I added one a few months ago and went to go check it, and there are 2 others almost right on top of it pointing in different directions, I guess that can't be prevented? I'm fairly certain they didn't add two more ALPRs that close to each other.
ezfe•Mar 4, 2026
You can go onto Open Street Map and tidy up the data. I would recommend surveying the actual situation first to ensure you don't mess anything up.
bigwheels•Mar 4, 2026
When your car gets stolen, suddenly nobody can access the data.
Are there any coordinated efforts for widespread scrubbing or removal of these parasitic devices?
dylan604•Mar 4, 2026
When your car gets stolen, even with camera data, the police will not do anything.
habinero•Mar 4, 2026
The city might call you in a month when it gets towed wherever it was abandoned. The cops aren't going to look for it. That happened to me once.
bubblewand•Mar 4, 2026
I've yet to see an amount of property crime that can get the cops to lift a finger. I've seen them ignore a low-six-figures-stolen string of after-hours break-ins at businesses, captured at multiple location on camera with clear shots of the vehicle, legible plates, and faces of the perps. Just straight-up gave the impression they thought anyone believing they might want to look into it was a moron. And no, given where this happened it wasn't because of that "prosecutors won't charge anyway" thing people complain about some places (it's led me to wonder how much of that is cops just looking to pass the blame on cases they had no intention of investigating anyway).
StayHuman•Mar 4, 2026
On the "coordinated efforts" front, some anecdata:
Three separate posts on Craigslist in the Community section about Flock Cameras, trying to increase local awareness. Posted to two different cities, various posting iterations (e.g. with links / without, pics / no pics, etc.). All appeared to post fine when entered, but never saw the light of day and were marked as removed within a few minutes.
Any other subject: posts fine.
Try it yourself and see what you get.
runjake•Mar 4, 2026
Great site.
Caveat: it does not seem to update camera statuses after initial reporting. I see several cameras that were removed long ago, or have been repositioned, but their old statuses remain.
CGMthrowaway•Mar 4, 2026
DeFlock is powered by crowdsourced data from the OpenStreetMap community. The map is incomplete! New locations are always being added. Know of a missing ALPR? Contribute to the map: https://deflock.org/report/id
This is a quite scary map. They are all over my local area. It may technically be possible to route a drive around them, but if you take the most convenient path between any two points at least one camera will spot you. I'd have to leave my neighborhood through back roads and enter local shopping areas through sidestreets.
This data shouldn't even be collected in the first place, let alone consolidated into a national network that any police officer can decide to spy on me through.
CGMthrowaway•Mar 4, 2026
> It may technically be possible to route a drive around them
I can't speak to flock but I know that other vendors in the space have software designed to calculate optimal locations to maximize probability at least one license plate scan for every trip taken.
Presumably that software can then be used to upsell additional cameras because with an increased density your capabilities start to approximate real-time live position tracking instead of just getting approximate locations of hot plates.
gentile•Mar 4, 2026
Download osm data, extract roads and surveillance, gpd overlay how=difference, remove/edit the different osmid's, write to pbf file, convert to obf file w/ osmandmapcreator, import into OsmAnd.
Now you have turn by turn navigation around ALPRs on your phone.
> Now you have turn by turn navigation around ALPRs [that we -- regular people -- know about] on your phone [while still being observed by the ones we don't know about].
fixed that for you. :-/
iamtheworstdev•Mar 4, 2026
wow. quite literally the only ones in my area are surveilling the county park / community center. that's creepy. I'll just have to assume they're doing something creepier at the public library.
burningChrome•Mar 4, 2026
>> This is a quite scary map.
It can be. FLOCK data was used to put Bryan Kohberger at the scene along with other people's security camera's. Cops regularly use FLOCK camera's to get hits for criminals that have warrants for violent crime.
I can see why people are ok with them when they're used to get criminals off the streets. However, I've seen multiple times where cops initiate a felony stop (where people are pulled out at gunpoint and detained) against a car they got a hit on - only to find out the person they really wanted wasn't driving or even in the car at all.
