I wrote to Flock's privacy contact to opt out of their domestic spying program

https://honeypot.net/2026/04/14/i-wrote-to-flocks-privacy.html

341•speckx•2h ago

Comments

kstrauser•2h ago

I wrote this. I had/have absolutely no expectation that Flock would comply with my request, but figured I should try anyway For Science. Their reply rubbed me wrong, though. They seem to claim that there are no restrictions on their collection and processing of PII because other people pay them for it. They say:

> Flock Safety’s customers own the data and make all decisions around how such data is used and shared.

which seems to directly oppose the CCPA. It's my data, not their customers'.

Again, I didn't really expect this to work. And yet, I'm still disappointed with the path by which it didn't work.

carefree-bob•2h ago

They were saying "don't write to us, talk to the people who own the cameras and ask them to delete the data". A company that manufactures video cameras is not the one to talk to when someone records you, talk to the person who recorded you.

But a reasonable person would say -- the data is stored on Flock servers, not with the camera owners. And Flock would say, just because we sell data storage functionality to camera owners doesn't mean we own the data, anymore than a storage service you rent a space from owns what you put in that space.

But then an even more reasonable person would say: the infrastructure is designed in such a way as to create inadvertent sharing, and the system has vulnerabilities that compromise the data, so Flock has responsibility for setting up the system in such a way that it's basically designed to violate privacy.

And that is the main criticism of Flock. You need to have a more nuanced criticism. It would be really interesting to see this litigated.

fudgy73•2h ago

AFAIK Flock owns the cameras and leases them out [0].

[0] https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/flock-safety-does-my-neighb...

mminer237•2h ago

If you go to Rent-A-Center and rent a DSLR, that doesn't make Rent-A-Center responsible for the pictures taken by their cameras.

kstrauser•2h ago

If Rent-A-Center installed the camera in a bathroom, I'd contend that it does.

Flock's cameras aren't in bathrooms. However, they're still recording people who haven't opted into it. ("But you have no expectation of privacy in a public place!" "You have the expectation that someone might inadvertently overhear you. You don't have the expectation that someone is actively recording you at all times.")

danielsunsu•2h ago

I think if it were only offline storage it would not be as big of an issue. A more accurate analogy would be renting a DSLR that automatically transmits every picture to Rent-A-Center servers.

yabutlivnWoods•2h ago

Your example is apples and oranges. Flock maintains private infrastructure that stores data.

If the DSLR uploaded them to Rent-A-Center owned/leased servers it would in fact require Rent-A-Center to take the necessary steps.

As Rent-A-Center would be the only group with proper access to data storage they would have inserted themselves into the chain of custody, and thereby have such obligation to ensure others data is wiped from systems they control.

tptacek•1h ago

AWS also maintains private infrastructure that stores data. Go write them asking to purge data pertaining to you from S3 and see how that goes.

itsdesmond•1h ago

Flock has knowledge/use of the data. Their system processes can relate the photos “owned” by two different entities. They’re interacting with it and selling their access to it as a feature. That’s obviously distinct from S3.

But you knew that.

tptacek•1h ago

I know quite a bit about Flock, having been intimately involved in the process of evicting it from our municipality, and I don't think the distinction you're trying to draw here is meaningful. Flock will say they provide a service, one avidly sought by the actual owners of the data, to generate analysis based on that data.

They're contractually forbidden from "selling their access to it" to arbitrary parties; they can share data only with the consent of their customers, almost all of whom actively want that data shared --- this is a very rare case of a data collection product where that's actually the case.

Mordisquitos•1h ago

Does AWS actively and by design parse and keep track of personally identifiable information of the data that AWS customers store on their S3 buckets? If that were the case they would absolutely be subject to CCPA (and GDPR) requests for deletion.

However, I suspect that is not the case. AWS is agnostic as to the type of data stored on S3, and deletion of PII stored on S3 is the sole responsibility of the AWS customer that chooses to store it.

danudey•1h ago

If AWS maintained private infrastructure that stored and indexed data associated with people's license plates and vehicles and then charged customers to do searches against that data then yes, you could write them to ask them to purge data pertaining to you.

If Flock was just an opaque cloud storage service for law enforcement to back up their mass surveillance to then sure, your argument would have merit; it's not, it's a giant database of photos, locations, times, license plate information, and likely a lot more. They're not selling cloud storage, they're selling (leasing?) surveillance devices and tools.

tptacek•1h ago

The argument you're making implicates way more than just Flock, and is in a practical sense novel. If you can cite jurisprudence (or even legal experts) backing it up, I'm interested in reading it. Otherwise, I'm happy to accept that we just have premises about the law that are too far apart for an argument to be productive.

My experience on HN is that these kinds of discussions almost immediately devolve into debates about what people want the law to be, as opposed to what it actually is.

