>“The city of Dunwoody is one city in our demo partner program,” a Flock spokesperson told 404 Media. “The cities involved in this program have authorized select Flock employees to demonstrate new products and features as we develop them in partnership with the city.
the two things i still dont understand are:
1) why is there not a dedicated demo environment for demos, like practically every other software? i cant think of any reason why they need live data for a demonstration. (this might be addressed in the article, but the paragraph where it looks like it might be mentioned is also where the article is cut off)
2) is the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta (MCJCCA) city-owned? if not, the city should not be able to give permission to use the cameras. if so, was the MJCCA notified that the cameras would be used for demo purposes? were the parents notified?
Cluelessness seems more likely. They'd have to be pretty stupid to use a live video for a demo in this way - there is almost literally no benefit compared to something more carefully curated, pre-recorded and staged. The money saved would not justify the risk of something weird happening on camera and disrupting the sale. Or, case in point, the current headline.
If they want a creepy vibe approach or to appeal to the powerful paedophile market or whatever they're trying to do here then it is a lot easier to just hire some actors.
404 media is massively underplaying what happened.
> [Bob Carter - Flock VP of Strategic Relations and BD] also has some interesting searches. On September 30th, 2025 - Bob looked at just one camera. This camera is in the gymnastics room of the JCC.
> [Randy Gluck - Flock Growth/Strategy] clicked through 3 private cameras at the JCC before he settled on JCC camera ‘Main Pool Right’. It was over 3 hours later before his next view on traffic cameras.
> [James Harding] The 1/7 session is the more notable one. He manually clicked through every JCC baseball field camera one per second, then paused 16 seconds before hitting Fitness, then Front Pool(1), Front Pool(2), Front Pool(3) — with 4-7 second pauses between each pool camera. Then after browsing other cameras, came back to Holding Cell 1 and 2, then Brook Run Playground 4 times over 33 seconds, then went back to Fitness again 12 minutes later. [...] his saved dashboard includes both holding cells and all three pool cameras, which is an unusual set of cameras to keep on a monitoring dashboard.
> [Yoruel Sanguillen] was manually clicking through JCC cameras one per second — baseball fields, cafe, camp cameras, clock tower — then hit Fitline Desk and paused 58 seconds. Moved to Front Pool(1) and paused 47 seconds. Then FitLine Weight, Fitness, paused 72 seconds, then Fitness North Exit and rapidly through all three Front Pool cameras in 3 seconds before moving to Guard House.
> [Kayce Lowe] came back on 2/14 - her first views were Gymnastics M/H front view left, Fitness, Gymnastics, Fitline Hall, FitLine Weight. She picked up exactly where she left off.
Note these people are targeting a community center across multiple months.
dang or moderators, can this be resubmitted with the excerpts here?
Even if there's an unseen side to this story that somehow contextualizes this in a less nefarious light, it deserves more attention than it got on first posting.
Reading the original after 404 media's characterization was shocking: it's simply not telling the same story.
They all should be prosecuted and jailed for life for the egregious harm and, if citizens, their blatant treason of the nation and the constitution.
I don’t think people are aware just how bad things are with these tyrannical and dystopian Flock cameras and the tyrannical illegitimate, treasonous government officials that install them.
They are tracking your egress and arrival in your neighborhood, your patterns of life, your coming and going, your personal movements. They’re tracking your travel on the interstate. They’re tracking your travel on rural roads and everything in between. They’re tracking every single bottleneck, choke point, and intersection.
Even the Deflock.me type sites miss a critical point; that it’s not the cameras themselves at specific points, it’s that the cameras are placed specifically to catch every single path anywhere. A better defrock.me type map would show all the paths, i.e., roads, that are fully tracked.
This is tyranny in modern form… a tiny little box with a solar panel that provides tyranny and totalitarian control no tyrant or dictator or megalomaniac psychopath all throughout history could have ever even dreamt of. This is not American. It is tyranny. It is the final nail in the coffin of this is not ended immediately.
