[stopachka]

I am surprised how overwhelmingly negative the comments are here. I would have expected at least a few voices defending Flock.

I'll step in and add a voice. Ultimately, Flock is solving a real problem with crime. This is why police departments when them.

Stopping Flock doesn't address the need that got police departments to use them. If you want to "stop flock", you need to address that need better.

[ellefire]

"stopping a real problem with crime" i.e. employing mass surveillance to hunt down women who want to terminate a pregnancy

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

[Finbarr]

Agreed. Flock has been a key contributor in solving numerous crimes. I'm happy for Flock to be in my county and would like the police to have more access to technology like this, not less.

[saghm]

Does your country also have a recurring problem of police shooting unarmed citizens? If not, it probably helps to understand the dynamics of why the police are not widely trusted here

[Finbarr]

County was not a typo. It's awful whenever there's an overuse of force in the USA. I'd recommend watching a few police bodycam videos on youtube before judging them wholesale though. The experience of a police officer in the United States seems to be long periods of tedium punctuated by moments of sheer terror and adrenaline. Anyone out there can have a gun and encounters can unexpectedly escalate to deadly violence in seconds. Some of them should not be police officers. There are many great officers out there just trying to protect their communities.

[saghm]

All it takes is one cop acting badly to ruin things for quite a lot of people though, and the fact that police uniformly circle ranks around any of their members who is accused of something regardless of the validity makes "well, not all of them are bad!" a pretty useless sentiment. I'll consider them individually when they start holding individuals accountable, but not before then.

[Finbarr]

I think you're making some hasty generalizations here. They don't "uniformly" cover for their colleagues. Do you expect the police service to be perfect and never make mistakes? Can you point me towards a single human-run service where that's the case?

[saghm]

Having a monopoly on violence means the bar should be higher for them than for other "human-run services".

[ryanjshaw]

I am not American, but in my extremely dangerous country we have many privately-operated cameras and I don’t know a single person who is against them. We also have strict privacy laws.

So I was disappointed by what felt like very weak arguments in the article. Basically seems to come down it “it can be abused”. But many things can be abused. The solution is to fix the abuse problem.

I’d like to hear stronger arguments against these devices, so that I’m better informed locally.

[whilenot-dev]

> Basically seems to come down it “it can be abused”. But many things can be abused.

This isn't your life pro tip to get you some additional 20% discount on the next McDonald's order, or some ethical kind of abuse that gets you your needed treatment, because the healthcare system is just too nonexistent to care, though.

Any criticism against the use of surveillance technology needs to resort to the rhetoric of COULD, because any other choice of words would put the final nail in any surveillance companies' coffin, with evidence from either whistleblowers or circumvented security issues.

It's certainly hard to look behind the curtains - fair, but in a world where the top companies are selling advertisements by accumulating and correlating large-scale tracking information from every person on earth, regardless whether they're users of the products or not, it should be much harder to shrug off such a possibility as dystopian nonsense than to see it as the fucked up reality (circumvention of fundamental rights included) that it is.

[latexr]

> The solution is to fix the abuse problem.

No, the solution is to fix the societal issues leading people to resort to crime. Surveillance cameras are not a solution, they are a band-aid placed several steps away from the wound.