It's not like they control it, manage it, and what was pitched may be significantly different than what happened since then.
YC isn't perfect, but what words you use, and their order is important. And the way you're phrasing it, you make it sound as if they are a subsidiary of YC. Or as if YC is on the board.
If any of these things are true, you should plainly state them. Otherwise, what you're saying is incorrect.
>Flock’s camera and accompanying software is geared towards private neighborhoods and neighborhood associations looking to decrease petty crime.[1]
[1]https://www.hypepotamus.com/flock-safety-funding-round-growt...
Yellow vests knock out 60% of all speed cameras in France
Don’t you understand? He was just following orders.
You'd think from the response that this was like the VP/Sales of Flock Safety. But it's just some installer dude probably making $65k/year to climb poles and fasten cameras. I guess that's praxis for you though.
I think this is just a ragebait piece.
But Flock itself should not be spared . They are building things that are going against widely accepted values.
Since when Americans are okay with that level of erosion of their privacy?
Same thing with Meta building pervert glasses.
You do unpopular things, you gotta expect to be an unpopular person.
Sophisticated, educated types might understand that parking wardens are just doing their jobs, and they didn't make the policy they're enforcing. But to 70% of the population, the person putting a ticket on their car is an asshole.
On the flip side, let Axon, Motorola take some of the heat, paint your enemies as "defund the police", and stop being so obviously branded. Take a page out of Phillip Morris/Altria playbook and keep a lower profile.
Instead, they've managed to unite left and right in hatred. Clown show.
Ignoring the fact that that deal is not necessarily good, if they had been slightly scummier, not given two shits about actually reducing petty crimes against the people and instead set out to help municipalities collect civil fines (which have basically no 4th-8th amendment protections these days) they probably could have gotten away without scrutiny for a very long time and gotten their systems deeply entrenched. The useful idiots would've eaten it right up with the flimsiest of pretexts so long as each segment of useful idiots was peddled to individually.
"The truck we saw carrying 2-tons of waste tires away from your tire shop is not owned by an entity on the state approved list, pay up"
"We saw you leaving home depot with a water heater but you didn't pull a permit, prove it didn't go into your house or pay the fine"
"we saw your 2004 Altima emit a puff of blue leaving a light. Per vehicle code XYZ any vehicle that emmits a visible cloud cannot pass emissions inspection, submit proof of passing withing 30d or your resigstration is revoked"
If they had done that a lot of people would have eaten it up and asked for more. But nope, they believed their own BS and built a system for "real" law enforcement. And of course that leads to a bunch of bad interactions with cops and the public doesn't like that.
We forget US society was configured (imperfectly) to allow families to raise their children in stability and safety, with guardrails around both sides of liberty. Surveillance has a legit role in protecting communities and their families - especially the most vulnerable.
Willing to be most of the Flock hate crowd doesn't have kids walking to school in areas where bad things happen - many probably don't have kids.
The problem is the many stories we already have of misuses of this equipment, showing that people in power are not mentally capable of actually managing a surveillance system like this in a societally beneficial way.
If the use of the system was designated as only being allowed to stop heinous crimes and we had a track record and way to prove this was always the case, then I would be 100% in support. But given it has already proven to not be possible is likely why most people are against it.
I simply don't think Humans are capable of proper use of a system like this.
ICE, yes. At this point you cannot make an argument at all that you are going to join a fair-minded organisation that treats people decently while upholding a lawful function.
People who work for Flock should be considering their futures, but I suspect people who install Flock cameras are more in the TSA bracket: it is a job that will be near them that pays.
We managed to swing a couple of the county commissioners who were in favor of it before and were not in favor of it after hearing about the constitutional issues as well as the cyber security issues that flock doesn't really care about.
Pasco county Florida is now removing all the cameras on the public right of ways at the end of this month.
The double standard demonstrated by Flock isn't the issue, they are the pieces of shit and of course they have no moral consistency.
But "He who fights with monsters should be careful, lest he thereby become a monster." I thought we were united that people have a reasonable sense of temporal privacy in public - that being in public is ephemeral and not some permanent record to be analyzed in perpetuity. We should not be fine stalking people and making them feel threatened, even those that want to build the panopticon state.
The scope is always the largest possible audience…
> When Demo Day was over, after we had booked meetings with investors and were well on our way to our first fundraising round, YC set the tone for scaling Flock doggedly, purposefully, and with consistent velocity, for years to come.
Damn, its almost like YC really set the stage for mass AI surveillance from the founders own mouth
Those local governments that aren’t banning are getting a cut of the ad revenue they make off these real world ads.
Literally wake up what is wrong with you people
You would let them do anything! You are actually a liability now just for being so unbelievably ignorant.
It’s the high rep accounts sticking their neck out for Flock and YC so it seems like HN is in on it too.
Two things can be true at once.
As opposed to all the new accounts (uncharitably: sockpuppet accounts) that are criticizing it?
Should other law enforcement contractors also be subject to the same higher standard? For instance, should dell get extra flak if one of their contractors called 911, because they were installing PCs for a police department? If not, this just seems like a way of applying a double standard, just because you hate flock. It's fine to hate flock, but it should be actually justified reasons (eg. "they're enabling mass surveillance" or whatever), not made up reasons like "they did a bad that's vaguely common, but we're gonna admonish them extra hard for it because we hate them")
Do they even have their own technicians? I believe there have been Dish Network technicians seen working on and setting up flock cameras and even those technicians are contractors of Dish network.
Sum up the number of kids harmed or murdered by random people (remember that, for example, non-family abductions are 1% of abductions).
Compare.
I guarantee you that an empowered state is worse for child welfare than random criminals.
> Willing to [bet] most of the Flock hate crowd doesn't...
...have a reason at all to worry about LPR cameras tracking their car. Just "something something government."
blueoranges•45m ago