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- Hacker News
- 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.
- 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...
by panny - Wealthy neighbourhoods get actual protection, rather than protection-as-an-excuse-for-surveillance.
- The comments under the post are difficult to read.
Really shouldn't have clicked the link or signed in to this cesspool...
by fg137 - 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”?
- A network of cameras where everything they record everywhere is logged and searchable is exponentially more powerful and dangerous that a patchwork of individual, unrelated cameras.
> What’s stopping a company from paying these people for their footage in return for “safety”?
The complexity of dealing with 1000 different relationships, with individual contracts, negotiations, prices, etc. to collect the information, and then building a platform on which to make that information available to customers.
by close04 - Not much, but a decentralized system is often hard to exploit, and we're reaching points where we've established the surveillance state the populace is finally understanding the repercussions in a clear and poignant way.
Assume that means the public camera technology in general will be called Flock cameras, and people will have a more default negative reaction going forward.
by hilariously - I have cameras on my house; I asked my neighbours if they were okay with them beforehand.
They're local storage only, no net access. I got them after my garage was broken into the second time. It's been a few years, haven't had a third break-in yet.
by ChoGGi - 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.by JohnFen
- 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?by thedougd
- Knowing the types that gravitate towards HOA boards and the like, I take the least charitable view possible. Simply a system that is ripe for abuse and it's hard to justify any of the use cases as necessary. We've ceded control of our lives entirely to tyrants both small and large.by csoups14
- 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.by skinfaxi
- HOA busybodies might be worse than spying cops.by xnx
- 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.
by flkiwi - I suspect it's a similar phenomenon as people capitalizing visa when the topic is international travel / migration instead of payment networks.by atq2119
- don’t forget!!!
Y Combinator invested in Flock Safety in 2017.
by 3dsnano - For the love of moneyby k12sosse
- > You're thinking Chinese surveillance
> US-based surveillance helps victims and prevents more victims
https://x.com/garrytan/status/1963310592615485955?lang=en
Brought to you by the king of double standards, Garry Tan, CEO of YCombinator.
by vrganj - HOA and Flock. That is one hellish dystopia over there now.by cryo32
- Imagine an HOA of 5,000 people that functions as a defacto city, surrounded itself with Flock, who has also successfully sued Google to remove itself from street view because it was private property and a privacy violation. The dissonance.by noaks
- Found a link to the original reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/realtors/comments/1von5bt/just_had_...by skinfaxi
- Thanks, HN linking to X linking to Reddit..by Jerrylui