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- 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.
- Beside the mass surveillance issues that are very real, let me just add that HOAs need to be made illegal except for condo buildings that obviously need to maintain and manage that building. There is absolutely no reason why a single family house needs to be in a mandatory HOA.
We've all heard or experienced the silly rules about how your house must look and the fines associated with it. None of that should be legal.
The one thing HOAs do is trash pickup but that should be a municipal government function. It is it everywhere else in the developed world.
And why do they exist? If you find yourself asking that about anything uniquely American the answer is almost always "systemic racism". And that's the case here. HOAs became popularized in the 20th century with racially restrictive covenants (ie to prevent the owner selling to black people) [1].
So where are we now? Instead of the HOA president spending their day driving past "problem" houses to look for any rules violations, are we going to have them doing that with Flock cameras instead? What a dystopian nightmare.
[1]: https://www.bostonfairhousing.org/timeline/1920s1948-Restric...
by jmyeet - What about an HOA for the management of roads and rainwater runoff (ponds, etc)?by thedougd
- See, that's the great thing about America. We can have neighborhoods with HOAs and those without. You get to choose!by mattw2121
- I’m sorry but this kind of thinking is non-sense. There are surely a few cases where someone lets power go to their head, but that happens in every place where humans have any power.
I’m on an HOA board because no else wants to because it’s boring. We maintain a large green space with walking paths and a community pool, and garbage pickup. We have whites, blacks, asians, hispanics, etc and nobody cares. Sometimes there is shared land in a development that has to be managed and somebody has to do it.
by DougN7 - There are a few exceptions, I live in an odd neighborhood where a group got together and rehabbed a bunch of dilapidated homes facing an alley. They got permission from the city to make the alley a pedestrian mall and green space. Our HOA exists to maintain the pedestrian mall that is essentially our front yard.by weard_beard
- You’re gonna run into a little bit of resistance on principles with that argument. For context, I would have absolutely no interest in living in an HOA neighborhood and I don’t support them at all.
But we do have a fairly strong precedent for freedom of association in this country and the freedom for people to join into groups and figure out how they want to live.
Not sure how you could write a law that would get rid of the kind of HOA’s. You don’t like without running straight into things like religious colonies, and a variety of other living arrangements.
Seems to me the current approach where you’ve been certain kinds of discrimination and so on is a little more sound. I could think of other reforms as well, for example perhaps a time limit on HOA‘s or the requirement of some sort of super majority or consensus to be taken at intervals to prevent automatic dissolution and restrictions on size structure.
by CPLX - > So where are we now? Instead of the HOA president spending their day driving past "problem" houses to look for any rules violations, are we going to have them doing that with Flock cameras instead? What a dystopian nightmare.
This actually very much understates the problems. HOAs are no longer small organizations where the local biddies gather to feel like they are back in high school because they have nothing better to do with their time. They've become defacto governments.
True story I at one point bought in a development that had an HOA the rules of the development were that for the first 5 years or until have the development was done then developer would be in charge of the HOA and then it would revert to the homeowners at 4 years 6 months the HOA board (who was the developers) voted to merge with another HOA to a that ran a dozen other developments and complexes throughout the state.
HOAs are now massive multi-million dollar corporations that controls vast swathes of land, and rule over their tenants without any of the checks or balances or recourse one has available against the government.
For those who say "just buy in a non-HOA area" the problem is that almost all new builds have HOAs built in from the start as part of the developers plan and so the options for those not wanting to deal with an HOA are increasingly limited.
In short abolish HOAs. If people want to get together to form groups of homeowners that's fine but there is no world in which someone should be able to take your house because your grass is too long.
by gustavus - 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