Karrot_Kream•25m ago

Realistically speaking you're never going to get pro Flock people in any numbers on this site writing comments at all. The anti surveillance position's popularity when it comes to up votes, down votes, and flags on this site is such that pros will continue posting about what they want the law to be and antis will stay out. That's just how crowd voting dynamics shape out.

ldoughty•2h ago

But the data collected is property of the government and flock is not allowed to use that data for additional business gain (according to their statements)...

So they can't sell the fact that you're at Target at 8:00 p.m. on Thursday to anybody... Nor build profiles to sell to advertisers... And if that's the case that's very similar to cloud storage vendors.

If I access hacker news, and the record of my visit is stored in an AWS S3 bucket, I can't submit to AWS to delete my visitor record, even though the server, network cards, wires, and storage medium are AWS property, it was hacker news' website that generated that record and their responsibility to take my request to delete it.. AWS' stance would rightly be "talk to the website operator for CCPA requests"

tptacek•1h ago

This is also true according to their contracts (we were one of the first munis in the country to ostentatiously cancel our Flock contract, and the lead up to that was a bunch of progressive legal experts poring over that contract looking for holes.)

fsckboy•1h ago

>a bunch of progressive legal experts poring over that contract looking for holes

all attorneys represent their clients; your attorney does not have to share your opinion of the law or public policy, they can still interpret what the law means to you.

if you are afraid your attorney might have a bias (they are human) you may get better advice from the "misaligned" POV: the flaws/holes in a privacy law found by a pro-business conservative attorney are more likely to find sympathy in the courts from both fellow conservatives and progressive judges.

shermantanktop•15m ago

As a practical matter, this may be good advice. But it also places a demand on someone with a legitimate concern that they go find an ideological "beard" to make themselves more palatable and sympathetic.

It's not hard to see how this enables an institution to gate itself from criticism.

thaumaturgy•1h ago

Except that Flock very clearly benefits financially from having direct access to this data: owning (and in their own documentation, they very clearly do own it) a network of 80,000 surveillance devices across the country, and owning every single transit point for the data they collect, is what gets them to a $7.5 billion valuation from investors.

The fact of the matter is that Flock is playing two-step with the concept of "ownership" of data. They disclaim ownership as a way to leave local agencies holding the bag for liabilities, but they fight tenaciously to retain complete and unfettered access to that data.

(After organizing a community group that won Flock contract cancellations in multiple jurisdictions in Oregon, I went on to coauthor state legislation regulating ALPRs. I am very well familiar with all the dirty ball they play.)

Also, Flock's cameras collect more data than is provided to police agencies. Who owns that data, I wonder?

necovek•1h ago

That makes them a data broker in my reading, and at least in California, Data Broker legislation should apply. CA Data Broker registry gives me access denied, but that could be because I am outside US.

ScoobleDoodle•1h ago

I looked it up at https://cppa.ca.gov/data_broker_registry/ and didn't find Flock / Flock Safety in that list of the currently registered 566 data brokers.

tptacek•59m ago

Because Flock isn't a data broker. Flock's customers own their data, not Flock, and they use Flock's platform voluntarily to share data with other customers.

necovek•52m ago

I was referring to the claim that "Flock's cameras collect more data than is provided to police agencies" — that suggests that there is data not "owned" by the customers, which implies it's Flock's data, thus it might make them liable under Data Broker legislation.

cwillu•50m ago

Equivocation. My stock broker doesn't own my stocks either, they merely hold my assets in a brokerage account.

tptacek•48m ago

I encourage you to present that analogy to an actual court and see how far it gets you. It's very easy to find the statutory definition of a "data broker" under California law.

This is what I mean by the fruitlessness of these kinds of legal discussions on HN. What do you want me to argue, that you're wrong to want the law to work that way?

jaredwiener•31m ago

And you would (rightfully) be angered if your stock broker sold your shares and pocketed the proceeds, because you own them.

tadfisher•39m ago

Flock charges to access the data which is voluntarily shared by other customers. I am struggling to note a difference in this practice from any other data brokerage service in existence.

Does Flock do some kind of P2P dance to avoid the data transiting their systems?

close04•29m ago

So… Flock uses their own platform and top to bottom tech stack to do everything technically? Your local PD doesn’t use random cameras (like Reolink), doesn’t run a custom software stack (like Frigate in a container on some random VM hosted with AWS), doesn’t store the data wherever (like Backblaze)? The customers just have to install the Flock cameras and “order” the subsequent data from Flock? But you say they’re not at all responsible or accountable for any it because despite doing everything at every step, they’re “just a broker”?

unethical_ban•25m ago

If Flock's customers, using Flock's infrastructure or tooling, can share data with each other, that would be bad.

I'm not saying that's what's happening, but that's what I thought was happening before reading this thread, and now I have to go and run through their policies.

Either way ALPRs and AI-facial scanners in public are a huge violation of privacy and I loathe them, but I hope it's correct that Flock customers cannot easily share information with one another.

unethical_ban•28m ago

This is worth validating independently, but to be clear:

Are you saying Flock itself does not have access to any of the data, and that the data they store on behalf of local governments is not fed into any central datalake? That every organization's data is completely, unalterably separate from everyone else's?

