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datahack 10 hours ago [-]
I didn’t vote for a crime free society and I don’t want a surveillance society. Some random ass CEO does not have the right or authority to tell the rest of us how to run our society: that’s sidestepping Democracy and not ok.
Societies have functioned for millennia without Flock, and there is nothing especially dangerous that it solves.
In fact violent crime in the United States has dropped by a record 9.3% just in 2025 (the largest single year decline in U.S. history). It’s not like there is some pressing crisis.
As far as I am concerned, this guy can get bent.
theglenn88_ 8 hours ago [-]
You misread it. What he said was "for me make more money, I have to convince you to give up your privacy"
What's funny though is the idea that giving up your privacy will remove crime. Ha.
AngryData 12 hours ago [-]
Most common crime is wage theft, don't see how they are going to do anything about that.
tencentshill 3 hours ago [-]
Flock camera in every board room in America, where most crime occurs.
joshAg 12 hours ago [-]
cool. I don't want a crime-free society. It's not that I want crime, it's that at a certain point I'd rather allocate government attention/money/time at issues other than crime because the benefit to that other thing is greater than getting crime asymptotically closer to 0.
StevenWaterman 8 hours ago [-]
Yep. The optimal amount of crime is nonzero
syntaxing 12 hours ago [-]
“ Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
- Benjamin Franklin
frankvdwaal 11 hours ago [-]
Franklin was talking about freedom of the local government to tax, as in "those who surrender their right to decide who gets taxed, merely to obtain some money for immediate defence, risk losing both their political independence and their security."
Funny how a defence of representative government's authority is turned into a warning against government exercising that authority in the wrong way. :)
salawat 6 hours ago [-]
Things can mean more than their original context. Franklin, in fact, was full of bangers in that regard.
TZubiri 6 hours ago [-]
Can we have some of those bangers?
salawat 5 hours ago [-]
You may. Go to Google, or your search engine of choice, and look up the following "wisdom aphorisms Benjamin Franklin".
You may then take the contents within and whittle away the hours delving into them and connecting to the present.
But here's a little sample.
"Security without liberty--is prison."
Also, Poor Richard's Almanac may be worth a perusal. Have fun!
joshstrange 4 hours ago [-]
A “crime-free” society would die. Without some level of “crime” it would stagnate. What do I mean by that? Well just look at US history. Can you imagine how much harder, if not impossible, societal change would be without “crime”?
If you are bewildered, consider the “crime” of black men voting, women voting, LGBTQ+ existing, labor unions, and the list goes on. All of these things would have potentially been impossible in a “crime-less” society. We’ve seen how the FBI has infiltrated civil rights movements in the past, does it really take that much imagination to think they would have just made gathering/organizing illegal if they could? Especially with the surveillance state we have today.
Consider the protests, and yes the rioting, if you were able to stamp that out would we ever make any progress forward?
For real. Has the world forgotten the USA PATRIOT Act?
pixeljam 5 hours ago [-]
London has a dozen cameras per person, totalling to almost 1 million cameras.
As an ancedote to, they recently trialled face recognition cameras in the area I work in.
Given that, why did the police not do anything when my friends phone was stolen?
In comparison, in the much smaller city of Cambridge, the police assigned an officer to the case and went and tracked down my friends' stolen airpods. In London I don't think they even lifted a finger!
If the west is going to go down the authoritarian route, I'd rather it actually worked. I think we have a more fundamental issue that no one is willing to address--because it's not profitable. Removing our privacy achieves nothing for citizens.
onraglanroad 37 minutes ago [-]
> London has a dozen cameras per person, totalling to almost 1 million cameras.
Something wrong with your numbers there.
silverFork 2 hours ago [-]
The fact that London's monitoring in some cases biometric is an issue I guess. From what I understand it was because of IRA. I personally don't think biometric collections are rational and could lead to police state. From what I understand, London's quality of recordings are pretty low and not routed to a single entity and so stolen stuff can not be easily traced!!
al_borland 12 hours ago [-]
Or just keep the people in jail who are committing most of the crime. When someone has been arrested a dozen times, we don’t need cameras tracking them to keep people safe, we need that person removed from polite society.
Flock is a poor solution to a failure of the judicial system.
Dezvous 12 hours ago [-]
We need to solve the root of why crimes happen in the first place to make any difference, not just arrest people for committing crimes.
stratos123 5 hours ago [-]
What's the root of why in 2022, only 327 people were responsible for a third of all shoplifting arrests in NYC?
> Some engage in shoplifting as a trade, while others are driven by addiction or mental illness
> Mr. Filpo said he had become accustomed to escorting people out of the deli who are shoplifting, many of them homeless. Cleaning items like laundry detergent, priced from about $8 to $11, are the items that are stolen most often, he said.
> Shoplifting is a crime of poverty, said Arielle Reid, supervising attorney of the Decarceration Project at the Legal Aid Society, New York’s largest provider of criminal and civil services for indigent clients. It can’t be solved by a continued reliance on “the heavy hand of law enforcement,” she said.
myersj 2 hours ago [-]
Do you think no one else was shoplifting? Feels like who was arrested for it and those who were responsible for most of the actual shoplifting, punished or not, may not be the same groups, and using one as if it's directly correlated, without any evidence, is quite silly.
al_borland 11 hours ago [-]
Something needs to happen between now and a cultural shift that will take decades.