Unfortunately, I believe the psychopathic, narcissistic ruling class will pull out all the stops to rationalize why this clear tyrannical and treasonous violation of the constitution is really Constitutional, in spite of your lying eyes and the fact that every single founder of America would be irate that we haven’t disposed of all these tyrants by now.
And no, mods, that’s not flame baiting. It’s just reality, objective reality. Regardless of whether proper want to rationalize and elude themselves into how it’s really not all that bad that the tyrants that rape and murder children by the dozens have a totalitarian surveillance stranglehold around everyone else’s neck.
I’ve seen dozens of these types of demos and it’s always live footage from a semi public place like this.
It’s much easier to just show live footage rather than rig up canned looping footage.
It’s pretty astonishing how no one watching the demo with me seems to care. No one asking “Hey, will you just be able to do this with our video if we buy from you?”
It's just not very concerning. The buyer presumably cares about safety and their risk model are guns. Having a vendor show a couple of seconds of live footage to a potential buyer probably doesn't rank high in their threat model.
I would think they would have a real set of cameras for demos, but like in their own office or something. Not pointed at unwitting children. So dystopian
Generally on multi-tenant SaaS kind of systems you do have testing environments, but they're filled with garbage data, plus they are usually running pre-release versions that aren't yet ready for the light of day. It's where QA and CI/CD operates. Sales demos are generally done on a production environment, but on dedicated tenants that are set up with "nice looking" well-organized data (e.g. company is named Contoso, users have names like "Jason Anderson" and "Maria Ramirez"). Testing environments have users with names like "1111111" and "`<script>alert(window.domain);`"
I think it's probably a just laziness here, which makes some sense - it would be easy to set up 5 Flock cameras on the sales demo tenant sitting in a storage room at HQ, but it would make for incredibly uncompelling demo. Rather than set up a pipeline to run stock footage in as a camera feed, they got lazy and used real tenants.
Sounds like the testing stage is sticky? It could exist without the tooling to reset it to a known baseline and/or create multiple environments which would enable safe demos.
The camera's main selling point is instilling fear: better not misbehave, because Big Brother is watching. The creepier it is, the easier it is to sell to powerful people looking for invasive control.
Surveillance cameras have been everywhere since the early 90s and lo and behold crime still exists!
Turns out people are either under the influence or simply amazingly stupid.
And obviously there is a capacity problem: NYPD isn't going after every purse snatcher.
Dunwoody asked the JCC for camera access in case of live shooter events but then used it for many other reasons.
“ In September 2024, Dunwoody PD Major Patrick Krieg requested access to the private securiy cameras at a community center on behalf of the department. When the community center pushed back and demanded to know what the access would be used for, Krieg was unambiguous: “This is solely for real-time critical incident response.” The community center agreed to share their cameras, including cameras in gymnastics rooms, pools, and fitness studios, with Dunwoody PD for emergencies”
"So here's a data sharing scenario, prospect agency"
"Isn't that illegal in [insert our state]?"
"Well, that's for your agency and your state to determine".
"Will that feature be turned off for our agency if it is is prohibited or illegal in our state?"
"Why would we turn it off? You'll use the system responsibly, right? Why don't we take a quick coffee break and after that, we can go through data sharing in the system."
They're appealing to entities that have surveillance and voyeuristic fetishes, showing that you can ubiquitously invade privacy in real-time, even in spaces society considers sensitive, is a feature worth demonstrating if you want to get contracts from psychopaths.
A good live demo would be to set it up pointing to a fishtank. You fire up the demo, you see the fish. No privacy invasion but everyone gets to see how the camera behaves.
Unfortunately, it does need to show that you can identify individual people in large rooms, long hallways, outdoor facilities, and vehicles or plate #'s in parking lots, roads, etc.
But the live demo should be Flock's own offices, not their customers.
That little man has eroded any respect that he might have been a priori granted with his publicly documented descent into a vibecoding mania. I'm still in disbelief that the very silly photographer guy is the CEO of ycombinator. Ah well, it was a good era.
isnt it the same sort of reason you guys have actors for presidents? its about how well you can sell the message, not how good you are behind the scenes, thats what normies are for.