If so, that makes the panopticon slightly less powerful.

valeriozen•10m ago

The AWS analogy breaks down because AWS doesn't encourage customers to pool their S3 buckets into a nationwide searchable index.

Flock operates a federated network. If you drive past an unmarked camera, you have absolutely no way of knowing which specific HOA or town leased it so how are you realistically supposed to know who the "data controller" is to send your ccpa or deletion request to?

jnovek•5m ago

I don’t care. I don’t care who owns the data. If I can’t easily get private information like my movements removed from a database like this, the legislation does not sufficiently protect me.

It should absolutely be Flock’s responsibility to remove my data and we should absolutely require it by law. Full stop.

mistrial9•2h ago

the way this has been addressed in complex product liability in the past in the USA is that the public-facing Brand Owner has certain legal liability for the product, despite contractors or supply chains. In this case, it appears that the Flock company is the brand owner and is public-facing.

halJordan•1h ago

It easily goes both ways. But we do sue American gun makers for deaths caused by lunatics. We sue drug makers for drugs prescribed by a doctor. We sue cloud providers for not reporting illegal photos. Printers are forced to id every printed page to combat counterfeiting. Banks are forced to do close accounts even though it's not their dirty money

thebaine•13m ago

Most of those examples have to do with the manufacturers knowing that their products were dangerous, addictive or illegal and advertising them aggressively as safe. They're mostly litigated on product liability claims. Banks are regulated by an entire architecture of laws, and we could enact laws that would regulate Flock too, as one of the other commenters pointed out they're doing in Oregon.

dozerly•1h ago

I don’t think you’re informed on the topic. They do not just manufacture cameras.

themafia•2h ago

These laws get complicated quickly. There's a specific ALPR law in the CA civil code which seems to carve out several exceptions for a business like Flock:

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.x...

The enforcement provisions are rather bleak as well and afford no opportunity to directly bring a case against the agency that operates the system but instead just the individual who misuses it.

I think one of the more direct attacks would be going after jurisdictions that chronically have officers misusing the system. I think you're going to have to create precedent in this way to foment actual change.

everdrive•2h ago

Nice work all the same. These systems need to be prodded and tested. Even unsuccessful results such as this tell us something about the situation we're in.

nainachirps_•2h ago

I am not a lawyer myself but can't one argue that this company has duty to ensure that data it is processing for client is legally obtained.

If they are processing data after being told it was not obtained with consent do they not have any liability?

Glyptodon•2h ago

I think you should write them back and ask that they provide you with a customer list and continually update you as they get new customers so that you may follow the advice they've given you.

kstrauser•2h ago

Ooh. I like this.

kube-system•2h ago

Why? The response is predictable. No company is going to give you a customer list.

kstrauser•1h ago

I wouldn't be so sure. In this specific case, they told me to ask their customers to comply with my CCPA rights. Without that information, it's impossible for me to exercise those rights. IANAL, but that sounds like a pursuable path.

kube-system•1h ago

I don't see any provision in CCPA that requires that. And outside of an explicit requirement to do so, nobody is required to help you.

Edit: from https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa

> If a service provider has said that it does not or cannot act on your request because it is a service provider, you may follow up to ask who the business is. However, sometimes the service provider will not be able to provide that information. You may be able to determine who the business is based on the services that the service provider provides, although sometimes this may be difficult or impossible.

singleshot_•1h ago

I’ve been in the lobby of hundreds of different technology companies and my understanding is that all companies are going to give you a customer list, you just have to look in the right place.

kube-system•1h ago

Ha -- you know what I meant: explicitly.

ratdragon•2h ago

maybe eff.org would be able to help you lawyer up or otherwise to push this forward. good luck!

kstrauser•2h ago

I've reached out, albeit very informally. I'll completely understand if this isn't something they have the time and energy to help with. If I accidentally caught them at a weak moment when they're looking for something to do, though, I'm all in.

tptacek•2h ago

Wait, is it your data? If you drive your car in front of a Ring camera on my house (I don't have a Ring camera don't @ me), is it your claim that you own the data on that camera?

kstrauser•1h ago

Did you put up a Ring camera on a stand in front of your house for the specific purpose of selling that I drove past at this specific timestamp? If so, yes. The CCPA[0] gives me explicit legal rights:

* The right to know about the personal information a business collects about them and how it is used and shared;

* The right to delete personal information collected from them (with some exceptions);

* The right to opt-out of the sale or sharing of their personal information including via the GPC;

This isn't someone incidentally taking pictures of license plates in an otherwise noncommercial setting. It's a company literally created to collect and sell PII. Laws are different for them than for us.