Compassion for the criminals comes at the expense of the peace, safety, and well-being of everyone else. There seems to be little compassion for the vast majority who act right, but have to put up with all of it, which ends up eroding public trust and keeps us on a downward spiral.
nielsbot 9 hours ago [-]
> There seems to be little compassion for the vast majority who act right, but have to put up with all of it, which ends up eroding public trust and keeps us on a downward spiral.
Everything in here is unfounded. Unless you have sources?
al_borland 3 hours ago [-]
Recidivism rates for those committing violent crimes are over 60%[0]… and those are just the ones who got caught.
Less violent crimes still erode public trust. Do I really need to dig up a study on this, when we have to show our receipts to someone at the door at Costco and Walmart, have Flock cameras going up everywhere, extra cameras in your face when in front of certain grocery items, personal care items behind lock and key, etc. These are all signs of a lower-trust society. When it gets bad enough we see retail stores simply closing, food deserts, etc… we have seen all these things in high-crime areas for a long time.
Companies wouldn’t waste money on escalating measures of inventory security if their inventory wasn’t at risk, based on their own shrinkage data.
The worse the crime is, the harder the punishment but only until a certain level, after which the crime is above the law.
JohnFen 4 hours ago [-]
If that's the price of a crime-free society, then I don't want a crime-free society.
Although I don't think that's the choice anyway. A crime-free society will simply not happen.
m463 10 hours ago [-]
or move to japan, which does thing a different way
I remember being in a fast food restaurant. A lady left her purse on her table and went to the bathroom. 8 year old kids walk to school in the city (with backpacks almost as big as they are).
or another way of thinking of it: what will be done for you will be done to you
juiceland 5 hours ago [-]
Japan is a totalitarian state where the enforcers are the citizens. This is great for tourists, who are happy to stick out like sore thumbs for the novelty of it and Japanese are all to happy to oblige in limited circumstances. Make no mistake, though, if you are not 100% Japanese, born in Japan, you will never be Japanese. You will never be accepted fully. You will always be excluded or out right discriminated against, and it’s legal.
The US has many flaws, including its most recent speed run into out and out fascism. But it is also the greatest immigrant integrator ever.
xtajv 12 hours ago [-]
Infringing on 4th amendment rights sounds like a crime to me.
donatj 6 hours ago [-]
Why would anyone want a crime free society. I think anyone but a small child understands that a ton of things now and historically have been illegal that really just shouldn't be. Society functions as a whole through lack of enforcement of a large percentage of current laws.
silverFork 12 hours ago [-]
Well there are many issues and that is ownership and who gets to see the data and who gets to delete the data. If it is ever going to work, the ownership has to be public and not private. The videos should be impossible to delete.. The camera spread should be the same everywhere and would collect data non-selectively and only in public spaces. The data could only become visible to viewers only if certain criteria's are met and not continuous.
nielsbot 9 hours ago [-]
hint: it's not going to work
silverFork 4 hours ago [-]
They have it in UK and Australia you know.
feverzsj 11 hours ago [-]
Says who hides his house on google map.
bob1029 9 hours ago [-]
The only thing I've seen improved by flock cameras would be my local shopping experience. Retail parking lots and freeway entrances seem reasonable. Everywhere else these cameras feel like absolute oppression.
There was a period of time where walking into Home Depot was like gambling in a casino with regard to inventory not being tampered with. It was genuinely really bad. There was a day when I couldn't find any sand, despite their system indicating sufficient inventory. I have to assume people were just walking out with it on carts. You'd have to steal a lot of sand to catch a felony charge. Seeing four flock cameras as you turn the corner in front of the store is probably helping to send a strong "please don't steal from me" vibe.
Kevin_Flynn 5 hours ago [-]
There was a day when I couldn't find any sand, despite their system indicating sufficient inventory. I have to assume people were just walking out with it on carts. You'd have to steal a lot of sand to catch a felony charge.
I'm guessing the sand was on a pallet out back. It's the type of item that doesn't get stored on the top rack, like other items do. Too heavy.
ForHackernews 8 hours ago [-]
I don't think tweakers robbing home depot sand to buy meth care about cameras.
fifilura 11 hours ago [-]
So much stupidity from people who make every choice binary.
Woodi 12 hours ago [-]
Somehow "Minority Raport" was about crime... And stupidity build into oversight system.
And under eg. communism where oversight is balooned to society self-harm you still have crime. And "bribery" is alias for communism and other dictatorships.
So, it is just better to give up on Flock spy[hard]ware.
spottedmarley 6 hours ago [-]
A false premise
Mass surveillance itself is a high crime. A society without crime will have no mass surveillance.
13 hours ago [-]
jesterson 10 hours ago [-]
This is such a weird framing.
