Pretty sure this is the same person who made "your flowing data" many years ago. Assuming it is, that was a really cool project!

You could follow their twitter account and DM semi-structured messages at it. He would generate personalized charts and tables from the message you sent.

Looks like it's the same account, but that service seems down at the moment.

https://x.com/yfd

Really great demonstration that created value from semi-structured data streams.

I’m not convinced that there’s any solution to this besides direct government regulation and an enshrinement of privacy rights into the law. Cities stop paying for flock access? Other cities still will. Regulations preventing public property from being used for cameras? Private companies will allow it. Vigilantes destroying cameras? Start using mobile drones or something. It’s a losing battle, and everything done so far to fight it is just causes an escalation. Constitutional right to privacy (from government and private companies) is probably the only durable solution.

Fitting the typical stereotype of a villain company, the greed with no ethics isn’t surprising, what’s surprising that it’s backed by “hacker” news.. shouldn’t HN be backing the counter efforts against such company not the other way around?

The CEO of Flock said his mission is to "completely eliminate and eradicate crime in America". I think I saw that movie, it was called Minority Report.

For an Amber Alert that could be really helpful.

Highly anti social people (flock executives, mark zuckerberg, other surveillance capitalists, etc.) should simply be expelled from society to a separate island to fight each other for scarce resources.

Hm, two questions:

- Who is paying for surveillance? - To whose benefit is it used?