Buyer cancels showing after Deflock shows two cameras utilized by the HOA

skinfaxi

Would be a great angle as a buyer's agent to proactively show clients flock camera locations. At the same time, would be an interesting way to hinder the sale of a property by falsely reporting flock cameras where none are.

skinfaxi

Found a link to the original reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/realtors/comments/1von5bt/just_had_...

jmyeet

Beside the mass surveillance issues that are very real, let me just add that HOAs need to be made illegal except for condo buildings that obviously need to maintain and manage that building. There is absolutely no reason why a single family house needs to be in a mandatory HOA. We've all heard or experienced the silly rules about how your house must look and the fines associated with it. None of that should be legal. The one thing HOAs do is trash pickup but that should be a municipal government function. It is it everywhere else in the developed world. And why do they exist? If you find yourself asking that about anything uniquely American the answer is almost always "systemic racism". And that's the case here. HOAs became popularized in the 20th century with racially restrictive covenants (ie to prevent the owner selling to black people) [1]. So where are we now? Instead of the HOA president spending their day driving past "problem" houses to look for any rules violations, are we going to have them doing that with Flock cameras instead? What a dystopian nightmare. [1]: https://www.bostonfairhousing.org/timeline/1920s1948-Restric...

3dsnano

don’t forget!!! Y Combinator invested in Flock Safety in 2017.

panny

I know most of these flock cameras are going up in low income black neighborhoods [1] to "protect" them, but don't these wealthy neighborhoods need "protection" too? 1: https://www.wvtf.org/news/2026-08-14/flock-cameras-trigger-p...

flkiwi

Completely frivolous comment: people who insist on capitalizing “realtor” are hilarious. I know “Realtor” is a registered trademark, but that just makes it funnier to me. On topic, we’ve stopped going to a popular pizza place near us because the owner put a Flock camera up.

bko

Can someone explain to me why you wouldn't want a camera accessible to police monitoring the comings and goings of your residence? Seems it would make it trivial to catch any criminal behavior. And the pool makes sense as well as pools are incredibly dangerous. If children are regularly breaking in and swimming at night, which has been known to happen, it's a huge liability to residents not to mention the possibility of someone drowning I guess it could be private effort (everyone I know has a ring or Google home type system monitoring their residence 24/7), but I think the hysterics around Flock is mostly an online phenomenon.

swarnie

From the original thread: > Why would you want to live in an area that has that creepy of a tech product facing the pool? I wouldn’t want the hoa or an enterprising creep of a cop spying on my kids or myself either. You've all spent two decades strapping microphone/camera/gps combos to the side of your head and filling your homes/cars/tvs/fridges with big tech cameras and microphones but this is the line apparently. I'm not well versed in American privacy expectations but it seems kind of arbitrary from an outsiders perspective.

tiffanyh

Can someone explain why Flock is such a politically charged topic. I’m only now becoming aware of it, and feel like I’m out of the loop on key aspects.

delichon

There is pressure on both sides of the issue. A lot of people prioritize security over privacy. My subdivision has a single entrance. I've been lobbying the HOA members to support installing a prominent camera there to dissuade thieves. It's less important to me that it works then that it is visible. (I have one at my driveway entrance; the one at the subdivision entrance would help the whole community.) I would certainly not support a Flock camera wired into their network, but do support a camera limited to HOA control. It would make me feel a little easier about trips away. The potential loss of privacy in my comings and goings seems like a reasonable price to me.

cryo32

HOA and Flock. That is one hellish dystopia over there now.

xnx

HOA busybodies might be worse than spying cops.

fg137

The comments under the post are difficult to read. Really shouldn't have clicked the link or signed in to this cesspool...

amazingamazing

Why so much emphasis on Flock here? In manhattan i feel virtually every place has cameras. You will be hard pressed to find a block without them. What’s stopping a company from paying these people for their footage in return for “safety”?

seethishat

Why is it OK for everyone to carry a surveillance device (smart phone) everywhere they go, but installing a camera on a public roadway is not OK? I don't understand the hatred for Flock. And I don't think the complainers see the irony of tweeting complaints about Flock from their iPhones.

thedougd

I find this unsettling. When a private entity buys Flock, how do they _use_ it? Is it more than ALPR? Are they sharing the data with the network and offer it to the police? Can they watch footage?

josefritzishere

I would never want to buy a house near Flock cameras. That's worse than having an HOA. That one has both! That's a special kind of dystopian hellscape.

JohnFen

I would have to. (Well, I wouldn't even bother looking further into the property once I learned it involved an HOA, but for the sake of argument...) The presence of these cameras is wholly and entirely objectionable.

ButlerianJihad

First off, I don't enjoy the intense kind of Internet surveillance we have today; the advertiser tracking and logging of everywhere we go and everything we see. I think most sessions should be kept private, just between me, my ISP, and Google/Microsoft. However, I am perfectly fine with Flock (or other) cameras existing and providing services on behalf of government. If the tech exists to watch public spaces all the time and massively process the data, then so be it; who can stop it? So there are abuses: any system can be abused, so improve the controls and stop corruption at its root, not its symptoms. I bet that most anti-Flock people lobby hard for bodycams on police, and they thrive on those amateur social-media videos that appear to depict "police brutality" or "ICE overreach" on the streets. It only seems fair, that if amateur video can be leveraged to whip the public into a righteous frenzy, that professional video networks should be in place as well. Lastly, I don't mind the folks who are chopping down Flock trees. I think it's kind of adorable, actually. I believe that Flock should've used better care and highway safety standards to install the things, rather than hastily throwing them in any open space. You kids with your axes like President Washington's cherry trees! Power to the people!