Thats a big part of it. Customers go into a flock demo with motivated reasoning. "Im scared. Im not sure i should be this scared."
Seeing a vulnerable set of kids happily playing and hearing a confident voice say "A shooter could end all this. We can prevent it" validates that and closes the sale.
If a cautious pragmatist goes to the demo thinking "i know crime stats have declined for decades and im concerned about misuse of technology." Then a performatively confident person says "this is a component of a massive surveillance state ripe for misuse. It will give us footage of crimes and only stop a small percentage of them," how well do you think it would sell?
That strategy didn't work out well for Makerbot. Tech companies actually need competent leadership with a tech background. You can't pretend they are interchangeable with some run of the mill commodities producer and adopt the same leadership practices.
To the best of my knowledge Linus Torvalds isn't posting walls of text to Github breathlessly announcing he's 810x-ed [1] his "logical lines of code/day" compared to what he was doing in 2013.
And, lest you think generating "600,000 lines of production code in 60 days" [2] is potentially problematic, has also fully solved the primary failure modes of AI coding identified by Andrej Karpathy, once and for all: "Karpathy's four failure modes? Already covered." [1]
As someone who has experienced mania, including with a programming bent specifically, it's hard not to raise an eyebrow at the idiosyncratic human-y bits of his thinking floating up from the sea of em-dashes and it's not X it's Y in his manifestos.
Plus volunteering this [3] in an interview:
“I sleep, like, four hours a night right now,” he told his interviewer, fellow VC Bill Gurley, during an onstage interview Saturday. “I have cyber psychosis, but I think a third of the CEOs that I know have it as well,” he joked about his current AI obsession. (Tan’s assistant confirmed to us that he was joking. ...)
It’s like I was able to re-create my startup that took $10 million in VC capital and 10 people, and I worked on that for two years, and I took anti-narcoleptics — I remember, you know, sort of being on modafinil...
It's it anything like the comments I see on here defending Flock, it'll just be a bunch of attempting to scare people with the idea of crime, and disparaging anyone in favor of privacy as being pro-crime.
Presumably there are people that have access to it. And if you are demoing software that connects to cameras, then someone gave the sales guy access to those cameras.
I’m also assuming those probably weren’t the only cameras…
I imagine its for security. Ie if there are reports of robbery, you can find who did it. I know its not that popular in the states but its common elsewhere, but with better controls. (well, "better" as in controlled by shitty IoT devices)
I think the thing with flock is just how poorly put together everything is. They are obviously insecure, and the entire network has massive holes in it. Yet its still being rolled out.
Robbery may not be the main reason for a camera. Having a video of any incident that happens (broken equipment leading to injury, angry parent, etc.) would be valuable.
Looting is done for fun too. It must suck to have kids show up for practice in the morning and some of the essential gear is gone. It doesn’t matter if it is inexpensive to replace, you still have to cancel class and take a day or two up replace it, file a police report, etc
Right, but why is a Flock camera a better approach than: insurance, on-prem camera, etc. The Flock camera doesn't prevent theft. It increases remote viewing (especially if it's used in a demo to strangers they aren't customers yet, doubly especially if those strange customers are doing it because the might want to see young gymnasts)
normally a condition of insurance is that you have CCTV and other preventative systems in place.
> The Flock camera doesn't prevent theft.
Not directly, but it does increase the chance of the perpetrator getting caught (not flock, the camera) in theory this means that less people are about to steal/break stuff.
Also sign posts with saying that "this place has surveillance" tends to reduce opportunists.
On a side note I would recommend volunteering at a community centre/sports/scouts/library. First its extremely rewarding, and secondly you learn about how things are in the real world "for the normals"
At least for private households, it's not mandatory to have surveillance cameras at home. If you do have one though, they will demand footage and can deny your claim if it was off, or worse. https://youtu.be/UMIwNiwQewQ?t=903
Any sane business that has lots of random people coming in will have cameras recording (except in bathrooms/locker rooms). There is too much opportunity for crime, and a camera is cheap. If something happens you pull up the feed from the last month and give the interesting parts to the police; most often you just delete everything after a month. More than one crime has been solved this way.
