anything. You muddy the water by saying repeatedly how progressive and experienced you are without providing the obvious reasoning that multiple commenters here are missing: why not be against it? This industry in general (and Flock in particular as per the article) have already been shown to continuously escalate things and change the deal to their benefit again and again. Any step they take forward always proved to be an irrecoverable step backward for civil liberties.
You cracked open the door and are looking at someone on the other side opening it wider and wider, and bringing their friends in, and still believe you can close that door whenever you want. Any history book will tell you that's hubris, not qualifications.
What are your bona fides on turkeys voting for Christmas? If you can put together an argument why this isn't a red line given this evidence of escalation, I'll tell you all about my bona fides.
The funny thing is you did the exact same thing in this comment as the last one! No arguments to be seen, just "I did all this stuff." Maybe we should call this sunken cost rather than muddying the waters?
Because the question was whether I'm commenting in good faith.
> I actually do real political work
I’m not even sure why but this sentiment rubs me the wrong way.
Perhaps it’s that what’s resonated most to me about democracy is the premise that it is all “for the people, of the people, by the people.”
There’s something exclusive about that statement.
Yes. The people are supposed to do work. Believe me: ordinary people who strongly disagree with a lot of what's being said on this thread are doing the work, showing up and complaining about "defund the police" people being behind any limitations on ALPRs at all. I had to argue with them! You are responsible for engaging on this, because, contrary to the claim at the top of the thread, this simply is not a "red line".
You could comment about why the things listed in the article aren't a red line.
I've already done that.
Please quote where. I don't see it. I will go further and assert no you didn't.
i guess you're not part of a group that the current administration has decided is anti-American just because we exist?
this administration is already making proclamations that are not laws (Executive Orders and National Security Directives), which clearly violate 1st Amendment rights to free speech, and yet are being interpreted by states to go after specific groups (may i introduce you to Texas and Florida).
police already exist as an uncontrollable force within most cities who apply the law as they see fit.
do you think a combination of those two things isn't going to result in a tool like this being abused?
if you do think it will be abused and that isn't a red line, that says something about you.
if you don't think it will be abused despite the evidence that police abuse surveillance and the current administration has no respect for due process and that isn't a red line, that also says something about you.
circling back, i hope you never find yourself on the receiving end of the technology you want others to be on the receiving end of.
> do not understand this idea that it's an obvious red line
ALPRs are not an obvious red line. Federal police ignoring court orders with microphones on street corners is.
The premise of these cameras is that the operating LEOs control sharing. If you assume the federal government is going to ignore those controls extralegally, then ALPRs themselves aren't acceptable. The red line you're proposing here isn't coherent.
Again I want to be clear that there's a difference between "bad idea" or "bad public policy tradeoff" and "red line". I believe it's pretty clear that when something is a live controversy with no clear winner in a municipality like Oak Park, whatever else it is, it isn't a "red line".
And the problem with that premise is the company clearly does not honor the local controls. Ask Evanston about it. I don't understand why you're defending Flock so hard when you can get the same product from e.g. Axon without all the we're-smarter-than-you bullshit from the vendor. Not all ALPRs come with Flock baggage, but you seem to treat them interchangeably.
This isn't responsive to the point 'JumpCrisscross was making.
Yes, that's how conversations work.
I'm surprised you say that. To flip this on its head, what would be your principled argument to accept ambient surveillance?
I don't doubt that license plate readers are used primarily to solve crimes. But the fact that it is collected and can be made available to anyone essentially strips you of privacy in everyday life. Cops are people too; once the tech is available, it is sometimes abused to spy on spouses, neighbors, journalists critical of the local PD, and so on.
There is also a more general argument: an ever-growing range of human activities is surveilled to root out crime, and we can probably agree that the end state of that would be dystopian: it'd be a place where your every word or even every thought is proactively monitored and flagged for wrongthink. We're ways off, but with every decade, we're getting closer. I'm not saying that Flock-listening-to-conversations is the line we can't cross, but if not this, then what?
