Police chief unplugs cameras after Flock ignores contract cancellation
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
They will never change their behavior when there are no consequences for their actions.
They've even been caught putting them back up or re-enabling them in places where the contract has been canceled. How is that legal? I thought you had to be city-approved to install equipment like that. One would think that no contract = no approval?
Maybe they need to set up a "sting" operation at one of the disabled units and start makin' some arrests/fines for unapproved equipment installation/construction on public property? See if that changes some minds over at Flock about what they can and cannot get away with?
Ring cameras are privately owned, installed on private property, by the choice of the property owner. Data sharing is under the customer's control unless a judicial warrant is involved.
Flock cameras are a completely different situation. They're installed on public property, data sharing controls are an utter shitshow, and they give police the ability to do unconstitutional dragnet-style fishing for crime and even pre-crime, i.e. "suspicious patterns of behavior".
Equating the two is a complete misunderstanding of what's happening, but companies like Flock rely on that kind of ignorance to push their product.
Also pertinent imo: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-49191005
Surveillance infrastructure is surveillance infrastructure, who is supposed to "own" it is irrelevant. Unless consumers own the hardware, the service, and where the data is stored, they do not own any of it.
There are precedents with Ring being very cozy with police departments, e.g.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/08/police-can-get-y...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/amazon-ring-stop...
And many more over the years (all the way until February of this year, when they cancelled a deal with Flock). Amazon is not a company to trust.
It's not possible to use Ring for mass surveillance with as little effort as Flock supports.
> No single Flock camera can do that
What does that matter? Flock allows government agencies to enter a license plate number and find all instances of that vehicle across all participating customers. This is not technically possible with Ring.
> this can be used to track people
Prove it. Find one example. I can find hundreds of examples for Flock.
Both articles you linked to prove my point - access to footage was accessed by government agencies with consent from users, in which case a warrant was not needed. Read more than the misleading headlines and you would have figured that out for yourself, god forbid you let facts get in away of your bias. There were an small number of incidents in which Ring used an emergency situation to share 11 instances of footage without a warrant, which isn't even worth talking about since they've since closed that hole.
> Amazon is not a company to trust.
This has nothing to do with trusting Amazon and everything to do with false equivalence.
Weren’t there regular scandals about local law enforcement regularly accessing Ring footage without the owner’s agreement or knowledge? Ring absolutely is a surveillance tool that can be used without oversight. See here for example: https://stateofsurveillance.org/articles/corporate/amazon-ri...
All access required user consent, other than a dozen very limited examples that were discovered in which Ring employees provided footage without user consent or a court order (which is negligible in the grand scheme of things). So no, Ring has not been abused by the police as much as Flock.
Flock is at one rather extreme end of that spectrum, at least in the context of a democratic country with some civil liberties. They literally seem to be breaking laws in order to achieve their goals. Ring occupies a point pretty far from that.
All of these issues can be addressed with government laws and regulations, and hopefully will be. But the laws needed to constrain what Ring is doing are nowhere near what will be needed to constrain Flock.
> Unless consumers own the hardware, the service, and where the data is stored, they do not own any of it.
This is trivially false. But if you live in the US and take its legal and regulatory environment as an unchangeable fact of life, I can see how you might think that.
You and the poster you're replying to are making related but separate points which partially overlap yet are both valid within a certain scope. It can be simultaneously true that:
* The fact a consumer has to 'make a choice' to install a Ring camera does make the situation materially different and better than Flock in a civil rights and property rights sense.
* The fact that most consumers are unaware (or don't care) that the Ring (or similar device) click-through EULA can permit all manner of invasive outcomes which are bad and companies can easily ignore whatever the EULA permits with (probably) little consequence, resulting in even worse privacy outcomes.
Bottom line: Judged by net outcomes in practice, Ring-like cloud cameras can be every bit as bad for privacy as Flock cameras. Judged through the lens of 'balance of rights and privileges between state and individual', Flock is even worse then a camera installed by a citizen on private property.
... recording the street, meaning https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/guidance-on-the-u... applies in the UK:
---
If your CCTV system captures images of people outside the boundary of your private domestic property – for example, from neighbours’ homes or gardens, shared spaces, or from public areas – then the GDPR and the DPA will apply to you. You will need to ensure your use of CCTV complies with these laws. If you do not comply with your data protection obligations you may be subject to appropriate regulatory action by the ICO, as well as potential legal action by affected individuals.
---
However, as with anything in the UK, it's virtually impossible to enforce it on sh*thead neighbours recording you with their Chinese cloud enabled devices 24/7.
The police routinely has access to Ring footage. The people who installed them give that access. Occasionally Amazon did it too even without user consent.
I’m equating the 2 because those people contribute to the internalizing of the surveillance status. When people walk down the street they are filmed by dozens of cameras and they are starting to expect this everywhere. Flock is “another one”. Flock would have had an uphill battle in a society where private surveillance is unacceptable.
When it becomes totally normal for others to use their own private (not so private n the cloud) surveillance footage of public spaces against you, Flock stops raising people’s internal alarm bells.
Why do you think Flock is big exactly in the society that was told private surveillance of public space is perfectly fine and even expected?