[0]https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa

snowwrestler•1h ago

“Personal information” has a legal definition and photos of you in a public street might not satisfy it, regardless of the photographer’s intent.

kstrauser•1h ago

I think it'd be challenging to rule that a license plate number is not personally identifiable information, when the same regulations often state that an IP address is.

uoaei•1h ago

"Anyone could have been driving my car, you can't positively identify me in the driver's seat with the evidence you have submitted" is routinely used to toss out cases involving traffic violations. It's not necessarily common but it does happen. By this logic a license plate does not personally identify the person driving, only the person the car is registered to.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF•1h ago

Right, but in this context the license plate number is still personal information, just of a different person.

uoaei•1h ago

Then the key aspect of our discussion is the "identifiable" part, which you've left out.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF•1h ago

Are you now saying that one cannot possibly "identify" the "person" who owns a vehicle, solely with the "information" on a license plate?

kube-system•1h ago

The CCPA explictly says:

> “Personal information” does not include [...] Information that a business has a reasonable basis to believe is lawfully made available to the general public by the consumer

tptacek•4m ago

California has an entire statute regulating ALPR information, so we don't need to derive this axiomatically.

danudey•1h ago

Yet the same is true of IP addresses. You (typically) cannot know for certain whether traffic from an IP address was originated by a specific person and yet it's typically considered PII because it can be used in conjunction with other information to identify you.

Even your full legal name and birth date cannot be guaranteed to refer only to you specifically (as there could be someone else with an identical name and birth date), but it's obviously still PII because it helps narrow the field immensely if you can combine it with other information - for example, your IP address.

So yeah, "anyone could have been driving my car", but if you also know that the car drove from your home to your work then that narrows down the list of likely individuals immensely.

Conversely, if your license plate was spotted parked near an anti-ICE rally, then they can be pretty confident that you or someone you know was near an anti-ICE rally, which means they can harass you about it, follow you around, shoot you in the street, etc.

tomwheeler•1h ago

The standard of proving someone's guilt in a crime or civil infraction is higher than the one for inferring that someone could plausibly be the person you want. This is the basis of parallel construction, wherein a government agency plays a game of "pin a crime on the suspect."

adrr•46m ago

Or home address, phone number, etc

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF•1h ago

Indeed, that definition is included in the CCPA.

> (v) (1) “Personal information” means information that identifies, relates to, describes, is reasonably capable of being associated with, or could reasonably be linked, directly or indirectly, with a particular consumer or household. Personal information includes, but is not limited to, the following [...]:

> (E) Biometric information.

> (H) Audio, electronic, visual, thermal, olfactory, or similar information.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...

To your point, the intent would presumably still matter for exceptions to when deletion requests must be honored (say for journalism), but a photo of someone walking down a public street would still logically be considered the subject's personal information, by the above definition.

necovek•1h ago

Personal information usually does include photos of someone in public without their consent: exceptions usually hold for taking photos of people where it is in the public interest to be able to show them or impractical to get consent. This covers large gatherings and celebrities, but a portrait photo of a stranger might put you on the wrong side of the law.

Obviously, the idea is to not disallow having someone take a photo of you as a background, passing figure as they take a front-and-center photo of their family, but not allow you to be the main subject unknowingly and especially when you object explicitly.

On the other hand, a photographer still owns the copyright to a photo, so a subject (including in a portrait) cannot claim it or distribute it without permission even if they can potentially stop the photographer from distributing that photo.

IANAL, but you are not by default allowed to use anyone's "likeness" for your individual profit.

patrickmay•1h ago

> Personal information usually does include photos of someone in public without their consent

This is not the case in the United States. There is no presumption of privacy in public. In fact, there is a whole genre known as "street photography" that involves taking pictures in public without explicit consent of the subjects.

necovek•54m ago

You seem to be right, thanks for the correction!

If https://legalclarity.org/can-you-post-someones-picture-witho... is to be trusted though, at least you get protection from your likeness being used for commercial purposes, though that seems a bit more limited than I'd expect.

tadfisher•45m ago

This is true, and it may also be true that location tracking through surveillance networks crosses a line into violating one or more Constitutional rights. One of Flock's revenue streams is explicitly selling access to data made available by other customers. A commonly-cited example is the ability of local law enforcement to locate abortion suspects in other states using the Flock camera network [0]; one could imagine dragnet-style or geofenced queries to also cross the line.

[0]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/flock-safety-and-texas...

tptacek•37m ago

People keep making this claim that Flock "explicitly sells access to data", but the link you provided doesn't demonstrate that, and Flock contracts I've read contradict the claim.

I think what's happening here is that people are trying to colloquially define "selling access to data" to fit the camera data sharing that Flock enables, and then saying that because you have to pay to be a Flock customer to get access to that data, they're effectively selling it. I don' think that's how data brokerage laws work. Flock doesn't own the data they're providing access to, and they're providing that sharing access with the (avid!) consent of their customers.

snowwrestler•1h ago

You’re getting mixed up about commercial use and personal information.

tadfisher•1h ago

Well, it matters if the photographer is the government (or contracted by the government, or subpoenaed by the government): see Chatrie v. United States [0]. The Fourth Amendment exists, and it remains to be tested whether querying massive surveillance networks is a "reasonable" search.

