He's pretty open in this video about how Flock is far from alone in this space, and he's just using them as an example because they're so popular and flagrantly abusive.
In what way this is an illustration of Flock's "flagrancy"? I'm seriously asking. I'm not a Flock supporter. My point is that cameras just as sensitive as the ones he shows here are deliberately public on the Internet.
His other two (much longer) videos go into those details. This one is more of a quick update.
Just to give you a sense of the kind of company we're dealing with, the CEO of Flock called the guy who made a Flock camera map an "antifa terrorist". He's unhinged.
Thanks! I know it's a big ask, but can you give me pointers (rough timestamps, whatever). A friend told me to watch this video for the distinctive Flock badness, and the time I spent on that was not rewarded.
It's also possible I'm just remembering Flock-specific stuff from other sources, and the things he shows in these videos are more general issues with security camera companies (using Flock as the example).
It would be great if this stuff was (also?) published as blog posts so that it could be easily skimmed...
Thanks! I looked, but that's a segment about someone at Flock accusing anti-Flock people of being "antifa" or terrorists. I'm about as anti-Flock as I think it's possible to be (having been instrumental in killing it my Chicagoland suburb) and I'm not not sure what to do with "someone at Flock said something dumb".
In case it helps: my thing here is, the video we were commenting on thread seems to be about all public cameras, not just AI-assisted smart cameras or even security cameras more broadly. That was my complaint.
It's not that I don't think there's a video to do about 60 open Flock admin consoles; I'm sure there is. I'm just not sure what the implications are, because that video spent all its time talking about stuff that is trivially true of all public cameras, many of which are indexed on Google already, not through Google-dork searches for open console but instead with searches like "open IP camera live streams".
(I was struck by this in part because I vividly remember when Russia invaded Ukraine flipping between dozens of different live camera streams in places like Mariupol; that's obviously not the US, but you can do very similar stuff in the US, and on a lot more than 60 random misconfigured Flock cameras).
I think there may be something to the PTZ on the new Flock cameras that makes this worse? I just think he should make a better, sharper video case against them.
It's the attitude and marketing. Maybe not "flagrant" but "ambitious," "aggressive," and "expansive." I don't know the name of any other public surveillance/camera company, but I've heard about Flock, and the same is probably true of any of my neighbors who are even the least bit tech-following. They are also ambitiously funded for growth and expansion and their outward press attitude is congruent.
Other camera companies would like to see steady year-over-year growth in camera sales. Flock would like to see the world blanketed in 24/7 surveillance.
They make themselves a lightning rod as a business strategy.
If Flock vanished off the Earth tomorrow I think we'd see exactly the same ALPR penetration. Municipalities aren't buying these things because Flock's so good at selling them; they're buying because the ALPR vendors have an extremely compelling pitch! Two of our neighboring municipalities have non-Flock ALPRs; I think you're going to see a lot of non-Flock ALPR penetration in progressive-leaning suburbs, for instance, because progressives are all het up about Flock.
(I helped get Flock cancelled in Oak Park, where I live, and before that led the passage of what I believe to be the most restrictive ALPR regs/ordinance package in the country. I'm not an ALPR booster.)
But I'm going to keep saying: my thing about this video is that he's describing mostly things that are true of all public IP cameras. There are zillions of those!
I think everyone in this thread can agree that surveillance cameras should be fought against, no matter whose brand is stamped on them. Flock is still a better than average target because of the attitude they project and because of name recognition.
I pushed back on our Flock deployment because the particulars of its deployment meant that we were curbing more cars driven by innocent Black drivers than we were responding to any meaningful crimes, and because when we had Flock's alerts enabled, the net effect was to take our selectively-recruited, highly-trained, very expensive police force and turn them into failure-to-appear-warrant debt collectors for nearby suburbs with far worse police departments.
It was not some nerd† principled stand against "surveillance". My experience working on the public policy of this stuff is that when you take a stand against "surveillance", normal people --- and I'm in what I believe to be one of the 10 most progressive municipalities in the country, the most progressive municipality in Chicagoland --- look at you like you're a space alien.