The problem with Flock and similar solutions is not about what they collect, but more about who and how uses it. The same applies to pretty much all government surveillance - it is acceptable it is collected, but absolutely unacceptable that it often accessed and used in ways obscure to person of interest.
verdverm 12 hours ago [-]
I'll take freedom and the cons that come with it. I doubt very much that crime-free is even possible, especially the oligarchy crimes
4 hours ago [-]
antibull 12 hours ago [-]
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bjorn_identity 12 hours ago [-]
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rdevilla 12 hours ago [-]
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nickphx 10 hours ago [-]
he is a real thought leader.. /s
bdangubic 13 hours ago [-]
He’s right, the countries that have lowest crime rates have flock cameras everywhere and zero privacy, this is the way /s
Societies have functioned for millennia without Flock, and there is nothing especially dangerous that it solves.
In fact violent crime in the United States has dropped by a record 9.3% just in 2025 (the largest single year decline in U.S. history). It’s not like there is some pressing crisis.
As far as I am concerned, this guy can get bent.
What's funny though is the idea that giving up your privacy will remove crime. Ha.
- Benjamin Franklin
Funny how a defence of representative government's authority is turned into a warning against government exercising that authority in the wrong way. :)
You may then take the contents within and whittle away the hours delving into them and connecting to the present.
But here's a little sample.
"Security without liberty--is prison."
Also, Poor Richard's Almanac may be worth a perusal. Have fun!
If you are bewildered, consider the “crime” of black men voting, women voting, LGBTQ+ existing, labor unions, and the list goes on. All of these things would have potentially been impossible in a “crime-less” society. We’ve seen how the FBI has infiltrated civil rights movements in the past, does it really take that much imagination to think they would have just made gathering/organizing illegal if they could? Especially with the surveillance state we have today.
Consider the protests, and yes the rioting, if you were able to stamp that out would we ever make any progress forward?
As an ancedote to, they recently trialled face recognition cameras in the area I work in.
Given that, why did the police not do anything when my friends phone was stolen?
In comparison, in the much smaller city of Cambridge, the police assigned an officer to the case and went and tracked down my friends' stolen airpods. In London I don't think they even lifted a finger!
If the west is going to go down the authoritarian route, I'd rather it actually worked. I think we have a more fundamental issue that no one is willing to address--because it's not profitable. Removing our privacy achieves nothing for citizens.
Something wrong with your numbers there.
Flock is a poor solution to a failure of the judicial system.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/15/nyregion/shoplifting-arre...
> Some engage in shoplifting as a trade, while others are driven by addiction or mental illness
> Mr. Filpo said he had become accustomed to escorting people out of the deli who are shoplifting, many of them homeless. Cleaning items like laundry detergent, priced from about $8 to $11, are the items that are stolen most often, he said.
> Shoplifting is a crime of poverty, said Arielle Reid, supervising attorney of the Decarceration Project at the Legal Aid Society, New York’s largest provider of criminal and civil services for indigent clients. It can’t be solved by a continued reliance on “the heavy hand of law enforcement,” she said.
Compassion for the criminals comes at the expense of the peace, safety, and well-being of everyone else. There seems to be little compassion for the vast majority who act right, but have to put up with all of it, which ends up eroding public trust and keeps us on a downward spiral.
Everything in here is unfounded. Unless you have sources?
Less violent crimes still erode public trust. Do I really need to dig up a study on this, when we have to show our receipts to someone at the door at Costco and Walmart, have Flock cameras going up everywhere, extra cameras in your face when in front of certain grocery items, personal care items behind lock and key, etc. These are all signs of a lower-trust society. When it gets bad enough we see retail stores simply closing, food deserts, etc… we have seen all these things in high-crime areas for a long time.
Companies wouldn’t waste money on escalating measures of inventory security if their inventory wasn’t at risk, based on their own shrinkage data.
[0] https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/recidivism-am...
Although I don't think that's the choice anyway. A crime-free society will simply not happen.
I remember being in a fast food restaurant. A lady left her purse on her table and went to the bathroom. 8 year old kids walk to school in the city (with backpacks almost as big as they are).
or another way of thinking of it: what will be done for you will be done to you
The US has many flaws, including its most recent speed run into out and out fascism. But it is also the greatest immigrant integrator ever.
There was a period of time where walking into Home Depot was like gambling in a casino with regard to inventory not being tampered with. It was genuinely really bad. There was a day when I couldn't find any sand, despite their system indicating sufficient inventory. I have to assume people were just walking out with it on carts. You'd have to steal a lot of sand to catch a felony charge. Seeing four flock cameras as you turn the corner in front of the store is probably helping to send a strong "please don't steal from me" vibe.
I'm guessing the sand was on a pallet out back. It's the type of item that doesn't get stored on the top rack, like other items do. Too heavy.
And under eg. communism where oversight is balooned to society self-harm you still have crime. And "bribery" is alias for communism and other dictatorships.
So, it is just better to give up on Flock spy[hard]ware.
Mass surveillance itself is a high crime. A society without crime will have no mass surveillance.
The problem with Flock and similar solutions is not about what they collect, but more about who and how uses it. The same applies to pretty much all government surveillance - it is acceptable it is collected, but absolutely unacceptable that it often accessed and used in ways obscure to person of interest.