What's interesting is businesses and houses have so many cameras nowadays that the first thing cops do when they get to the scene of a violent crime is canvas the area for camera's. So yeah, you can avoid FLOCK, but there are most likely hundreds of other camera's that will capture you driving through any given area.
ghouse•Mar 4, 2026
But the cameras that the law enforcement officers canvas in the area aren't centrally aggregated and tagged with meta data such that they can be queried at scale.
xXSLAYERXx•Mar 4, 2026
> However, I've seen multiple times where cops initiate a felony stop
At what point do we accept that all systems are flawed? There could be many variables as to why the perp wasn't in the car. Maybe the perp stole the car. Maybe the perp borrowed the car. Maybe these systems do not work well in fog etc etc. I don't know how we're supposed to advance technology that makes us safer without getting into these muky situations from time to time.
mulmen•Mar 4, 2026
Technology is a means to an end, not the end itself. If you can’t make it safe then don’t deploy it.
mainmailman•Mar 4, 2026
Why do anything at all?
Firerouge•Mar 4, 2026
Do you have a source to your Bryan claim?
If you look at the map, there are zero flock cameras reported in that region.
None in Moscow Idaho where the murder happened, none in Pullman where he lived, and none showed between the locations.
zythyx•Mar 4, 2026
There's a disclaimer when you first open the page that the map is incomplete and that users need to submit the data. It's possible that data hasn't been submitted/parsed yet
Firerouge•Mar 4, 2026
It's possible, but I can't find a corroborating news report, and it's the first I've heard this claim made about that case.
FireBeyond•Mar 4, 2026
You can't rely on Flock's "transparency" reports either, they're woefully inadequate. In our County, the Sheriff spoke of a PD in the County getting a Flock hit. It was news to many, including Flock's transparency site, that that PD was a user of their services.
So I'm not overly surprised by this.
birdo-wordo•Mar 4, 2026
Sounds like it's working as intended. These systems don't track people, they provide objective clues and evidence.
Ajedi32•Mar 4, 2026
By tracking everyone at all times.
ImPostingOnHN•Mar 4, 2026
There have been numerous instances where cops used it to stalk exes, etc. If it isn't already, it will be used to stalk a blacklist of dissidents. It will continue to happen as long as the system exists.
carefulfungi•Mar 4, 2026
You should assume every police cruiser has a plate reader, too.
pc86•Mar 4, 2026
They do, especially in cities and wealthy suburbs (and honestly a lot of poor rural areas too).
The difference is these typically don't zap that data up to a central database that any agency in the country can access, the way Flock does if only because the security people at Flock are a joke.
cdrnsf•Mar 4, 2026
Remember, according to Flock's CEO, Deflock is a terrorist organization.
mikece•Mar 4, 2026
Yes, and according to Steve Ballmer (back in the day) Linux Torvalds was a terrorist. People are allowed to say stupid things.
jLaForest•Mar 4, 2026
People are allowed to say stupid things....and those people should be held accountable for the stupid things they say
hsuduebc2•Mar 4, 2026
Everyone who is not content with the way I do business must be a terrorist for sure. o_o
technol0gic•Mar 4, 2026
by "say stupid things," you of course mean "tell bald-faced lies"
rl3•Mar 4, 2026
The most notable one: "Developers, developers, developers!"
burkaman•Mar 4, 2026
I don't think this is true, I can't even find anyone else claiming this happened.
dspillett•Mar 4, 2026
I don't remember him calling Linus a terrorist, though there were others that associated anything with a copyleft licence to be the loony left (or the commie left).
He certainly referred to both him and Linux as cancers though, that I do remember. He later changed his mind on that, and IIRC may even have publicly apologised for those statements.
burkaman•Mar 4, 2026
He said Linux is a cancer, which was a stupid thing to say, but not the same as calling Linus a cancer. I say plenty of bad things about software that I would not say about the people who create it. I think Next.js is awful to use but that doesn't mean I think everyone at Vercel is an awful person, for example.
Just anecdotally looking around my city, it's noticeable that the camera's locations have a much stronger correlation with areas of high wealth rather than high crime.
nomel•Mar 4, 2026
Generally, only addicts steal from poorer people.