That said, if there wasn't a crime the camera footage should be deleted.
The problem isn't having cameras. Its that these cameras should be closed circuit with data residing locally, not being sent to a 3rd party that has full access to the video streams, and who processes them, combines them with other parties, resells data from them, or hands them over without a warrant!
Ok, and bear with me, but what if that third party needs to do a sales demo and the client can only be convinced by seeing live footage of stranger’s children in a gymnastics class or at the pool in their swimsuits?
I really don’t see how we can avoid having our cities hand over this data sight unseen to a company with a history of enabling stalkers and overzealous policing.
I haven’t checked this, but based on the enthusiasm for this technology, I assume that crime clearance rates are near 100% in cities with these cameras.
> There is too much opportunity for crime, and a camera is cheap.
The camera doesn't prevent crime. It just displaces it. Even when it doesn't it will not prevent the crime from happening. It _may_ provide you an opportunity to prosecute the person who committed it.
In reality the only real reason to have one is to reduce your insurance premiums.
> crime has been solved
A perpetrator was potentially caught and now has to be tried or negotiated into a plea. I understand we use the term "solve" as a term of art but it's a particularly poor one. It speaks to the need of police to clear their books of negative indicators and not to any first order desirable social outcome.
> That said
That said, if during a demo, you access another customers equipment, I will _never_ do business with you. That's just extremely unprofessional behavior.
> The camera doesn't prevent crime. It just displaces it.
That's why I periodically leave a bunch of bicycles with cheap locks downtown. They act like a kind of criminal sacrificial anode, reducing crime in the rest of the city.
Cops don't enforce drug laws in particular areas because wealthy people live there and not only will arresting wealthy people and their kids get those guys a call from their boss, but the courts will never make any money off prosecuting wealthy people that can afford to drop thousands of dollars on a lawyers and the court case.
Drug laws are enforced in poor areas tho because poor people can't afford good lawyers or drag the process out for years and potentially cost the court tens of thousands on just a single case, they instead get give a disinterested public defender, or maybe a bottom tier of private lawyer if they can afford it, against a prosecutor who's entire job is to ram cases and plea deals through the system as fast as possible to make a profit and fund the court and local cops. Judges that don't convict enough get the boots, prosecutors who aren't big enough dicks get the boot, public defenders that don't recommend a ton of plea deals or are too good at their job don't get offered as many public defense cases.
Because many of us who live in cities have experience with police being completely feckless.
I have experienced multiple times when I tell police that I have video evidence of a crime happening as well as evidence of the identity of the criminal and they won’t even look at it. I once had a cop tell me that I shouldn’t bother with a report with witnesses and evidence and a known perpetrator since it would never get investigated. That cop got punished for telling the truth, although they were 100% correct, the detective on the case never even opened the file. The detective was not punished.
> The camera doesn't prevent crime. It just displaces it. Even when it doesn't it will not prevent the crime from happening. It _may_ provide you an opportunity to prosecute the person who committed it.
And that is worth something in itself, at least in areas where disputes between people are the norm. Gyms in particular suffer from theft to sexual harassment.
In many cases the people deploying these cameras have no idea the feeds are being resold to Flock. It’s not like they have a consumer brand and people are saying, “oh yeah, Flock, they’re the license plate camera folks…I definitely want one of those in my locker room.”
We are opening up a wellness clinic and we were planning to use a managed service company for internet, network, and security. I was appalled by the managed services suggestions. Privacy of our patients and their data is critical, and the managed service company wants to send all of our feeds to third parties and give third parties direct access to our network.
We decided this was a privacy and security risk, and have gone in a completely different direction, but it would not surprise me if most businesses used one of these companies and just went with whatever they suggested without understanding at all what is at stake or who has access to the data.
It's "hilarious" how incompetent some companies are.