Salami slicing tactics. The authoritarians will take a nibble at a time until we are all consumed.
Constantly surveilling your citizens without cause doesn't strike you as an obvious red line?
I'm deeply skeptical of surveillance and convinced it will be misused, more and more over time as all sides get used to it and the complaints become less, or less fundamental and more against something specific while not questioning the tech as such.
Still, I'm torn whenever I walk to the city center (Bavarian big city that is not Munich) and see how many rental bikes and rental e-scooters can be found thrown into the river that runs through the city. Or public trash cans that were actually put deep into the earth, with concrete too, lie broken with lots of earth and the long metal pipe with concrete attached because some people spent considerable effort to destroy public infrastructure. Or somebody must have jumped hard and repeatably on a weak point of a public bench, which has very thick wood and thick steel screws, but they still managed to destroy it.
I want those people to be found, I'm very angry. This is a frequent occurrence. If that means more surveillance, I would not oppose. I'm tired of seeing this happen again and again and again.
The city had to start using trashcans that look more and more like little war bunkers. They can't do anything for the bikes and scooters though, making them too heavy to lift and throw into the water is obviously not possible. Police do patrol, but they can't be everywhere all the time.
For illustration: Two bikes of a public bike rental service found in the river. They are not old, all of them are new, but this is how they look after a few days or weeks in the river:
https://img.mittelbayerische.de/ezplatform/images/4/4/8/8/40...
Divers are called regularly to retrieve bikes, scooters, and other big items thrown into the city's river: https://images.nordbayern.de/image/contentid/policy:1.132184...
It's almost assured the police know and have interacted with those committing vandalism already. Really the question you need to ask yourself is should said vandals should be beat to death or enslaved in prison forever.
More cameras doesn't fix this kind of crime.
Surveillance in the end is a tool, like a gun, which can be used for good or bad.
I doubt any more effort will be made against vandalism for a long time that reaquires to increase surveillance. The cameras and microphones will remain, though.
Edit: I live in a dictatorship. State surveillance and policing has helped with vandalism. But the drawbacks are obvious and nefarious. I would take more vandalism in a mediocre democracy any day.
Uhm... see my first sentence? I'm aware, and I said so.
Obviously I pointed to a conflict (of my interests), that's why I said I'm torn. If I want the second (less vandalism) I'll have to give up at least some of the first (freedom from surveillance while in public places).
No. Roughly half our community wanted to keep the cameras. And we're as blue/progressive as it gets. Whatever else it is, it isn't "a red line".
That is not the same thing as me saying I think the cameras were a good tradeoff.
The wealthy people keep the poor down, then having this subpopulation that acts in messed up ways causes crime, which causes the wealthy to accept things like surveillance to "protect themselves" and continually cedes to more authoritarian policies. The middle class is the social base of fascism.
The way out is to turn on the rich and produce a more economically equal society.
People live in fear, and these things help police close cases quickly.
I served on a jury where a young woman slipped on ice while crossing the street and was run over by a negligent driver who was fleeing what he thought was the police, because he was on probation and not supposed to drive. With private surveillance, red light cameras and some other sources, they were able to track down the vehicle and apprehend the individual within 45 minutes of the event. Prior to that, much more primitive version of that technology being available, there would no chance of that case being solved.
Personally, I think this technology is dangerous, lacks effective governance, is operated without transparency, and is prone to abuse. Events of late highlight how different jurisdictional boundaries at the city, state and federal levels can be in conflict. But the technology is not going away -- imo it's time to govern it and limit the inter-jurisdictional data sharing.
The logic here works both ways. The number of wars prevented by mutually assured destruction, and the number of lives saved is beyond nontrivial, and likely outnumbers the lives lost.