[0]: https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/case-files/chatrie-v-united...

snowwrestler•55m ago

True but the Fourth Amendment doesn’t rely on the CCPA for authority!

tptacek•1h ago

I think you're going to find that you're wrong about this, and that you're not going to get anywhere targeting Flock in particular, as opposed to the owners of Flock cameras. Consider that California has had multiple rounds of legislation about red light camera legislation, including new limitations on it, and all of those cameras are also from commercial providers collecting your PII. Your argument proves too much.

You're going to get a lot of cheerleading and support about this in venues like HN and Reddit, because you're narrowcasting to an audience already primed to be hyperconcerned about surveillance technology (I am too). I think you're going to find those attitudes do not in fact generalize to the public at large, and especially not to the legal system.

Best of luck either way. It'll be an interesting experience to write up, and I'm happy to read about the outcome, even if I do think it's highly predictable.

john_strinlai•1h ago

>you're not going to get anywhere targeting Flock in particular, as opposed to the owners of Flock cameras.

fyi, flock owns the cameras.

"We operate using a lease model. What does that mean? Since we own the hardware, we own the problems that occur."

kstrauser•1h ago

FWIW, I just did this as an experiment and turned it into a blog post afterward. I didn't really set out with an agenda or a deliberate audience, and I didn't share it here. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to chat about it! But this ended up here without any special effort on my part.

tptacek•57m ago

I know the feeling! My arguments here are positive, not normative. I don't know that I think it would be a worse world if your hypothesis was correct. I'm just reasonably sure it isn't.

kstrauser•37m ago

For sure. This is the sort of conversation I'd typically rather be having at a bar with appropriate beverages. If it sounds like I'm arguing, it's because it's the kind of thing I'd debate with my friends for the fun of it.

mindslight•1h ago

"Your data" isn't really a well defined term, right?

But yes, data that can be used to track my movements in my vehicle is certainly a type of personally identifiable information. I'd argue there should be some exemptions for individuals operating on a small scale, which I believe the CCPA has (and if we actually got a US GDPR, that it should have). But also that kind of exception shouldn't apply to a camera operated by and backhauling to Ring.

necovek•1h ago

I believe you are still the owner of that data, but if you are holding someone's PII — which time of passage, car model and license plates can be argued to be especially with a fixed location — according to privacy regulations, they can ask a business to remove it unless they have a legally acceptable reason to keep it (eg. they hit-and-run a parked vehicle).

Now, with you likely not keeping that Ring tied to a business account, how that applies to non-businesses holding PII is a different matter.

danudey•1h ago

The laws say that data about you is your data, information about you is your information. No one is saying that you "own the data", but by virtue of the data being personal information about you specificially you are allowed to exert control over that data, such as asking for it to be deleted.

kasey_junk•58m ago

That view of data ownership is _highly_ jurisdiction dependent and is not the overwhelming norm in the US.

captaincrisp•6m ago

While that's definitely true, in this particular case he's invoking his rights under CCPA.

mindslight•2h ago

Isn't this just the routine fascist playbook at this point? Start by declaring that the law doesn't even apply to them, on whatever flimsiest of bases.

Personally I would really like to see torts for attorneys who willfully promulgate blatantly incorrect legal interpretations - they're effectively providing incorrect legal advice. A non-attorney is likely to believe such advice coming from a member of the Bar, and the net goal is to discourage the target from seeking further legal advice.

SoftTalker•1h ago

An attorney whom you have not engaged in counsel is not providing legal advice.

snowwrestler•1h ago

It’s not clear to me that it is actually your data. If I take a picture of you in a public place, I own the picture, not you.

But maybe I am unclear on how Flock works.

bjt•1h ago

Setting aside Flock, the "ownership" situation is not as clear as you say above.

What you own is the image copyright. But the right to copy is only one of the rights at issue.

Under various state laws (California in particular), you might not be entitled to do all the things with that picture that you could do of one that doesn't have my likeness. Privacy laws like the CCPA are one possible carve-out. A "right of publicity" is another.

There's an old saying about property law that "property is a bundle of sticks". The bundle can be subdivided.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/publicity

pksebben•1h ago

Isn't flock's whole thing that they extract information from the pictures they have?

Like, say I have an interview in your office and you step out for coffee. I take a picture of the applicant list on your desk. That doesn't make the list of applicants "my data".

lotsofpulp•41m ago

>I take a picture of the applicant list on your desk. That doesn't make the list of applicants "my data".

If the list is sitting there out in the open, then yes, it does make it your data.

throwway120385•22m ago

Well, maybe not. A reasonable person might not think that about that applicant list. I bet you could make a different argument for taking a picture versus memorizing the list too.

