Archive Link: https://archive.ph/IWMKe
Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1-uiUlHTo – This Flock Camera Leak is like Netflix For Stalkers
[1]: https://lookout.co/georgia-police-chief-arrested-for-using-f... [2]: https://www.404media.co/emails-reveal-the-casual-surveillanc... [3]: https://www.404media.co/ice-taps-into-nationwide-ai-enabled-...
> The financing was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with backing from Greenoaks Capital, Bedrock Capital. Meritech Capital, Matrix Partners, Sands Capital, Founders Fund, Kleiner Perkins, Tiger Global, and Y Combinator also participated.
https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/flock-safety-secures-major-...
> The financing was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with backing from Greenoaks Capital, Bedrock Capital. Meritech Capital, Matrix Partners, Sands Capital, Founders Fund, Kleiner Perkins, Tiger Global, and Y Combinator also participated.
https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/flock-safety-secures-major-...
> You're thinking Chinese surveillance
> US-based surveillance helps victims and prevents more victims
>>46356182 Benn Jordan – This Flock Camera Leak Is Like Netflix for Stalkers [video] (youtube.com)
It's a map of all city council meetings in the US whose agenda mentions Flock
Source (Portuguese): https://mpmt.mp.br/portalcao/news/1217/164630/pf-expoe-invas...
Don't look to pg for anything that can be seen as "woke" - he wants that mind-virus eliminated forever[0]. Many billionaires revealed their true colors after November 2024, remember this when they adjust their public posture to follow the political winds.
1. >>42780223
Ultimately, I don't think it matters much what he says or has said, he won't clearly say what he/they are planning, obviously.
A core principle is that we moderate less, not more, when YC or a YC-funded startup is part of the story. Many past explanations: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
That post was literally the #1 story on HN for the entire day: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2025-12-16.
It was on the frontpage for 25 hours. That's about as much attention as any thread gets - well above the 99th percentile.
The video in question is linked from the toptext above.)
However, YC very much has control over the algorithm used to rank stories on the Hacker News front page, and this algorithm very commonly downranks threads which are detected as being "controversial."
If the algorithm "working as intended" consistently downranks stories that cast a bad light on YCombinator, the sorts of people y'all mingle with, or the tech industry in general...is that any better than putting your thumb on the scale?
This is kind of why I feel obligated to use https://news.ycombinator.com/active - after all, it's a very good indication of what Hacker News' algorithm and certain cohorts of its readership wants to hide from the casual viewer. And given the sorts of stories it tends to hide, it doesn't reflect well on this site or its users.
https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented?tab=re...
> Currently, there is no evidence that non-job submissions about a YC startup receive preferential treatment on the front page, or kill submissions critical of a YC startup. In fact, the moderators have stated that they explicitly avoid killing controversial YC posts when possible.
And also:
> Additionally, founders of YC companies see each other's usernames show up in orange, which — although not an explicit benefit — does allow fellow YC founders to immediately identify one another in discussions.
The other video is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ but I don't recall which one goes more into it.
It's also possible I'm just remembering Flock-specific stuff from other sources, and the things he shows in these videos are more general issues with security camera companies (using Flock as the example).
It would be great if this stuff was (also?) published as blog posts so that it could be easily skimmed...
Same was found in Australia when they looked into police access of data [0] [1] [2]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/jun/...
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-12-15/victoria-police-leap-...
[2] https://www.ccc.qld.gov.au/sites/default/files/Docs/Public-H...
> because there is no expectation of privacy in public
I think maybe the worst part is that the more we buy into this belief the more self fulfilling it becomes (see third link). But I don't expect anyone to believe me so here's several links. And I'd encourage people to push back against this misnomer. In the most obvious of cases I hope we all expect to have privacy in a public restroom. But remember that this extends beyond that. And remember that privacy is not binary. It's not a thing you have complete privacy or none (public restrooms again being an obvious example). So that level of privacy that we expect is ultimately decided by us. By acting as if it is binary only enables those who wish to take those rights from us. They want you to be nihilistic
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/09/you-really-do-have-som...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_expectation_of_priv...
https://legalclarity.org/is-there-an-expectation-of-privacy-...
[] https://www.dixiegunworks.com/index/page/product/product_id/...
Do you mean these fine former civil servants simply making administrative decisions who are now Flock lobbyists, or do you mean current civil servants who are future Flock lobbyists?
You more likely are getting paid something to not understand things if you, in 2025, believe the "bipartisan consensus" with massive donor class overlap is credible to anyone without an emotional need to rationalize.
And as a result, they got rid of the cameras. Funny how that works!
It reminds me of this meme: https://www.reddit.com/r/Cyberpunk/comments/sa0eh3/dont_crea...
There are few reasons people probably keep building on this topic: 1. Eventually someone will do this anyway. 2. Thus, it shall be mine - I for sure will handle data better than anyone else can, respecting all sorts of guardrails etc. 3. company ipos, founder leaves, things happen.