And, where I am, you're more likely to have a gun if you're poor, because there's more exposure to crime, resulting in a much more realistic understanding that the police won't save you in an emergency.
downrightmike•Mar 4, 2026
wage theft is a much larger crime
wahnfrieden•Mar 4, 2026
police in the US also steal more than robbers, as a factual statistic
baggy_trough•Mar 4, 2026
This is great, we can see where more cameras need to be added around the neighborhood!
avsavani•Mar 4, 2026
love this , give me more cameras please , fuck those criminals.
unethical_ban•Mar 4, 2026
Coming 2028: Dissent is a crime
drunken_thor•Mar 4, 2026
Haha Sudbury and Napanee are the only places in Canada to have them. They are tiny cities where nothing happens. Bored police officers imagining situations where they are needed.
allthetime•Mar 4, 2026
UBC campus in Vancouver as well.
randlet•Mar 4, 2026
Sudbury is 150k+ people so not exactly tiny in terms of Canadian cities (30th most populus).
glitcher•Mar 4, 2026
In my area I'm seeing a few random ones on roadways, but mostly clusters of them in the parking lots of Home Depots, Lowes, and Wal-Marts.
doctor_radium•Mar 4, 2026
Same here, but just Lowes stores. That I know of. I surveiled the two local Lowes roughly a month ago and found two cameras not mapped, which I gleefully added myself. Want to send them a snail mail complaint at some point stating they won't be getting my business until they step back from turning us into a police state.
Ajedi32•Mar 4, 2026
Are they Flock cameras or bog standard CCTV?
doctor_radium•Mar 4, 2026
The Lowes cameras are definitely Flock. The look is unmistakable. See
I contacted them about it too and got the most generic corpo pr about them being essential for the safety of their employees.
willis936•Mar 4, 2026
Woof. There is one that I basically must drive by everyday close to where I live. How can I figure out who is responsible for its installation so I can let them know how I feel (and will vote) about it?
qup•Mar 4, 2026
It's probably your city/police.
I have two cameras in my small town, but I can avoid them, so I now go out of my way to cross town.
NoSalt•Mar 4, 2026
I wonder how long until the site gets taken down. You know ... to protect the children.
sanufar•Mar 4, 2026
Jeez there’s a few all around my uni and surrounding areas, did not know about that at all.
tmshapland•Mar 4, 2026
How do we make this site mainstream? The public would really start to push back if they could so viscerally experience that they are being surveilled multiple times per day.
seniorThrowaway•Mar 4, 2026
I think you overestimate the public.
whimsicalism•Mar 4, 2026
Much prefer camera driven enforcement to cop-on-beat driven enforcement.
saxonww•Mar 4, 2026
Flock cameras aren't enforcing anything. They collect your license plate and distinguishing details of your car. It's just car X with plate Y detected at location Z at time T.
Notably, they are not used for speed detection or 'good driving' detection.
You might think that having a constantly-present, objective, impartial camera enforcing a law is better than a sometimes-present, subjective, often not impartial beat cop doing that. But that's not what Flock does. Flock just turns that 'sometimes-present' beat cop into an 'always-present' beat cop, without addressing any of the other beat cop problems.
nickstinemates•Mar 4, 2026
None in my area. Time to disperse. Get out of major cities like the pandemic promised. Fill in this great country we live in. Proliferate the governments surveillance for them.
LordGrey•Mar 4, 2026
Coincidentally, a nearby county has just announced that they have begun installing new Flock cameras [0].
Their stated reason is: "Along with the cameras being used to reduce crime, the sheriff’s office said they may also be used for public safety concerns, including AMBER Alerts and Silver Alerts."
The cameras are good when we're all on the happy path, but as soon as a bad actor gets involved, all of that surveillance won't look so great. History shows that the odds of that happening are decidedly non-zero.
EDIT: Searching for some info on the grant referenced in the article, it appears that a county must match 20% of the grant amount; one example is [1]. I'm sure this looks like a great deal to county officials.