When you have two choices and the rich decide what those choices are they will always ensure than half the population hates one of the choices and the other half hate the other one and then you vote based on which candidate you hate the least which means the rich always get what they want and you always get screwed.
If you ever want anything to change then you need to treat both parties like the parasitic treasonous scum that they are and make it clear to all americans that anyone who puts a party before their nation is a traitor.
Then you vote for actual people, not a party, not whoever your favorite celebrity was paid to endorse.
IF YOU WANT TO VOTE, FIRST YOU LEARN THE CANDIDATES, THEN YOU LEARN THE POLICIES THEY PROPOSE, THEN YOU CHALLENGE THOSE POLICIES WITH THE BEST STEELMAN YOU CAN FIND.
only then should you even consider voting. But thats way too much responsibility for americans. They prefer to be given a binary choice, heads or tails their both the same except one fucks you left the other fucks you right, unless you happen to belong to the class of people that own the politicians in which case you dont actually care which way the election goes because you paid both sides so you win no matter what.
If you listen to their cult members, they're just gods themselves.
I don't think people have connected the dots between Flock and Ring yet, but it's only a matter of time.
I'm sure there's more but not enough for sure.
> They've even been caught putting them back up or re-enabling them in places where the contract has been canceled.
Those banks should have been nationalized or auctioned off and those executives should have gone to jail and had all their assets confiscated to help pay for the bailout.
Im not advocating the use of the guilotines yet mind you, its just a little reminder for now.
Town meetings are happening right now, people are already engaged. If you want to see the pressure raise, you should go to your local one.
This doesn't reduce the responsibility of the state for misdeeds it does or attempts with Flock, but neither does the State’s role absolve Flock’s leadership and owners of the misdeeds they do and profit from, whether or not some or all are at the request of the State.
Where? I live in Denver, are there clandestine Flock folks running around in fake electrician outfits like a cheap imitation of the Town? we could use a little Situationist urban guerilla theater here, complete with the vacant commercial space repurposed for data centers
> Dayton, another city in Minnesota located just 10 miles north of Plymouth, has also paused its Flock program and disabled the two devices in the area. The Dayton police became aware that the company intended to replace these cameras and told Flock not to proceed with the work order. However, it moved forward with the replacement anyway despite being instructed otherwise.
but doing a little legwork it looks like Flock has done that in Evanston and Cambridge. rollin' in hot with the Fall River Five
The billonaires suffered no laws, Holmes did, who was a nobody except for very briefly holding a few of others' billions.
Still terrible that Flock isn't responding to them, and of course even if they intend to hold the city to the contract in terms of expecting to be paid for the full duration, they should still honor the request to shut off service.
Companies can move mountains yes, but a routine request to cancel a service probably isn't seen as requiring that. Especially since the service contract undoubtedly defines the terms upon which either side can cancel.
Seems like their PR fire is self induced by sucking up to Money and whatever they qualify as investors?
Why not? Because it takes long to deliver, or because they can't be expected to read their mail?
The first thing the city should do when cancelling is lock down the data so no jurisdictions have access to the data. Even if the cameras are still powered on and connected, any ongoing searches should not return any results from that jurisdiction.
Well we don't know what was in this contract was that they had with Flock in the first place, but usually a contract termination like this would have some requirement to give a reasonable notice to allow Flock to disconnect cameras etc, and a week probably isn't reasonable notice.
What's the aim? ~~Bribing~~ Lobbying someone else in the government with the data they are gathering anyways in the hopes of cementing this?
So what this is telling me is if I don't like the way the government or public services is doing something, I should just plow ahead without any care and just force it and then be immune because I said so?
If a city wants to exempt ICE, they can. However, if the city has a rogue officer who accesses the Flock search, they can forward the results to their ICE/DHS boyfriend (the claims of a recent firing and lawsuit).
It's quite possible that Flock has different sales contracts, so if a city manager (or whomever signs those contracts) doesn't have a lawyer review the contract or if neither the manager nor lawyer consider data sharing with the Feds to be a concern, then of course my assumptions are off.
But Flock's current PR cycle pins all of the blame for too much data sharing on the customer's permissions settings.
Maybe it's a shitty "you didn't actually cancel until you called us and sat through our upsell speeches for hours" kinda dark pattern.
Not an alpr apologist but aren't they almost always solar with lithium storage?
tl;dr : there is a cost associated to allowing a random company to cement down a galvanized steel pole somewhere in town; for installation, removal, and liability.
They themselves generally don't mind the invasion of privacy, at least not until it catches them specifically. In general they are much, much more afraid of the "crime wave" than of the police. (A crime wave which never seems to diminish, despite more and more policing and punishment. And which is contradicted by crime statistics.)
Do people feel the same way about speeding cameras?
I find the backlash against ALPRs wildly disproportionate. It earnestly saddens me that our political focus has flowed to these issues, datacenters, college sports rules, etc. while we remain incapable of confronting far more consequential structural problems, like an inability to tax and redistribute wealth.
