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- Hacker News
- I watched a series on Netflix recently: "Homicide Squad: New Orleans". The series was basically an infomercial for video surveillance cameras and license plate readers. It felt like all the detectives did was watch video and monitor LPR data all day. Every single homicide was solved like this - video surveillance and LPR data.
I'm not sure how accurate that show is, but the use of video surveillance and LPR data to solve crimes certainly seemed plausible. And it made me realize, unfortunately, these Flock cameras aren't going anywhere. People want crimes to get solved, especially homicides.
by jimt1234 - Flock (YC S17)by curiousgal
- not a good look for YCby zuzululu
- Ugh. It hurts my brain to think about the Venn diagram of privacy advocates and YC sycophants that hang out on Hacker News.by ryandvm
- I think a discussion we're not having is how policing should exist moving forward given this technology exists for criminals as well.
We literally have people driving around with electromagnets on their license plates to cheat any number of perfectly reasonable traffic instruments. We have folks breaking into and going for joyrides in cars that lack engine immobilizers by exploiting them, then ditching them often after crashing.
I'm certainly fine with the folks who say we shouldn't have surveillance, but then how do we have law enforcement without hiring a literal army of police officers? We are effectively at the point where technology allows very small groups to massively exploit the general public.
In the vast majority of cases, we do not have the public funds to do law enforcement purely in person anymore. I suspect the alternative is not "greater liberty" but organized crime/vigilante justice.
by scoofy - > how do we have law enforcement without hiring a literal army of police officers?
Just like we did way back in 2023 before the massive nationwide rollout of Flock cameras.
A surveillance state is the antithesis of what the U.S. founders gave us. It is fundamentally illiberal.
by patrickmay - I know we're all sharpening pitchforks for Flock - but the national license plate database has been leading to mistakes like this for decades.
Some states also compound the problem by issuing a license plate number multiple times. So long before Flock getting someone else's speed camera tickets in the mail was already a problem.
by legitster - One of my plate numbers was reissued. I only found out when I went to renew the registration and they gave me a new plate and told me then. It was a shame because I liked that random combination of letters and numbers.by rationalist
- A mistake like this wouldn't be so bad if we didn't have flock cameras everywher.by behringer
- This is such an evil company; they should be regulated out of existence.by overgard
- Yes they should be shut down and their assets destroyed and their CEO should be publicly humiliated as he’s done to many many other people.by righthand
- This shouldn't be a controversial opinion. The company exists to launder responsibility between government and corporation in order to facilitate mass surveillance. Another more accurate name for them could be "Constitutional Loophole Corp."by morkalork
- The swiftness with which this company went from "We are setting up cameras in neighborhoods where we were invited by HOA, representing the homeowners" to "We set up cameras on public highways all over the country putting everyone in a dragnet" is exactly why you don't let the camel's nose under the tent.by projektfu
- > Garrett: At the highest level, nothing would make me happier than if we had state-by-state regulation on this type of technology. That to me is so crystal clear, because the lack of regulation on this type of technology just shows that our elected officials need to move faster than they have historically.
Agreed. We've had a lot of this - tech companies begging for tech regulation. Without the regulation it seems we'll always get these competitive races to the bottom of what's possible within the confines of the laws that do exist as less and less scrupulous companies enter the fray.
by f154hfds - please google "regulatory capture"by smcg
- This just reads to me like "won't someone please stop me from grinding up all these babies? If only someone would pass a law preventing me from doing these horrible things I keep doing..."
Like, you know you can just stop doing bad things, right? You shouldn't need a government telling you that maybe you shouldn't do bad things. Its as if he's saying he has no free will or executive action being the CEO of Flock, he has no way of having the company not be evil until the government gives him a rulebook.
by vel0city - > tech companies begging for tech regulation
Companies are perfectly capable of being well-behaved without regulation. They simply choose not to. When I see these companies crying for regulation (even though I agree we need it desperately), it makes them look even more craven than they looked before.
by JohnFen - If Flock has so many issues with this database, and all their solutions are patchwork, and those solutions remain local to the jurisdiction that is locally using Flock, then this is a bad product.
If you build a product on a bad database, you cannot load the blame for the resulting bad product on the bad database. If it was not fit for purpose, then the product designers are the problem as much as anything else.
This applies doubly for a product that relies so heavily on automation enabling speedy responses with heavy consequences.