A Sedgwick, Kansas, police chief used Flock Safety license plate readers to track his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend’s vehicles 228 times over four-plus months and used his police vehicle to follow them out of town, according to a city official and a report released this week by the agency that oversees police certifications.
arcanemachiner•Mar 4, 2026
Edward Snowden. Everything after that is a no-brainer.
Hell, everything after Room 641A is a no-brainer.
jp191919•Mar 4, 2026
Snowden, a true American patriot.
Zigurd•Mar 4, 2026
Before posting that you couldn't Google the Milwaukee cop who got busted for abusing Flock camera access? From just a week ago?
If you want an absolute torrent of abuse search for cops running the IDs of their exes. That's why it's dead certain that Flock cameras will be routinely abused.
k33n•Mar 4, 2026
So then we need better access controls, and apparently the people who abuse it to stalk exes and such are already being prosecuted.
Doesn’t seem like the technology itself is the core issue here to me.
pc86•Mar 4, 2026
The only way you could have moved this goal post faster is if you had edited your original comment.
lokar•Mar 4, 2026
Police in the US very rarely face accountability for misconduct.
nyc_data_geek1•Mar 4, 2026
If a technology, backdoor or capability exists, it's not a question of if it will be abused, but rather when, how, and by whom.
Stop being obtuse.
debarshri•Mar 4, 2026
Small counties generate huge revenues with traffic cameras.
I think reducing crime and road safety is an excuse.
There are true innovators in the traffic camera space but i think counties often choose vendors who give them best ROI.
dhdaadhd•Mar 4, 2026
Can you elaborate on true innovators? No shade, but I have a hard time conceptualizing what innovation would look like in this space.
dspillett•Mar 4, 2026
> Small counties generate huge revenues with traffic cameras.
Whether or not that is true, I suspect it is, the best way to avoid fines for breaking traffic regulations is to not break traffic regulations. They can't make anything from you that way if you do.
pc86•Mar 4, 2026
Until they start changing speed limits, adjusting the timing on yellow lights, or just saying you ran a stop sign when you didn't and - oops! - they happened to have their dashcam off or their car angled so the actual intersection was just out of view.
pibaker•Mar 4, 2026
> Along with the cameras being used to reduce crime, the sheriff’s office said they may also be used for public safety concerns, including AMBER Alerts and Silver Alerts.
Hot take: AMBER alert is a way to keep the public paranoid about child abduction by strangers, an evil but extremely rare act, and turn their paranoia into support for law enforcement. It may not be the intended purposes, but the (real) purpose of a system is what it does.
It is no surprise that Flock, like other parties pushing for the erosion of privacy and personal freedom, are following the same playbook. Don't you want your kid (or your doggo) to get home safe? If you don't let us spy on you your literally supporting child abductors. Checkmate libertarians.
The reality of AMBER alert is they overwhelmingly come from custody dispute cases where the child's safety is not in jeopardy, because they tend to be the only kind of cases where they know enough about the "abductor" to issue an alert that is not just "look for a man driving a white van." The reality of child abuse is you should be infinitely more worried about authority figures dealing with the child — parents, relatives, teachers, pastors, coaches and yes, the police — than strangers driving unmarked white vans.
fc417fc802•Mar 4, 2026
> the (real) purpose of a system is what it does
I agree with the rest of what you wrote but the quote is an overly cynical tired cliche when applied in a blanket manner. There are specific situations involving bad faith actors where it is directly relevant, and there are also times where it can be a useful observation about the impact of perverse incentives that build on top of unintended consequences.
But the way you're using it there it's no better than other politically charged nonsensical slogans.
butterbomb•Mar 4, 2026
> Hot take: AMBER alert is a way to keep the public paranoid about child abduction by strangers, an evil but extremely rare act
I thought they were mostly custody style kidnappings anyway.
pc86•Mar 4, 2026
They almost entirely are, 90% plus. And they're incredibly rare even including those, which you shouldn't.
craftkiller•Mar 4, 2026
Huh, none on the upper west side in NYC. Interesting.
segmondy•Mar 4, 2026
Interesting ... the police in this case are claiming to be the owners of the camera.