Ultimately this is due to the fact that the systems are used to generate revenue from citizens trying to live from day to day. Speed cameras don't really impact the wealthy the way they do the working class. Same goes for video surveillance.
So why should we the people give up our right to privacy for some fake sense of safety and huge bill
And it's not a question of one or the other. It's a imposition of both upon the citizenry.
Speed cameras typically give you leeway over the limit. And yes, I support interventions that measurable reduced serious injury and death while still allowing you to drive to your destination.
And a repeated response from a certain kind of person was "Well, if we're spending 45% on policing, we must need it right..."
And the comments in that post were a Rorschach test of where the commenter fell on how "necessary" the abuses of the FBI were.
J Edna Hoover could assign a team to gather kompromat on a person and to surveil them or harass them.
A Congressperson has no equivalent ability to threaten the Director of the FBI. At best, they could spread a rumor, but a rumor doesn't catch fire when journalists / editors had too high of ethics to repeat unverified rumors.
Also, American society in the 1960s was not nearly as supportive of MLK Jr when he was alive as much as they are now that he was martyred. You and I are looking back and projecting our modern values on people who were still largely racist in a time when racism was both a de facto and de jure truth.
That is to say that lots of America would likely have supported the effect of the blackmail letter, if not the method itself. It was a different time. The frequent threat of the USSR, encroaching Communism, and the specter of nuclear war was suffocating and the "Law and Order" marketing of Nixon and J Edgar Hoover were appealing to many people, even if they suppressed the freedoms of many.
We did change the laws and provide more de jure rights since the 1960s.
I think there's lots of conflation of the more traditional definition of "racism" with the contemporary definition, which is not a direct correlation to the older one. The older one was a descriptor of the attributes of an individual's beliefs whereas the contemporary is a descriptor of the societal system / incentives.
Companies with deep pockets aren't throwing advertising dollars at Nick Fuentes or Kanye West when they are deep in their racist mania arc. It is no longer socially acceptable to be associated with what used to be common, the societal norm, and legally enforced.
We have come a long way, but we still have a long way to go.
Im enjoying watching HBO's The WhiteHouse Plumbers and CNN's Ticky Dick. There are soooo many references thick rhyme with Trump's rhetoric, actions, and policies.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/26/politics/jd-vance-richard-nix...
Of course this is in addition to state-level political action against flocks and other types of surveillance to preserve our freedom uniformly. The point is that we want the police lobby to be neutral or even on our side, rather than having to fight against them.
CEO... sure that beach vacation will still be nice after they've collected their golden parachute while company goes up in flames. But anyone else?
And the charge needs to be applied via RICO to all the C levels and the board of directors.
This doesn't abrogate the paid contract. But you trespass the owners of said hardware after being formally notified for removal.
A counter-example: how well received would it be if I made a solar/camera/battery/cell device that was called "PigSty" and only tracked police vehicles? How would the city/county/state go after me for those devices?
A picture of a known prison escapee driving the mayor's car should drive the point home after the police pull the mayor over and investigate.
I want to live in the fantasy world you have described.
You won't be able to out-cynic me, but even I recognize that there are ways to break through injustice. The deeper you fall into cynicism, the more people you turn off from seeking justice.
The NYPD has their own terrorism and counterintelligence divisions. They are pretty much an FBI governed at a city level (minus all of the cool forensics science).
I wouldn't put it beyond NYPD (in theory) except IIRC the NYPD actually drives him around in their SUVs and he has an NYPD team that does his personal security.
Why do we let narcissists run so much of our world?
Flock's shareholders and board of directors don't pay their executives to be humanitarian moralists. Same for OpenAI, Disney, Apple, et. al.
But I can't find any easy information on the contract they had with Flock, but it could well take a week for Flock to be able to respond properly after working out what to do with lawyers etc. The article says that the account management team had been in touch... so... I think this is just a PR piece for the police chief to look 'hard'.
Flock will also operate free of charge and are more than willing to take promisary notes and install them without ever getting payment while budgets are debated. Because once they're up they know they'll just get the grants approved, and its much harder to take them down.
Flock seems way more like a government program larping as a private company. Its kind of hard to approach congress for multi billion dollar budget as the NSA/CIA/FBI for Orwellian domestic spy programs, so intelligence finds a nice tech bro to be the face of it and bankroll the startup with private capital, and then funnel money to them through less discretionary programs like grants for public saftey and local law enforcement.
Call me a conspiracy head but this is clearly a psuedo private company.
There are non-destructive ways to disable them (covering them with a garbage bag, for one), but I'm also fully in favor of the destructive ways.
Maybe the California privacy law??
Then others, like Washington have strict laws around Health Data and have a private right of action. Still that would require a specific camera facing to possibly be considered for standing.
*Not a lawyer, just spends all day, every day, taking about privacy law with lawyers
Contract ended in September and the company hasn't yet collected their equipment. Oh, what an amazing modern battlefield between everybody I don't like and everybody I like.
> but it failed to respond even after a week
Read that sentence again and think about it. Are you being propagandized?
I once had to wait for 3 years for an ice cream vendor to come take back their freezers, and 5 years for the beer vendor to come take their fridges. These kind of things aren't exactly priority.