I don't want to get into an argument about the dangers involved, I agree with Taleb about the fat tails of violence, and how standard statistics breaks down when there is infinite variance. My point is just that Tan's point is reasonable, even if there is risk. You need only look at the CCTV usage in the UK to see how you can have a reasonable society with strong surveillance.
The UK has departed from being a reasonable society with strong surveillance. This happened about the same time the police started showing up at 2am for Facebook posts from old ladies.
Part of why CCTV in the UK is ubiquitous and yet hasn’t so far resulted in what many people describe as a surveillance state is that the cameras are all operated by different people. To hoover up data an agency needs to go ask the owner of every shop along a road for the video, while hoping they’ve not recorded over the tape yet.
That falls about (and is falling apart) when the cameras are all operated by the same company. Now an agency can just go to that company and request video for an entire town in one go. There’s probably a self-service portal for this because the operator isn’t even based in that town, so has no skin in the game, no need to work out whether they agree this is something the video is needed for.
>You need only look at the CCTV usage in the UK to see how you can have a reasonable society with strong surveillance.
It's not really 'surveillance' as the vast majority of those cameras are privately owned and on private property. The numbers that get thrown around are basically just guesses, given that there are no central records of privately owned CCTV cameras.
Irrespective of how you feel about this, its very strange to throw China under the bus here. If Chinese surveillance is so dystopian, don't you think China uses the same exact rhetoric for protecting their police state? After all China went from a bunch of farms to the second largest economy in 30 years.
Either you think mass surveillance is wrong or not.
> I admire Garry
Why?
There is no real red line for Garry when it comes to enabling an authoritarian surveillance state. This is obvious bullshitting, just like his “Christianity”.
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They film us on the street. They film us at traffic signals, from law enforcement vehicles, and drones, parks and even through our doorbell cameras. I don't mean this glibly, or in its entirety, but the big screen watching your every move in 1984 seems not too far off..
And now with the advent of highly capable LLMs, we don't even need humans watching and listening. The data streams can be captured, analyzed, summarized, for any behavior, mention, suspicion, or hallucination of undesirable activity. In a population inured to masked agents snatching people off the street domestically and semi*-autonomous drone strikes abroad*, our future doesn't look rosy.
* for now
This is the key realization which is missing from talks about AI dangers.
Total surveillance used to be impossible because the government needed people to spy on other people. They needed to find somebody willing and pay them.
Now it can be automated.
The war won't be humans vs an AI controlling robots. It'll be humans vs the government and rich people controlling AI controlling robots.
At least we don't have listening devices in our homes!
Seems like we need more peaceful citizen defense tools.
ICE will go after you for organizing such tools (unrelated to immigration cases): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45475525
Larry Ellison, major asshole and big ally of the current authoritarian regime:
"Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on," Ellison said, describing what he sees as the benefits from automated oversight from AI and automated alerts for when crime takes place.
Ellison, Vance, Musk, Thiel, Luckey, Zuckerberg and many of the tech oligarch assholes want us to live in their surveillance state.
They're currently making good progress. What will you do to help stop them?
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/omnip...
And so plebians vs patricians turns into citizens vs entrepreneurs.
It's not just about who owns the means of production anymore, it's about who owns the means of surveillance (the so called AI).
Two thousand years and humans have learned nothing. Power and money still lead to more power and money which lead to abuse, which after decades gets so bad it leads to revolution. Except this time they want to make revolutions impossible. So they _have_ learned but common people have not.
Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on
These people live in fantasyland bubbles, powered by their unshakeable belief in their own intelligence and "hyper rational" nonsense.
People already film themselves committing crimes. There are a great many people who, over and over again, make decisions in the present that will have strongly negative consequences in their own futures.
"If we watch people they won't do bad things." Sure, in some other universe maybe.
It's funny because they were constantly recorded at epstein's island and yet not on their best behavior...
Recording isn't enough you also need follow-up and if there's anything we've learned over the years is that the police are going to follow up on somebody throwing their soda can into Ellison's yard but not breaking your front door.