One background check firm used by a previous employer of mine sent me an email saying:
"Hi FireBeyond, doing a background check, just want to verify that all these details for you are correct:
full legal name, address, dob, full ssn, phone number, USCIS#..."
and then the kicker:
"and also want to make sure we have the correct email address for you"
Oh. You just sent all this shit to an email address and "oh, let us know if this your email address"?!?
Meanwhile, they've found my fiancee on FB and are messaging her out of the blue to "verify" she knows me (to be clear, this was meant to be a standard background check, not a security clearance or anything similar).
To their credit, that employer, when I told them all this, were as horrified as I was and fired them as their background check provider.
Most often the business hires a security contractor to take care of it, and signs the contract without understanding the terms. You should be able to trust your suppliers enough that you can do the above, they are the experts in the thing (cameras in this thing, but could be things like plumbing or accounting) and you have your own business to run. "Should" is key though, all too often someone doesn't do right by their clients.
>Most often the business hires a security contractor to take care of it, and signs the contract without understanding the terms.
The bulk of the responsibility here would lie on whoever signed I think. It's one thing to click "I agree" when you are making a SaaS account for downloading cat videos. But at a job, you are getting paid to read these things and to make informed decisions.
> Or are you just saying the person placing the cameras is decoupled from the person making the decision to aggregate them all.
That's exactly what's happening.
People are buying webcams which are cheap and have in their ToS something to the effect of "we get to sell everything the camera can see". Which, in turn, allows them to partner with Flock and sell video footage directly to them.
Consider the fact that at one point, Amazon partnered with Flock to sell their ring camera footage to Flock. [1] It only got botched because of the creepy superbowl commercial selling the spying as "finding lost puppies".
So there are people sitting in cubicles in various companies/orgs that flock sells the access to and they are watching your children on a screen.
Usually the government is trying to wrap the spying/privacy breaches by "save the children", but this time if you want to save your children from some older dude watching them on a screen, you actually have to be against this privacy nightmare.
Isolated information isn't a problem. If it takes effort to access information then mass information abuse doesn't scale, it is free of cost, and consequence, access that is the issue here. Flock is attempting to destroy barriers to access around real time surveillance. There is a clear distinction between someone having a business surveillance system that points at the street that the police can get access to with some sort of device specific request and no-requirement needed brows the world access that Flock is pushing. This is different. This is evil.
What other companies are pushing into this space with similar offerings, but flying under the radar compared to all the bad press Flock has been getting?
This is massively underplaying what happened. From the original source:
> [Randy Gluck - Flock Growth/Strategy] clicked through 3 private cameras at the JCC before he settled on JCC camera ‘Main Pool Right’. It was over 3 hours later before his next view on traffic cameras.
> [Bob Carter - Flock VP of Strategic Relations and BD] also has some interesting searches. On September 30th, 2025 - Bob looked at just one camera. This camera is in the gymnastics room of the JCC.
> [James Harding] The 1/7 session is the more notable one. He manually clicked through every JCC baseball field camera one per second, then paused 16 seconds before hitting Fitness, then Front Pool(1), Front Pool(2), Front Pool(3) — with 4-7 second pauses between each pool camera. Then after browsing other cameras, came back to Holding Cell 1 and 2, then Brook Run Playground 4 times over 33 seconds, then went back to Fitness again 12 minutes later. [...] his saved dashboard includes both holding cells and all three pool cameras, which is an unusual set of cameras to keep on a monitoring dashboard.
> [Yoruel Sanguillen] was manually clicking through JCC cameras one per second — baseball fields, cafe, camp cameras, clock tower — then hit Fitline Desk and paused 58 seconds. Moved to Front Pool(1) and paused 47 seconds. Then FitLine Weight, Fitness, paused 72 seconds, then Fitness North Exit and rapidly through all three Front Pool cameras in 3 seconds before moving to Guard House.
> [Kayce Lowe] came back on 2/14 - her first views were Gymnastics M/H front view left, Fitness, Gymnastics, Fitline Hall, FitLine Weight. She picked up exactly where she left off.
This reads like Flock employees are individually using the camera system to watch people in sensitive settings.
I'm unsure why 404 media is portraying this as related to a demo, it's seems like these are individuals acting independently.