The legal system thrives on specifics of a situation, so simply asserting that the list of applicants is or is not "yours" because you can see it seems like a gross oversimplification. The specifics of how you came to be there, what your relationship with the officeholder is, and so on probably matters a lot in that situation and I think there might be some unwritten rules or social norms that you'd be expected to follow as well.

throwway120385•27m ago

You also might not be considered a commercial entity under the law. It's a bit more nuanced and the words written in a particular statute have to be interpreted together. So statements about "commercial entities" have to be limited to such entities even if we'd really like to be able to go to our neighbor's house and ask them to delete all of the surveillance they have of our cars driving up and down the street in front of their house. I think these laws are often narrowly written to avoid unintended consequences like de-facto banning private operation of surveillance systems on private property.

goodluckchuck•1h ago

The CCPA clearly violates the 1st Amendment. If you're out in public, then people are allowed to see you, to remember it, to communicate that it happened, etc.

necovek•1h ago

This answer is relevant: https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa#collapse6d

In short, Flock is a "service provider" and not the entity doing the recording.

Perhaps you can make a case that they are a "data broker" instead (https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa#collapse1i), but that is a separate law, and what you are really looking at is a combination of license plate, time and location being collected as data being collected and sold without your consent.

Obviously, I am not a lawyer (and not even US-based), but I like when privacy is respected :)

zbrozek•1h ago

I tried the same, got a similar response, and complained to the AG. Nothing.

wakamoleguy•56m ago

The data ownership is really interesting, as many threads here are going into. I wonder if it's possible to sidestep that entirely, though! Under the CCPA, "personal information" is defined as information that identifies, relates to, describes, is reasonably capable of being associated with, or could reasonably be linked — directly or indirectly — with a particular consumer or household. That says nothing about ownership.

To the extent that Flock is only storing the data on behalf of their customers, I'd understand they wouldn't be required to delete it. But to the extent that they are indexing it, deriving from it, aggregating it across customers, and sharing it via their platform, it seems they should be required to remove that data from those services.

But then again, I am not a lawyer!

tgsovlerkhgsel•42m ago

Under GDPR, I believe that would be accurate. I think CCPA was to some extent inspired by GDPR so I wouldn't be surprised if they copied this point too.

Which, hilariously, means that under GDPR, you only need to contact the web site, and they have to go talk to their 1207 partners that value your privacy to fulfill your request (I'm sure that in practice they'll say "sorry it's all 'anonymous' so we can't" or "we can't be sure that it's you even though you provided the identifier from your cookies"). I'm really disappointed that NOYB hasn't started going after web sites like that - that's quickly put a damper on the whole web surveillance economy.

charcircuit•36m ago

>It's my data, not their customers'.

Just because data is about you, that doesn't mean it is your data.

john_strinlai•30m ago

you may be minunderstanding the california consumer privacy act (ccpa). in the ccpa, personal data is defined as:

"Personal information is information that identifies, relates to, or could reasonably be linked with you or your household."

and, you do have the rights set forth in the ccpa (know, delete, correct, limit exposure, etc.) regarding that data.

lmkg•34m ago

> which seems to directly oppose the CCPA.

I have some background in data privacy compliance.

It sounds like they are claiming to be a Service Provider under CCPA, which is similar to a Processor under GDPR. Long story short, a Controller is the one legally responsible for ensuring the rights of the data subject, and a service provider/processor is a "dumb pipe" for a Controller that does what they're told. So IF they are actually a Service Provider, they're correct that the legal responsibility for CCPA belongs to their customers and not them.

That's a big IF, though.

Being a Processor/Service Providor means trade-offs. The data you collect isn't yours, you're not allowed to benefit from it. If Flock aggregates data from one customer and sells that aggregate to a different customer, they're no longer just a service provider. They're using data for their own purposes, and cannot claim to be "just" a service provider.

barelysapient•2h ago

If that's a valid excuse than the CCPA isn't worth the paper its written on.

dylan604•2h ago

The rule of any documentation is that it is out of date as soon as the ink is dry. By the time a regulation is enacted, workarounds/loopholes have already been found (if not intentionally worked into it).

ldoughty•2h ago

I would argue that the request was invalid in the first place.

If I see a flash on a speed camera operated by a business on behalf of a police department, your argument states I should be able to use CCPA to force the business to delete my picture and the record of me speeding If I can get the request to them before the police can file with the court and request that data as evidence.

The data belongs to the government, and you can't get around that right by going to business that holds the data and asking them to delete it.

inetknght•1h ago

> If I see a flash on a speed camera operated by a business on behalf of a police department, your argument states I should be able to use CCPA to force the business to delete my picture and the record of me speeding If I can get the request to them before the police can file with the court and request that data as evidence.

Sounds reasonable to me. If the police want to put up a camera, then the police should put up a camera.

Offloading their legal responsibilities to a third party company is shitty.

SoftTalker•1h ago

So police departments should have to develop and host all their administrative software also? I think we can all see why that would be a terrible idea. Police are like any other government agency or business in that they contract with the private sector for a variety of services that are not in their area of expertise.

stephbook•45m ago

"Hey private prison please delete all data you have about me. And by the way, I'm locked up here by accident. Please release me."

barelysapient•1h ago

But we're not talking about speed cameras or a private entity with exclusive contract with the police to provide traffic enforcement.