And this guy is going to own TikTok through a deal with Trump, he's literally going to be the thought police
With WiFi even being able to detect our heartbeats [0], we'll get to enjoy dynamic pricing on our insurance on a second-by-second basis!
Remember kids, if the invasive tracking is done by the government and a couple of companies, then it's the good kind of dystopia! /s
[0]: https://news.ucsc.edu/2025/09/pulse-fi-wifi-heart-rate/
The slide into hell is steep and slippery. I’m afraid we’re in a dark period of history that’s only going to get darker.
I want proponents of this tech to explain something to me. Why has the rate of stochastic terrorism only increased since the NSA and Palantir started spying on all of us? Isn’t the whole point of this to preempt those kinds of things?
What is the counterfactual? Without knowing the number of attacks prevented by these tools, we don't know what the baseline would be.
For the record: they prevented essentially nothing in our muni. We're 4.5 square miles sandwiched between the Austin neighborhood of Chicago (our neighbor to the east; many know it by its reputation) one side and Maywood/Broadview/Melrose Park on the other, directly off I-290; the broader geographic area we're in is high crime.
We ran a pilot with the cameras in hot spots (the entrances to the village from I-290, etc).
Just on stolen cars alone, roughly half the flags our PD reacted to turned out to be bogus. In Illinois, Flock runs off the Illinois LEADS database (the "hotlist"). As it turns out: LEADS is stale as fuck: cars are listed stolen in LEADS long after they're returned. And, of course, the demography of owners of stolen cars is sharply biased towards Black and Latino owners (statistically, they live in poorer, higher-crime areas), which meant that Flock was consistently requesting the our PD pull over innocent Black drivers.
We recently kicked Flock out (again: I'm not thrilled about this; long story) over the objections of our PD (who wanted to keep the cameras as essentially a better form of closed-circuit investigatory cameras; they'd essentially stopped responding to Flock alerts over a year ago). In making a case for the cameras, our PD was unable to present a single compelling case of the cameras making a difference for us. What they did manage to do was enforce a bunch of failure-to-appear warrants for neighboring munis; mostly, what Flock did to our PD was turn them into debt collectors.
Whatever else you think about the importance of people showing up to court for their speeding tickets, this wasn't a good use our sworn officers' time.
Can you elaborate on why you're not thrilled about Flock being removed?
The metro area is blanketed in ALPRs and we were the only ones actually writing real policy about them. Now we don't have any ALPRs and can't build policy or shop it to any of our neighbors. We had harm reduction for the cameras and a plausible strategy for reducing their harm throughout the area, and instead we did something performative.
Why is it better to reduce the harm of a practically useless anti-crime device than remove it entirely?
That's a good and reasonable question. The answer is: the cameras weren't going to do any meaningful harm in Oak Park (they were heavily restricted by policies we wrote about them, and we have an exceptionally trustworthy police department and an extremely police-skeptical political majority). But you can drive through Oak Park in about 5 minutes on surface streets, and on either side of that drive you'll be in places that are blanketed with ALPRs with absolutely no policy or restrictions whatsoever.
Had we kept the cameras, we'd have some political capital to get our neighboring munis (and like-minded munis in Chicagoland like Schaumberg) to take our ordinances and general orders as models. Now we don't. We're not any safer: our actions don't meaningfully change our residents exposure to ALPRs (and our residents weren't the targets anyways; people transiting through Oak Park were) because of their prevalence outside our borders.
What people don't get about this is that a lot of normal, reasonable people see these cameras as a very good thing. You can be upset about that or you can work with it to accomplish real goals. We got upset about it.
> What people don't get about this is that a lot of normal, reasonable people see these cameras as a very good thing. You can be upset about that or you can work with it to accomplish real goals. We got upset about it.