The only flock cameras indicated in my town are the canonical Home Depot arrangement. I'm pretty sure it's part of their standard operating procedures at this point. The effect these have had on the in store experience (at my location) is the primary thing that has me interested in limited deployments. Shopping at HD prior to the ALPRs was a horrible time. I think they finally caught the guy who was stealing the little screws out of the irrigation vacuum breakers. You can actually get a complete, unopened factory product most of the time now.
s1gsegv•Mar 4, 2026
And to think, all it cost was a significant loss of privacy nationwide
mulmen•Mar 4, 2026
Home Depot didn’t have CCTV and loss prevention before Flock?
mixmastamyk•Mar 4, 2026
Wondering what the intersection is with Home Depot cameras and ICE?
unclad5968•Mar 4, 2026
Weird. The city I live in has cameras, but only a few at random intersections. Most of the cameras are on a university campus, home depot, Lowes, and target. Are these normal places to put flock cameras for other cities?
kurtoid•Mar 4, 2026
Lowe's has their own contract with Flock. I've seen them outside a couple of Targets too
jmward01•Mar 4, 2026
So, our city clearly has other cameras but they are from a different vendor (and don't show up on the map). I wonder how good/bad the other players in the industry are. Flock gets the press, is that just letting someone worse quietly fill in the gaps?
jppope•Mar 4, 2026
So silly question. Flock is making money off of my Name, Image, and Likeness can I request compensation for that?
david_shaw•Mar 4, 2026
It would be an interesting and potentially useful project to combine these camera locations with Maps routing -- similar to "avoid toll roads," we could "avoid surveillance cameras."
waterproof•Mar 4, 2026
Reminder that at least in Washington state, all images from Flock cameras are public data and thus subject to public records requests.
It only gets them deactivated until the state legislature "fixes" the "loophole".
ribosometronome•Mar 4, 2026
If they're not already exempted by law, legislators are likely to carve out exemptions. Federally, the FOIA already exempts the government from releasing data that would violate privacy (which was one of the hurdles to releasing Epstein related documents prior to Congress passing a law to demand it).
barnas2•Mar 4, 2026
Isn't the entire argument for these based on the fact that people don't have an expectation of privacy in a public place? Not that I'm sure they won't try to make an excuse as to why it's different, but as far as I'm aware, you're allowed to just film in public.
fc417fc802•Mar 4, 2026
I'm glad the data is being catalogued and made available like this but the interactive map doesn't work for me at all. Seems to be missing clickable zoom controls and gestures on my trackpad only seem to be able to get it to zoom out, not in (I think maybe it's becoming entirely unresponsive when it first registers the zoom in event and dropping the rest of it). Did anyone actually bother to test this on a low end device?
More generally, if you're a webdev with a high end workstation it's really important to occasionally spin up a single core VM with less than 4 GB RAM, open a youtube video, and then check how well your page works in a second simultaneously visible window.
renewiltord•Mar 4, 2026
This is pretty cool. I think I'd want a few more on my block. Can an individual request and fund one?
milkytron•Mar 4, 2026
Nice. The bike trail to my office and a few grocery stores doesn't have any of these.
superkuh•Mar 4, 2026
Flock AI cameras run off small solar panels. Having run my own computer systems off small solar panels I know that even a minor shadow or a bit of bird poop on the panel can decrease the output enough the computer eventually cannot run and shuts down. I bet Flock cameras have the same response to a bit of bird poop like substance or shadow.
stri8ted•Mar 4, 2026
It's clearly true there have been abuses as a result of this technology. And its also clearly true criminals have been caught as a result of the cams, that otherwise would not have been.
If you believe the costs of the the abuses, and potential abuses, exceed the benefit, then at least be honest about the trade-off, because there are real benefits.
Personally, I believe the costs, on net, are worth the benefits. And in so far as the costs can be further reduced, without loosing most benefits, then great. This is not right or wrong. It's just a question of values, and how you weight the costs vs benefits.
Don't down-vote this all at once.