An underrated comment. But sunlight is the best disinfectant.
I think it's the fundamental issue with these cameras, that it takes pictures of us, but we ourselves cannot access it. Even though it was us who has paid for it!
If the government has access to it and it isn't otherwise publicly broadcast, yes. It is straight up illegal for the government to do it itself, just because they found a loophole of buying the surveillance they want from private institutions instead of using their own camera doesn't mean it is right or should be allowed to continue.
And you better believe Flock considers it a sales channel to also sell to data brokers and such institutions with the aim of having them be able to share data with agencies who'd otherwise be prohibited (and they also won't turn off such sharing functionality just because you're an agency in that state - that's not their job).
The incentives of panopticon company seem peversly aligned to bring out the worst in humanity and fearmonger politicisns into endless societsl scaffolding.
>“The city of Dunwoody is one city in our demo partner program,” a Flock spokesperson told 404 Media. “The cities involved in this program have authorized select Flock employees to demonstrate new products and features as we develop them in partnership with the city.
the two things i still dont understand are:
1) why is there not a dedicated demo environment for demos, like practically every other software? i cant think of any reason why they need live data for a demonstration. (this might be addressed in the article, but the paragraph where it looks like it might be mentioned is also where the article is cut off)
2) is the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta (MCJCCA) city-owned? if not, the city should not be able to give permission to use the cameras. if so, was the MJCCA notified that the cameras would be used for demo purposes? were the parents notified?
Answer to 1 is simple and obvious based on Flocks previous actions: they have no idea what they are doing and are reacting instead of planning.
or they have exact idea what they are doing and don't give a shit
Cluelessness seems more likely. They'd have to be pretty stupid to use a live video for a demo in this way - there is almost literally no benefit compared to something more carefully curated, pre-recorded and staged. The money saved would not justify the risk of something weird happening on camera and disrupting the sale. Or, case in point, the current headline.
If they want a creepy vibe approach or to appeal to the powerful paedophile market or whatever they're trying to do here then it is a lot easier to just hire some actors.
I implore you to read the original source.
https://jasonhunyar.substack.com/p/why-are-flock-employees-w...
404 media is massively underplaying what happened.
> [Bob Carter - Flock VP of Strategic Relations and BD] also has some interesting searches. On September 30th, 2025 - Bob looked at just one camera. This camera is in the gymnastics room of the JCC.
> [Randy Gluck - Flock Growth/Strategy] clicked through 3 private cameras at the JCC before he settled on JCC camera ‘Main Pool Right’. It was over 3 hours later before his next view on traffic cameras.
> [James Harding] The 1/7 session is the more notable one. He manually clicked through every JCC baseball field camera one per second, then paused 16 seconds before hitting Fitness, then Front Pool(1), Front Pool(2), Front Pool(3) — with 4-7 second pauses between each pool camera. Then after browsing other cameras, came back to Holding Cell 1 and 2, then Brook Run Playground 4 times over 33 seconds, then went back to Fitness again 12 minutes later. [...] his saved dashboard includes both holding cells and all three pool cameras, which is an unusual set of cameras to keep on a monitoring dashboard.
> [Yoruel Sanguillen] was manually clicking through JCC cameras one per second — baseball fields, cafe, camp cameras, clock tower — then hit Fitline Desk and paused 58 seconds. Moved to Front Pool(1) and paused 47 seconds. Then FitLine Weight, Fitness, paused 72 seconds, then Fitness North Exit and rapidly through all three Front Pool cameras in 3 seconds before moving to Guard House.
> [Kayce Lowe] came back on 2/14 - her first views were Gymnastics M/H front view left, Fitness, Gymnastics, Fitline Hall, FitLine Weight. She picked up exactly where she left off.
Note these people are targeting a community center across multiple months.
dang or moderators, can this be resubmitted with the excerpts here?
Even if there's an unseen side to this story that somehow contextualizes this in a less nefarious light, it deserves more attention than it got on first posting.
Reading the original after 404 media's characterization was shocking: it's simply not telling the same story.