An alternative is you can try to convince those people that, while their desire to reduce crime is perfectly understandable, this might not be the way to do it effectively, to say nothing of the potential avenues for abuse (and in current day America, I'd be very wary of such avenues)
It remains an issue of trust for me. You not only have to trust your police and government(s), but you have to trust Flock too - and that trust has to remain throughout changing governments and owners of that company. I have a healthy distrust of both, particularly lately.
Just as importantly, but more to the point, is still the question of whether they're actually useful. To that end, does not the same logic apply to being able to pressure nearby municipalities to remove the cameras?
In any case, while I remain fundamentally opposed to such surveillance, you raise very good points, and I appreciate you taking the time to explain your position in this thread.
I'm fine that we took the cameras down. As you can see from my first comment on this part of the thread: they weren't working, and before we stopped our PD from responding to stolen car alerts, they were actively doing harm. But I disagree with you about the long-term strategy. I'd have kept the cameras --- locked down (we had an offer from Flock to simply disable them while leaving them up, so that they wouldn't even be powered up) --- and written a formal ALPR ordinance. Then I'd have worked with the Metro Mayors Caucus and informal west suburban mayor networking to get other munis to adopt it.
> Why has the rate of stochastic terrorism only increased since the NSA and Palantir started spying on all of us?
…is this true? What timespan are we looking at? My understanding was that crime has been on the decline pretty much from the 90s up until 2020. And in 2020 the world changed in a way that kind of made everyone go nuts.
Let’s start with school shootings which only started AFTER the surveillance apparatus went online.
You're making the same mistake that lots of people do, looking at the big events that make the news instead of actual crime stats. The former doesn't really tell you anything about crime rates.
This is a big problem that leads to things like these surveillance measures, because people think crime is really high even when it's the lowest it has ever been, because of the media environment.
> stochastic terrorism
This is a bugbear for me. The point of terrorism is that it’s a random act of violence.
The stochastic part is who is doing it (random people being incited) vs an organized cell who has members engaging in random acts of violence
Right, it's the inverse of saying a "random dice roll" isn't happening because there isn't a random human throwing a random selection of polyhedra. Different aspects.
That said, even "random" has so many different interpretations that "random targets" it can still be a misleading shorthand. What happens is something closer to "unpredictably unjust and disproportionate"... but of course nobody wants to keep saying a mouthful like that.
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Stochastic terrorism usually refers to incitement, afaict.
Edit: it's got a Wikipedia article, which says it's a particular kind of incitement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_terrorism
Terrorism isn't even an actual action. Its a threat of a random action to the public.
For example, saying "there is a planned school shooting at a school in $metro_city", even though there is absolutely nobody doing that - that causes terror. Doesn't have to be backed by any actions at all.
Like, with the shooting of UHC CEO, there was no grandiose statements or otherwise causing terror ahead of time. It was 3 bullets and leave.
They did fail to prove terrorism in court in that case - I think generally there needs to be some attempt to use the terror to achieve a political aim or change public opinion?
Just making people afraid is a different thing.
It's a problem entirely made up from America's insistence on guns. IMHO that's like when you have a website that serves a few requests per second, and then someone has the bright idea of using Kafka and Kubernetes because reasons, and now you have a horrible mess that requires multiple developers to support and, instead of questioning the original technical decision, everybody instead piles up technical "solutions."
At least nobody actually says "The founding engineers knew everything, our job is protect their original technical decisions, because otherwise our great company will fall."
Regulate guns and all these problems go away. As a bonus, you'll find out they were neither necessary nor useful for defending your rights.
> Regulate guns and all these problems go away.
Firearms are regulated in the United States. Quite heavily, in fact. This goes back to the National Firearm Act of 1934, carries through the Gun Control Act of 1968, then loops in the Firearm Owners' Protection Act (FOPA) of 1986 (which included the famous Volkmer-McClure amendment that all but outlawed fully automatic weapons for civilians) and runs through at least the Brady Act of 1993. And that's without getting into the smorgasbord of state, county, and municipal laws that also apply.