We're talking about Flock. A company offering surveillance as a service. Per their website:

>Trusted by over 12,000 public safety customers including cities, towns, counties, and business partners.

If Flock's argument holds then most of the CCPA be circumvented this same way. All it takes is a few entities and clever contract language.

TheRealPomax•58m ago

Except the data does NOT belong to the government, that's the whole point of Flock operating the way it does. It's not governmental data collection it's data collection by a private company that is then made available to the government upon request. And yeah: it is literally allowed to delete data, because again: it's not a government agency, it's just private data, collected by a private company, with the exact same status as you recording an public intersection with a camera from your window.

ranger_danger•2h ago

To me this sounds like the equivalent of visiting a website that sells your data, and then asking AWS to delete your personal data when it actually belongs to a customer of theirs and only resides within their private storage.

Would you ask your local ISP to delete data they provided to Tinder like your IP address? That doesn't make sense to me.

terrabitz•2h ago

Yeah I was getting the same feeling. I wonder if an equivalent request to California police agencies that contract Flock technologies would work though.

OkayPhysicist•2h ago

Probably not, as the law enforcement agencies get a bunch of exceptions to the CCPA.

monooso•2h ago

As I understand it, the author wrote to Flock as they are the entity collecting the PII. Your analogy would only make sense if the author had written to Flock's customers (and even then it's a rather strained comparison).

ranger_danger•33m ago

> they are the entity collecting the PII

I'm not convinced this is the case. It might be equipment made by them, but does that necessarily mean they were ever even in possession of the data in question?

Would you ask the manufacturer of your oven what you ate for dinner last week? No, you're just using an appliance that they made.

In the case of Flock I don't think we have any evidence of whether Flock themselves ever hold or store any data produced by their devices when operated by a customer.

alt227•1h ago

Yes, I have asked multiple companies to destroy my data under GDPR. Its quite common in Europe.

ldoughty•2h ago

I think you're going to have a hard time with this...

Flock seems to leave the data in ownership of the government. They are just providing the service of being custodians for storing and accessing that data.

You probably would get a similar response by submitting your request to Amazon web services or Google cloud or whoever has Flocks data: "sorry, we're just holding the data on behalf of Flock"

In either my example case or your stated case, you would have a very hard time convincing the host business to destroy their customers data without a court order or court case that shows their policy is invalid and they must comply.

Not a lawyer, just noting the parallel.

I do appreciate that Flock's response says that they cannot use the data they've collected for other purposes.. which further reinforces my cloud storage analogy -- the cloud vendor can't look at your data you upload to storage to e.g. build profiles on you/your business.

Barbing•1h ago

> the cloud vendor can't look at your data you upload to storage to e.g. build profiles on you/your business.

Would our main check on this be whistleblowers?

calmbonsai•2h ago

Per my understanding of the law for these sorts of data collectors, at least in the U.S., you need to contact the local municipalities (Flock's customers) for this redaction and the jurisprudence is governed at the state and municipal level.

The best source of this information is https://deflock.org/ . FWIW, this is run by a neighbor in Boulder, CO which has been wrestling with the use of these cameras.

cousinbryce•1h ago

Automating requests to every municipality sure would be fun

nekusar•2h ago

The only opt-out the citizenry has is with any of the following:

    2x4
    rebar
    spraypaint
    spray foam
    battery powered metal cutter

And bash those pieces of shit to chunks or completely ruin the lens and solar.

Republican community? They love corporate surveillance. Democrat community? They too love corporate surveillance.

There is no "Peoples' Party" that rejects this garbage.

MengerSponge•1h ago

https://www.techspot.com/news/108045-lidar-great-cars-but-ca...

It would be a pity if someone made dense point clouds of these devices.

pugworthy•1h ago

All materials available at major home improvement centers - which happen to be very popular Flock camera locations.

empathy_m•1h ago

I noticed that the company is glossed as "Flock" and not "Flock Safety (YC S17)" in posts like this and last week's "US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47689237.

Did YC house style change a while back to drop the "(YC xxx)" annotation since so many popular firms particpate / or because it's well known?

mikey_p•1h ago

Who know, maybe they're trying to distance themselves from the privacy disaster, but I doubt anyone at YC or HN is smart enough to read the room on Flock.

bix6•1h ago

Which room? The one paying them millions to spy on people? Cash Rules Everything Around Me.

kube-system•1h ago

I don't think they need your permission to use ALPR on your publicly displayed license plate.

> (2) (A) “Personal information” does not include publicly available information [...]

> (B) (i) For purposes of this paragraph, “publicly available” means any of the following:

> (I) Information that is lawfully made available from federal, state, or local government records.

> (II) Information that a business has a reasonable basis to believe is lawfully made available to the general public by the consumer

_moof•1h ago

The information being collected isn't your license plate, it's your location. (Still might not be personal information.)

wcv•1h ago

Flock has stonewalled with the "we are not the controllers" excuse here in MN too. We have similar rights to opt-out and delete under the MCDPA [0].