Forgeties79•Mar 4, 2026
My question to you is: how are you assessing the costs? Do you know how many crimes have been stopped as a result of these cams? Do you know the extent to which our privacy is being lost and our data is being used against us or others?
stri8ted•Mar 4, 2026
I take into account publicly available information (news articles), factor in personal anecdotes, and reason about human nature and incentives. I know the extent of reported abuses, and I do my best to extrapolate. It's not perfect, but such is life.
To be clear, even if we all agreed on the data, I still would not expect everyone to take the same position. There are subjective differences in values.
ergocoder•Mar 4, 2026
I'm gonna get downvoted for this.
But I'd like cameras in my neighborhood.
sciencejerk•Mar 4, 2026
I personally know 3 victims of brutally violent crime. Flock would have detected, but maybe not prevented, two of these cases, where violence occurred in broad, open daylight near main roads and highways. Crimes occurred in left-leaning, anti-police small midwest city. All of the victims were women.
I would encourage anti-Flockers and anti-authority individuals out here to question their motives and make sure that their voices and actions are best aligned with protecting vulnerable individuals (this also includes trafficked illegal immigrants).
Seems like many folks here might be more concerned with preventing hypothetical/theoretical harm, instead of REAL harm (violent crime, trafficking, vehicle theft)
38 Comments
Are there any coordinated efforts for widespread scrubbing or removal of these parasitic devices?
Three separate posts on Craigslist in the Community section about Flock Cameras, trying to increase local awareness. Posted to two different cities, various posting iterations (e.g. with links / without, pics / no pics, etc.). All appeared to post fine when entered, but never saw the light of day and were marked as removed within a few minutes.
Any other subject: posts fine.
Try it yourself and see what you get.
Caveat: it does not seem to update camera statuses after initial reporting. I see several cameras that were removed long ago, or have been repositioned, but their old statuses remain.
This data shouldn't even be collected in the first place, let alone consolidated into a national network that any police officer can decide to spy on me through.
That's an interesting idea...
Presumably that software can then be used to upsell additional cameras because with an increased density your capabilities start to approximate real-time live position tracking instead of just getting approximate locations of hot plates.
Now you have turn by turn navigation around ALPRs on your phone.
Edit: link https://github.com/pickpj/Big-B-Router - I tend to find ALPRs that are missing in the OSM data, so keep on updating OSM data.
fixed that for you. :-/
It can be. FLOCK data was used to put Bryan Kohberger at the scene along with other people's security camera's. Cops regularly use FLOCK camera's to get hits for criminals that have warrants for violent crime.
I can see why people are ok with them when they're used to get criminals off the streets. However, I've seen multiple times where cops initiate a felony stop (where people are pulled out at gunpoint and detained) against a car they got a hit on - only to find out the person they really wanted wasn't driving or even in the car at all.
What's interesting is businesses and houses have so many cameras nowadays that the first thing cops do when they get to the scene of a violent crime is canvas the area for camera's. So yeah, you can avoid FLOCK, but there are most likely hundreds of other camera's that will capture you driving through any given area.
At what point do we accept that all systems are flawed? There could be many variables as to why the perp wasn't in the car. Maybe the perp stole the car. Maybe the perp borrowed the car. Maybe these systems do not work well in fog etc etc. I don't know how we're supposed to advance technology that makes us safer without getting into these muky situations from time to time.
If you look at the map, there are zero flock cameras reported in that region.
None in Moscow Idaho where the murder happened, none in Pullman where he lived, and none showed between the locations.
So I'm not overly surprised by this.
The difference is these typically don't zap that data up to a central database that any agency in the country can access, the way Flock does if only because the security people at Flock are a joke.
He certainly referred to both him and Linux as cancers though, that I do remember. He later changed his mind on that, and IIRC may even have publicly apologised for those statements.
https://every-door.app/
https://github.com/Zverik/every_door
And, where I am, you're more likely to have a gun if you're poor, because there's more exposure to crime, resulting in a much more realistic understanding that the police won't save you in an emergency.
https://deflock.org/identify
I have two cameras in my small town, but I can avoid them, so I now go out of my way to cross town.
Notably, they are not used for speed detection or 'good driving' detection.