The idea that the US is still living in the Wild West era with regards to firearms is a complete myth.
> As a bonus, you'll find out they were neither necessary nor useful for defending your rights.
That's not an experiment I'm willing to indulge in personally. As the old saying goes "I'd rather have my guns and not need them, than need them and not have them."
We're not going to regulate guns this way, so this point, valid or not, isn't meaningful to US policy.
Dangerous freedom > peaceful slavery
The non-American mind simply can't comprehend, and that's okay.
"We will all be on our best behaviour because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on"
That should be Flock (YC 2017)
There are a lot of ideas that are bad for society but great for business. YC is business first, always.
Surely this will never be used for evil
The logical next step is replace the microphones with the ones we carry around in our pockets every day: https://youtube.com/watch?v=IRELLH86Edo
1960: "I have a great idea! lets have every person in the country carry a radio tracking beacon!" "That'll never fly!" 2012: "I can has TWO iphones??"
I'm going to go around these things all day screaming, "help, rape!"
It's like that old prank where you order pizzas to someone's house that didn't order them. That's how we used to fight against the man. Now we scream, "rape" randomly in public.
What a time to be alive.
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Is there an audio stream that tends to ruin speech recognition?
Play multiple lyrical songs at the same time? Bonus for multi-language.
1. This is illegal eavesdropping
2. I will start screaming at the Flock cameras
1. This is illegal eavesdropping
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/plain_view_doctrine_0
might apply, though IANAL
That's probably exactly the rationalization for this. No expectation of privacy in a public space, and therefore no requirement for warrant to eavesdrop. I may not like it, but the government will find absolutely any way to do things we don't like in spite of the infinite attempts to restrain it from doing so decades or centuries ahead of time.
Next week: App that emits frequencies that block Flock microphones
2 weeks from now: Google and Apple remove AntiFlock apps; developers arrested
(Only slightly sarcastic. We should be talking about ways of making these things useless, as well as illegal)
EMP devices.
The US is speed running fascism it's wild to watch.
And then they'll start proactively reporting to law enforcement when their AI model thinks what you're saying is "suspicious", just like they do now when it thinks the movement patterns of behavior of your car is suspicious.
Flock's CEO openly says the he intends that "Flock will help eliminate ALL crime", and has shown he has no concerns about how dystopian or Minority Report-esque Flock would need to be to accomplish that mission.
I’m not worried that much about random acts of violence from desperate or misguided strangers.
The crime I want eliminated is that of the elite.
I think you're going to find that working class people living in low and middle income neighborhoods do not agree with you about this. They're unhappy with how police response tends to traumatize the innocent in their neighborhoods, but they're even more unhappy with how police response appears only to halfheartedly address crime, which falls heavier (both in frequency and impact) on lower-income people than it does on the wealthy.
You can read meeting minutes from neighborhood and beat meetings to confirm this (there's probably lots of things you can read to confirm it, but the nerdiest way to do it is to get the raw data.)
A shorter way to say all of this: you're expressing a luxury belief.
When one cares not about false positives, eliminating all true positives is trivial.
It is now fair game to destroy their illegal surveillance devices. Please do.
Disgusting.
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I'm yet to be convinced that the removal of privacy has any effect on the level of crime, nor do I believe that to be the primary motivation for it
Nor a viable solution to the problem.
That’s a good point. I can tell you from firsthand experience that the abundance of cameras in our society absolutely have a profound effect on the ability of law enforcement to solve individual crimes. To the point you are making how do we transfer those successes into reducing the level of crime?
My thoughts on that are probably not very popular on here and those are to just build larger jails and equip those with drug rehabilitation options. The larger jails allow us to not just kick the people back on the streets immediately but compel steps that help eliminate recidivism. Another source of criminal behavior is mental illness. I have no clues on how to fix that except perhaps concentrate on the causes.
All these cameras and recording devices exist for that same reason Advil exists in that it helps a toothache. Doesn’t really solve the problem but fights the symptoms.