Jesus Christ.
It is unfortunate to all of us, but I think you are right. And the more they go with the conversation they are the victims the worse it will get.
They all should be prosecuted and jailed for life for the egregious harm and, if citizens, their blatant treason of the nation and the constitution.
I don’t think people are aware just how bad things are with these tyrannical and dystopian Flock cameras and the tyrannical illegitimate, treasonous government officials that install them.
They are tracking your egress and arrival in your neighborhood, your patterns of life, your coming and going, your personal movements. They’re tracking your travel on the interstate. They’re tracking your travel on rural roads and everything in between. They’re tracking every single bottleneck, choke point, and intersection.
Even the Deflock.me type sites miss a critical point; that it’s not the cameras themselves at specific points, it’s that the cameras are placed specifically to catch every single path anywhere. A better defrock.me type map would show all the paths, i.e., roads, that are fully tracked.
This is tyranny in modern form… a tiny little box with a solar panel that provides tyranny and totalitarian control no tyrant or dictator or megalomaniac psychopath all throughout history could have ever even dreamt of. This is not American. It is tyranny. It is the final nail in the coffin of this is not ended immediately.
Unfortunately, I believe the psychopathic, narcissistic ruling class will pull out all the stops to rationalize why this clear tyrannical and treasonous violation of the constitution is really Constitutional, in spite of your lying eyes and the fact that every single founder of America would be irate that we haven’t disposed of all these tyrants by now.
And no, mods, that’s not flame baiting. It’s just reality, objective reality. Regardless of whether proper want to rationalize and elude themselves into how it’s really not all that bad that the tyrants that rape and murder children by the dozens have a totalitarian surveillance stranglehold around everyone else’s neck.
I’ve seen dozens of these types of demos and it’s always live footage from a semi public place like this.
It’s much easier to just show live footage rather than rig up canned looping footage.
It’s pretty astonishing how no one watching the demo with me seems to care. No one asking “Hey, will you just be able to do this with our video if we buy from you?”
It's just not very concerning. The buyer presumably cares about safety and their risk model are guns. Having a vendor show a couple of seconds of live footage to a potential buyer probably doesn't rank high in their threat model.
I would think they would have a real set of cameras for demos, but like in their own office or something. Not pointed at unwitting children. So dystopian
Woah hold on there, having cameras in their office could be a huge violation of privacy!
Does this mean there is no testing environment?
Generally on multi-tenant SaaS kind of systems you do have testing environments, but they're filled with garbage data, plus they are usually running pre-release versions that aren't yet ready for the light of day. It's where QA and CI/CD operates. Sales demos are generally done on a production environment, but on dedicated tenants that are set up with "nice looking" well-organized data (e.g. company is named Contoso, users have names like "Jason Anderson" and "Maria Ramirez"). Testing environments have users with names like "1111111" and "`<script>alert(window.domain);`"
I think it's probably a just laziness here, which makes some sense - it would be easy to set up 5 Flock cameras on the sales demo tenant sitting in a storage room at HQ, but it would make for incredibly uncompelling demo. Rather than set up a pipeline to run stock footage in as a camera feed, they got lazy and used real tenants.
There's an obvious answer... just set up the camera in the conference room where you're running the demo.
Sounds like the testing stage is sticky? It could exist without the tooling to reset it to a known baseline and/or create multiple environments which would enable safe demos.
The camera's main selling point is instilling fear: better not misbehave, because Big Brother is watching. The creepier it is, the easier it is to sell to powerful people looking for invasive control.
Surveillance cameras have been everywhere since the early 90s and lo and behold crime still exists!
Turns out people are either under the influence or simply amazingly stupid. And obviously there is a capacity problem: NYPD isn't going after every purse snatcher.
Dunwoody asked the JCC for camera access in case of live shooter events but then used it for many other reasons.
“ In September 2024, Dunwoody PD Major Patrick Krieg requested access to the private securiy cameras at a community center on behalf of the department. When the community center pushed back and demanded to know what the access would be used for, Krieg was unambiguous: “This is solely for real-time critical incident response.” The community center agreed to share their cameras, including cameras in gymnastics rooms, pools, and fitness studios, with Dunwoody PD for emergencies”
https://substack.com/home/post/p-196010541
This is the nudge nudge wink wink of Flock.