You might think that having a constantly-present, objective, impartial camera enforcing a law is better than a sometimes-present, subjective, often not impartial beat cop doing that. But that's not what Flock does. Flock just turns that 'sometimes-present' beat cop into an 'always-present' beat cop, without addressing any of the other beat cop problems.
Their stated reason is: "Along with the cameras being used to reduce crime, the sheriff’s office said they may also be used for public safety concerns, including AMBER Alerts and Silver Alerts."
The cameras are good when we're all on the happy path, but as soon as a bad actor gets involved, all of that surveillance won't look so great. History shows that the odds of that happening are decidedly non-zero.
EDIT: Searching for some info on the grant referenced in the article, it appears that a county must match 20% of the grant amount; one example is [1]. I'm sure this looks like a great deal to county officials.
[0] https://www.ketk.com/news/crime-public-safety/new-traffic-ca...
[1] https://www.beltontexas.gov/news_detail_T11_R1277.php
A Sedgwick, Kansas, police chief used Flock Safety license plate readers to track his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend’s vehicles 228 times over four-plus months and used his police vehicle to follow them out of town, according to a city official and a report released this week by the agency that oversees police certifications.
Hell, everything after Room 641A is a no-brainer.
If you want an absolute torrent of abuse search for cops running the IDs of their exes. That's why it's dead certain that Flock cameras will be routinely abused.
Doesn’t seem like the technology itself is the core issue here to me.
Stop being obtuse.
I think reducing crime and road safety is an excuse.
There are true innovators in the traffic camera space but i think counties often choose vendors who give them best ROI.
Whether or not that is true, I suspect it is, the best way to avoid fines for breaking traffic regulations is to not break traffic regulations. They can't make anything from you that way if you do.
Hot take: AMBER alert is a way to keep the public paranoid about child abduction by strangers, an evil but extremely rare act, and turn their paranoia into support for law enforcement. It may not be the intended purposes, but the (real) purpose of a system is what it does.
It is no surprise that Flock, like other parties pushing for the erosion of privacy and personal freedom, are following the same playbook. Don't you want your kid (or your doggo) to get home safe? If you don't let us spy on you your literally supporting child abductors. Checkmate libertarians.
The reality of AMBER alert is they overwhelmingly come from custody dispute cases where the child's safety is not in jeopardy, because they tend to be the only kind of cases where they know enough about the "abductor" to issue an alert that is not just "look for a man driving a white van." The reality of child abuse is you should be infinitely more worried about authority figures dealing with the child — parents, relatives, teachers, pastors, coaches and yes, the police — than strangers driving unmarked white vans.
I agree with the rest of what you wrote but the quote is an overly cynical tired cliche when applied in a blanket manner. There are specific situations involving bad faith actors where it is directly relevant, and there are also times where it can be a useful observation about the impact of perverse incentives that build on top of unintended consequences.
But the way you're using it there it's no better than other politically charged nonsensical slogans.
I thought they were mostly custody style kidnappings anyway.
https://oaklandcounty115.com/2026/03/03/clarkston-man-accuse...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/washington-court-rules...
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/law-justice/wa-cit...
More generally, if you're a webdev with a high end workstation it's really important to occasionally spin up a single core VM with less than 4 GB RAM, open a youtube video, and then check how well your page works in a second simultaneously visible window.
If you believe the costs of the the abuses, and potential abuses, exceed the benefit, then at least be honest about the trade-off, because there are real benefits.
Personally, I believe the costs, on net, are worth the benefits. And in so far as the costs can be further reduced, without loosing most benefits, then great. This is not right or wrong. It's just a question of values, and how you weight the costs vs benefits.
Don't down-vote this all at once.
To be clear, even if we all agreed on the data, I still would not expect everyone to take the same position. There are subjective differences in values.
But I'd like cameras in my neighborhood.
I would encourage anti-Flockers and anti-authority individuals out here to question their motives and make sure that their voices and actions are best aligned with protecting vulnerable individuals (this also includes trafficked illegal immigrants).
Seems like many folks here might be more concerned with preventing hypothetical/theoretical harm, instead of REAL harm (violent crime, trafficking, vehicle theft)