I understand that this may smack of perfect being the enemy of good, but this domain is akin to medical devices in terms of impact.
by dundarious - Is there any evidence or other form of justification for the Flock CEO's claims about how it is responsible for SF's crime downturn? I find it hard to believe that Flock cameras are at the heart of such a wide-ranging effect. I am not a local, and I have only done a cursory search, but I don't see the elected officials making the same claim -- I have seen them say it has more to do with changing socioeconomic factors.by dundarious
- >like San Francisco, where crime is incredibly hard to get away with—so hard that people just choose not to do it.
hilarious.
by tencentshill - "Inevitably what happens is, let’s take the rental car example: A car is reported stolen by the rental car agency."
I've heard stories of rental car companies being very aggressive in reporting a car stolen. It sounds like Flock is having to do a lot of work to handle reports made by rental car companies specifically. This leaves me wondering how aggressive rental companies are in reporting back to the department they made the stolen report notifying the car had been found. I'm guessing not very.
These rental companies need to be held responsible for their lackadaisical use of stolen car reports. It is not the police's responsibility for what is essentially a contract dispute. If I allow someone to borrow my car, the police will not consider this a stolen car situation even if they said they would bring it back the next day. This is no different than a car not being returned to the rental company, so why are the police willing to be involved?
by dylan604 - Hertz had a "glitch" in their system which would wrongly flag cars as stolen and automatically report that to police.
https://www.npr.org/2022/12/06/1140998674/hertz-false-accusa...
by black6 - seems like:
- cop messed up, added an incomplete license plate number (34DTM) into the NCIC database.
- Flock cameras found his fancy car, a $155k Range Rover, which had a license plate like 34DTM10, and flagged it.
- cops didn't bother checking the police report before they went in and surrounded him.
thoughts:
- as much as I dislike Flock, it seems like it wasn't at fault here. this was a scene straight of Brazil, and Flock was the typewriter. it was an accelerant, not the cause.
- police are shockingly incompetent. the individual officers, the departments, the bureaucratic systems, they're bad at their jobs. probably because they're insulated from consequences - these are people who can shoot the wrong person by accident, and at worst they get fired (QI.)
- none of this would have made the news if it wasn't a $155k Range Rover being driven by a reporter. how many people in beat-up Carollas have faced this same situation?
by sterlind - Running a partial plate is common. Especially in a hit and run where a witness might only get a few digits.
Cops regularly made the exact same kind of mistake even when using their own eyeballs.
by legitster - The system needs to account for how it will be used and resulting externalities. Being an accelerant can be a problem in and of itself. I do agree that having stricter societal and legal guardrails here is probably better then relying on companies to do the right thing, though.by efromvt
- So we should give guns to children then because it’s just a tool to defend themselves right? Or a more common metaphor, if you give chimpanzee’s a gun…
The police have no actionable method of abuse if you take Flock cameras away. They wouldn’t be acting on flagged random license plates if you took away the dragnet and surveillance system that’s randomly flagging people.
This is 100% fault of Flock.
by righthand - > as much as I dislike Flock, it seems like it wasn't at fault here.
34DTM != 34DTM10
by scrapcode - > as much as I dislike Flock, it seems like it wasn't at fault here
Seeing this in an engineering-centric community disappoints me. It's hard to say for certain without seeing the system but I think it's extremely likely they are at fault. Things that come to mind:
- If the incomplete plate really was "34DTM" - why does the system allow that to be added? Either you should use actual wildcards to indicate you are searching for a partial or you should be blocked from adding an incomplete plate.
- This likely is not the first time his car was seen by the system. Why did they not require the person entering the partial match to clear / assess all of the cars that were known already?
- Alternatively, if it had never been seen before, why was that info not highlighted?
- If "flagging" the same for partial and full matches - that seems like a substantial design oversight.
There are so many things Flock could have done to prevent this kind of inevitable user error.
by aeturnum - You misunderstand Brazil--the system is the cause.
People can be relied upon to make mistakes. Any system that does not account for this fact and allows mistakes to "accelerate" is fundamentally flawed and requires redesign.
by c22 - Flock's system misread the plate, simple as that. Trying to pitch it as solely human error just shows that they don't want to take responsibility of the limitations of their software. Handling partial matches should be the bare minimum. In this article the CEO talks like considering those is a great idea that they'll look into. That's so incredibly dumb that I can't believe that they don't already do that. What likely actually happened is that the plate was incorrectly flagged as a perfect match.
Why is their tech not tested on every plate format that is currently used? That should be table stakes. Why did it not flag the match for review because the "34" and "DTM" had an unusual amount of space between them (not matching expected spacing of NJ plates)? The truth is that they are probably just using some free ML models off of hugging face and selling it as a magic black box that finds criminals to police.
by yesb