Flock worker calls police on reporter filming public camera installation

blueoranges

Flock is YC

Zeetah

Privacy for me but not for thee - Flock

croes

Oh the irony

driverdan

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49618447

jamesnorden

Flock (YC 2017) missing from title.

spiderfarmer

US citizens are bad at protesting. In my area these cameras would be on fire weekly.

juiceland

>The officer said the installer was also concerned about privacy. "And his worry more than anything is that, you know, he's just an employee. Anybody like you and me. And now he's going to be in the news and he doesn't know if it's going to be targeted at him or his family." Don’t you understand? He was just following orders.

tptacek

Random people calling 911 on other people filming them is a staple of Youtube; banks, coffee store workers, hairdressers, most especially restaurant managers. I don't know why anyone would expect technicians from Flock to be different. It's worse for the technician in this case, because he really was being followed --- that's not unlawful but it's unnerving. You'd think from the response that this was like the VP/Sales of Flock Safety. But it's just some installer dude probably making $65k/year to climb poles and fasten cameras. I guess that's praxis for you though. I think this is just a ragebait piece.

Hasz

man, these guys bungled their PR so, so hard. What they should have done is pre-seeded a ton of stories about flock catching some notorious criminal, helping solve xyz serious crimes, helping solve abc minor nuisance issue crimes, and maybe some lines about reducing direct law enforcement interactions. On the flip side, let Axon, Motorola take some of the heat, paint your enemies as "defund the police", and stop being so obviously branded. Take a page out of Phillip Morris/Altria playbook and keep a lower profile. Instead, they've managed to unite left and right in hatred. Clown show.

howmayiannoyyou

Flock has solved crimes in my state, including a few horrendous violent crimes. We forget US society was configured (imperfectly) to allow families to raise their children in stability and safety, with guardrails around both sides of liberty. Surveillance has a legit role in protecting communities and their families - especially the most vulnerable. Willing to be most of the Flock hate crowd doesn't have kids walking to school in areas where bad things happen - many probably don't have kids.

classified

Outfits like TSA, ICE, Flock attract all the wrong people.

Tostino

I've gotta mention it because everyone seems to have a learned helplessness with this type of thing. I went and spoke at my county commissioners meeting a couple times after the initial flock roll out (voted on with no discussion a couple years prior) started becoming apparent. The first meeting, the group of me and two other people were half of the people making public comment. Every single person was against it unless they worked for the county. At the second meeting there were a whole lot more people. Again, every single person who spoke who didn't work for the county was against it, this time they had eight+ police officers speak in favor of it. We managed to swing a couple of the county commissioners who were in favor of it before and were not in favor of it after hearing about the constitutional issues as well as the cyber security issues that flock doesn't really care about. Pasco county Florida is now removing all the cameras on the public right of ways at the end of this month.

hermannj314

If someone came up to me and started filming me while I was in public, and then when I got in my car they followed me, I would also call the police. The double standard demonstrated by Flock isn't the issue, they are the pieces of shit and of course they have no moral consistency. But "He who fights with monsters should be careful, lest he thereby become a monster." I thought we were united that people have a reasonable sense of temporal privacy in public - that being in public is ephemeral and not some permanent record to be analyzed in perpetuity. We should not be fine stalking people and making them feel threatened, even those that want to build the panopticon state.

trs83

Irony is dead.

delichon

If someone were following around and filming someone who was posting anti-Flock fliers, I would also feel that crosses into harassment after a certain amount of time. A TV news crew filmed me when I was a freshman setting up my old travel trailer in a new university trailer park. I hated it, but it didn't last long. If they had continued following and filming indefinitely despite my protests, I would have wanted some kind of legal protection from them.

gessha

Alternative title: “Torment Nexus technician complains about local mass surveillance resistance”.

driggs

I love a good taste-of-their-own-medicine story like anyone else, but the headline is false. It seems that this is about a YouTuber stalking a Flock employee's vehicle through traffic for 10-15 minutes, which is why the police were called.

ck2

the weird thing about anti-flock is they are just replaced with another brand also they are just putting 24/7 recorders now in police vehicles and even delivery services so you can't just be anti-flock, you have to be anti-recording without policy for use and retention your phone and even your watch may be recording your audio right now

quaintdev

It's kind of ironic that US built the infrastructure(adtech, social media) to track people around the world on the Internet and now their own people are getting tracked in real life.

chinathrow

The audacity.