If you think prisons turn criminals into law abiding individuals, or that that's even their purpose, you've got some more figuring out to do before teaching.
Your cure is worse than the disease! Our risk of violent crime is lower now than almost any point in history. We make crime better by improving the lives of the average person. Jails don't fix socioeconomic issues, they in fact make them worse.
If that was true, there would be no crime in London.
The current system is all downsides - no privacy while the police ignore crimes like bike thefts despite ample CCTV coverage. Worse, CCTV and other surveillance tools are used with glee to target protestors who the government dislike.
Completely agree. Generally speaking, America’s homicide closure rate isn’t great compared to other western countries and is unfortunately trending downward in recent years.
I can certainly understand concerns about privacy but the other sides of this discussion should not be ignored.
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/29/1172775448/people-murder-unso...
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
Before discussing trade-offs between those two, what about prevention of crime?
How would that work? Assume that I'm willing to bribe the underclass with welfare to prevent crime (hell, assume I'm only worried about the worst types of crime)... how much bribery for how much reduction?
Flock won't prevent you from being stabbed by a homeless junkie. It might help catch the guy and prevent him from stabbing someone else (until he's released three months later).
Knowing this, wouldn't you prefer that we spend the money on crime prevention programs that "bribes" the underclass, instead of in a system that won't prevent crime at all but will rob all of us of privacy?
The single best resolution to crime is to dramatically reduce poverty.
The single best way to reduce poverty is to pay (bribe) the poor to stop having children, which ends the cycle of poverty (which is extraordinarily difficult to break and tends to trap generations). That should go hand-in-hand with free birth control, free day-after pills, free abortions, comprehensive sexual education, etc.
A large share of the bottom 1/3 in the US will never step foot outside of poverty, most of them will never hold a job on a sustained basis. Pay them to not have children, which simultaneously benefits their lives in the here and now, while preventing the mistake of bringing children into poverty. It's one of the most humane things the US could do as a society. It would very rapidly improve poverty (and reduce crime) in the US.
Paying an entire class of people to not have children is eugenics. There is a massive line between that and increasing (free) access to reproductive services.
How about helping them out of poverty instead of subjecting them to eugenics?
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Barring any massive mental illness, humans are great optimizers. Crime is basically the optimal policy within environmentm where illegal activites with their added risk have a potential much greater reward than leading your life normally and doing things by the book.
Its not hard to inject money in the right places to either decrease the reward, or increase the risk.
When do we start removing white-collar crime?
What crime? The system is working as designed. /i
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Holy false dichotomy Batman. The amount of crime you can reduce by funding decent law enforcement training and a working law system and just by having a general halfway welfare system dwarfs the effects these privacy invading solutions could ever produces. Absolute lunacy to believe that.
"Never give power to authorities that wouldnt want them to have if someone you didnt like was in charge"
While I fully agree with your statement, until we as a society learn to self regulate and prevent things like orange man happening, its best that we live in a world where people in charge have as little power as possible.
But we want to build fancy tech and not listen to those annoying humanists, so no
Having adequate law enforcement training and funding, is not mutually exclusive with leveraging technology for more effective enforcement. In fact that's where some of the funding goes. I would be interested in seeing some data reflecting a reduction in crime as a result of increasing the welfare system, as you claim.
I mean compared to corporate written Wikipedia articles from privacy invading dystopian nightmare companies the evidence that welfare reduces crime is so obvious that even a quick google search drowns one in 3rd party validate studies:
https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/137/4/2263/658... https://news.uchicago.edu/does-welfare-reduce-crime https://law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/documents/pdf/Intel... https://pp.ethz.ch/news/2025/03/higher-welfare-payments-redu... And probably a gazillion more
But again, by the time we did all the non privacy invading stuff that doesn't target me as a law abiding citizen the discussion about these devices becomes moot because crime isn't that much of a problem anymore.
surprise!
not
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