> if the object class of the identified object is that of a human being, then the object detection module 154 may further analyze the image 501 using a neural network module 507B configured to identify different classes of people (male, female, race, etc.)
The old PIPS ALPR devices aren't online anymore but they had horrible security as well. Just sending a newline to their UDP port would cause them to send you all images as they were being collected in real-time - no authentication needed. And the images had the license plate information encoded in the JPG metadata. I did a talk about it at some point (https://imgur.com/HHcpJOr) and worked with EFF to take them offline
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/she-got-abortion-so-te...
Sure, they might not take as many bribes as South American police tends to take (as someone who traveled that continent in car without a driving license, I'd say 90% are accepting of bribes for minor crimes), but American police also accept bribes from time to time. They'll laugh at you and pile on more charges if you offer too little, but even American police has a price.
FY 2024 has 229 "Number of Bribery Offenses" (https://www.ussc.gov/research/quick-facts/bribery), which obviously doesn't account for the bribing that no one noticed or where there wasn't enough proof, we could probably assume it's at least 50% higher than that if we're being charitable, but in reality that number is probably way higher, by magnitudes.
HN is designed to downweight sensational-indignant stories, internet dramas, and riler-uppers, for the obvious reason that if we didn't, then they would dominate HN's frontpage like they dominate the rest of the internet. Anyone who spends time here (or has read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) knows that this is not what the site is for. The vast majority of HN readers like HN for just this reason. It is not some arbitrary switch that we could just flip, if only we would stop being censoriously sinister It's essential to the operation of the site.
At the same time, we downweight such threads less when the sensational-indignant story, drama, or riler-upper happens to be about YC or a YC-related startup. Note that word less. It means we "put our thumb on the scale" in the opposite direction you're implying: to make those stories rank higher than they otherwise would.
How you get from that all the way back to the notion that we moderate HN specifically to suppress negative stories about YC strikes me as escape-artist-level logic, and citing a web page that we ourselves publish as the best (only?) supposed evidence for this is surely a bit ironic.
From Stalking Prevention, Awareness, & Resource Center (SPARC): " A pattern of behavior directed at a specific person that would cause a reasonable person to fear for the person’s safety or the safety of others; or suffer substantial emotional distress."
Your assertions in every comment so far have been fully balanced on what you ‘feel like’ should be the case, not on known facts. I’ll give you an example:
“quite plausibly already happened thousands of times throughout the course of Flock's existence.”
‘ FBI monograph, July 2008: "Serial Murder: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives for Investigators"
https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/reports-and-publications...
Introduction on page 1: "Serial murder is a relatively rare event, estimated to comprise less than one percent of all murders committed in any given year." ‘
The FBI used to classify serial murder as 3+ murders with a cooling off period between them, but that resulted in too few cases to bother studying, so by the time of the quoted statement they had reduced it to 2+ separate murder events. Seems like it fits our discussion.
In 2008 there were 16,465 homicides, so if we take “less than 1%” to be a healthy 0.5% that would be ~82. Even if you assume every year spawns a fresh new set of 82 serial murderers then Flock would have needed to contribute to catching every single one this century in order to meet the minimum requirements for “thousands.”
Of course there’s no way of telling if the murderer you caught would have become a serial murderer if not caught, so here’s where your intuition can be helpful. Take the 82, spread them around the country in densities that you ‘feel’ are appropriate. Do the same for the density of Flock cameras. Then use the same rigor when guessing at how many of the 82 just got witnessed committing a murder, and their license plate was noted, and they happen to transit an area with Flock camera license plate readers in the future while still driving the same car. Feel your way through to how many of them might be caught, then intuit what it would take to catch “thousands.”
It's how we know even YEARS later EVERYONE who went to Epstein Island
They didn't even have smartphones then, just regular cellphones
Wired just bought all the tracking from a databroker, no warrant needed
https://www.wired.com/video/watch/we-tracked-every-visitor-t...
That doesn't mean other conservatives dont see gay rights and marriage equality as "woke". You just proved my point though, "woke" is the bespoke set of things you don't like.
Do you want links to the numerous instances of conservatives lumping the existence of gays with being "woke"? Or before they hijacked the term, derided the "gay agenda"? Even the Log Cabin Republicans cried uncle[1]
1. http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/gay-south-fl...
Turns out, 95% of the predators already know exactly where the victims are, usually because it's their kid. Probably we want to worry about that a lot more.
Doubly so since, y'know, this only works if the predator lives close enough to act on the information before it changes - so the tiny possibility of a predator, a tiny possibility that they didn't already know this, and a tiny possibility of being able to act on the information...
This is a common line of phrasing parroted by Flock and their supporters to no end but it's a myth. The SC, as much of a joke as they are now, established that a person has a reasonable expectation to privacy in their long term movements in Carpenter v. United States (2018). To date there is NO precedent carved out in the constitution or ANY Supreme Court case stating that people have zero expectation to privacy in public.