[0] https://ag.state.mn.us/Data-Privacy/Consumer/

deepsun•1h ago

If Flock collects and processes PII data, then all their customers are "subprocessors". Flock should really have a Data Processing Agreement with their subprocessors, to legally ensure they follow the same PII handling controls as Flock does.

For example, if Flock receives a legitimate request to delete some data, then Flock must forward that request to all their Data Processors (e.g. including AWS/GCP/Cloudflare) and they must delete it as well.

Aaargh20318•1h ago

It’s the other way around. Flock is the subprocessor for whoever hired them to collect data. If they are collecting data on behalf a city or municipality, those are the entities you need to address.

mmmlinux•1h ago

Lot of Flock Defenders in here.

pwython•24m ago

Not Flock defenders, just people explaining how this is not a CCPA violation. I could set up 100 cameras around town (with property owners permission) and record cars driving by, birds, etc all day. Then I could sell access to that footage to whoever I want. If they want to scrape license plates that's up to the customer and their problem. Or if they want to track birds, cool, that could be in the frame too.

kstrauser•10m ago

It gets a little weird when you explicitly market them for a purpose, though. Flock doesn't advertise a fleet of cameras suitable for birdwatching or other random activities. They market them specifically for the collection and processing of PII.

By analogy, Google Docs isn't marketed for healthcare use. If you wanted, you could put a bunch of PHI in a Google doc and it wouldn't be their responsibility. They certainly didn't tell you to do that. However, if they marketed Google Docs as a great place to store PHI, yeah, then suddenly they're on the hook for complying with the relevant laws like HIPAA.

(Although in this case Google will sign a HIPAA business associate agreement with you and voluntarily agree to comply. They still don't market it that way, or at least don't predominantly do so.)

annoyingnoob•1h ago

I've had the same kind of response from Email providers like Sendgrid, they claim its not their data. There is no way to have Sendgrid block you in their entire network, you have to play whack-a-mole with their customers. Seems like a flaw in these privacy laws when you can't ask the actual record holder to remove the records.

hmokiguess•1h ago

https://www.flocksafety.com/legal/lpr-policy

> In accordance with its Terms and Conditions, Flock Safety may access, use, preserve and/or disclose the LPR data to law enforcement authorities, government officials, and/or third parties, if legally required to do so or if Flock has a good faith belief that such access, use, preservation or disclosure is reasonably necessary to comply with a legal process, enforce the agreement between Flock and the customer, or detect, prevent or otherwise address security, privacy, fraud or technical issues. Additionally, Flock uses a fraction of LPR images (less than one percent), which are stripped of all metadata and identifying information, solely for the purpose of improving Flock Services through machine learning.

In this document, to which they linked in their reply, it says clearly "address ... privacy ... issues."

Does your case not constitute a privacy issue? I would say so.

Continuing down below, their claim on "Trust Us" about how they employ machine learning would need some proper transparency into how can that be guaranteed.

FireBeyond•1h ago

> Continuing down below, their claim on "Trust Us" about how they employ machine learning would need some proper transparency into how can that be guaranteed.

Wait til you see their "Transparency Portal" which, if my County and neighboring can be used as a sample size, doesn't even name at least 30% of agencies using Flock.

_moof•1h ago

They seem to be implying that because they are a "service provider," they aren't responsible for complying with CCPA rules even though they are the ones with the data.

Does this hold water? I'm reading the CCPA rules now but if anyone knows, it would save me some tedious research.

ezfe•1h ago

I guess if one likens it to AWS S3 holding your data on behalf of Apple it makes sense

pugworthy•1h ago

An interesting quandary here is that they'd need to constantly scan for you and your vehicle, etc. so that they could know it was you then delete you. So to ensure they don't observe you, they need to observe you.

rdiddly•1h ago

Flock's customers own the data the same way Uber drivers are independent contractors, i.e. it's designed for weaseling out of obligations.

lacker•57m ago

Isn't that how it should work?

If you write the police and ask them to delete all their data about you, that isn't a thing that they do. It shouldn't matter if the police store their data on AWS or their own servers.

Flock is a tool used by the police so it should work the same way.

nerevarthelame•37m ago

You're right are exemptions for both GDPR [0] and the CCPA [1] where organizations aren't obligated to comply with erasure requests if it would limit their ability to prevent or investigate crimes, fraud, or similar matters.

But that's not what Flock is claiming. They're claiming that they don't even have to consider the request because they don't own the data.

[0] https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...

[1] https://www.clarip.com/data-privacy/ccpa-erasure-exemptions/

dsr_•57m ago

Remember that the difference between "Flock can do whatever the hell it wants" and "Flock is required to delete your data at your request" is a law. Citizens vote for legislators. If you want this to be a higher priority for your legislators, buy them off.

Or vote for/against them, that might work too.

cold_tom•8m ago

Feels like a classic “we’re just the processor” answer But in reality you have no way to find or contact whoever actually controls the data, so it doesn’t really help. Kind of shows the gap between how the law works on paper vs how these systems work in practice.

sklargh•8m ago

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