"So here's a data sharing scenario, prospect agency"
"Isn't that illegal in [insert our state]?"
"Well, that's for your agency and your state to determine".
"Will that feature be turned off for our agency if it is is prohibited or illegal in our state?"
"Why would we turn it off? You'll use the system responsibly, right? Why don't we take a quick coffee break and after that, we can go through data sharing in the system."
They're appealing to entities that have surveillance and voyeuristic fetishes, showing that you can ubiquitously invade privacy in real-time, even in spaces society considers sensitive, is a feature worth demonstrating if you want to get contracts from psychopaths.
If it really has to be a live system, they could just set one up in a broom closet at hq?
I would put it in the lobby or outside the HQ building.
A good live demo would be to set it up pointing to a fishtank. You fire up the demo, you see the fish. No privacy invasion but everyone gets to see how the camera behaves.
Unfortunately, it does need to show that you can identify individual people in large rooms, long hallways, outdoor facilities, and vehicles or plate #'s in parking lots, roads, etc.
But the live demo should be Flock's own offices, not their customers.
That does not demo well at all.
Yeah, the kids didn't like the broom closet.
The employees were concerned about the lack of privacy setting it up at the entrance.
Hehe
Meanwhile YC President Garry Tan continues to support and defend Flock. I'm curious how he'd spin this as a good thing.
That little man has eroded any respect that he might have been a priori granted with his publicly documented descent into a vibecoding mania. I'm still in disbelief that the very silly photographer guy is the CEO of ycombinator. Ah well, it was a good era.
isnt it the same sort of reason you guys have actors for presidents? its about how well you can sell the message, not how good you are behind the scenes, thats what normies are for.
Thats a big part of it. Customers go into a flock demo with motivated reasoning. "Im scared. Im not sure i should be this scared."
Seeing a vulnerable set of kids happily playing and hearing a confident voice say "A shooter could end all this. We can prevent it" validates that and closes the sale.
If a cautious pragmatist goes to the demo thinking "i know crime stats have declined for decades and im concerned about misuse of technology." Then a performatively confident person says "this is a component of a massive surveillance state ripe for misuse. It will give us footage of crimes and only stop a small percentage of them," how well do you think it would sell?
> "i know crime stats have declined for decades and im concerned about misuse of technology."
Garrett has said that Flock's goal is "zero crime", "made possible by Flock". It's full Minority Report, 1984, Stasi stuff.
That strategy didn't work out well for Makerbot. Tech companies actually need competent leadership with a tech background. You can't pretend they are interchangeable with some run of the mill commodities producer and adopt the same leadership practices.
He's using AI assistants and excited about it. So is Linux Torvalds, and all my other programming friends.
To the best of my knowledge Linus Torvalds isn't posting walls of text to Github breathlessly announcing he's 810x-ed [1] his "logical lines of code/day" compared to what he was doing in 2013.
And, lest you think generating "600,000 lines of production code in 60 days" [2] is potentially problematic, has also fully solved the primary failure modes of AI coding identified by Andrej Karpathy, once and for all: "Karpathy's four failure modes? Already covered." [1]
As someone who has experienced mania, including with a programming bent specifically, it's hard not to raise an eyebrow at the idiosyncratic human-y bits of his thinking floating up from the sea of em-dashes and it's not X it's Y in his manifestos.
Plus volunteering this [3] in an interview:
“I sleep, like, four hours a night right now,” he told his interviewer, fellow VC Bill Gurley, during an onstage interview Saturday. “I have cyber psychosis, but I think a third of the CEOs that I know have it as well,” he joked about his current AI obsession. (Tan’s assistant confirmed to us that he was joking. ...)
It’s like I was able to re-create my startup that took $10 million in VC capital and 10 people, and I worked on that for two years, and I took anti-narcoleptics — I remember, you know, sort of being on modafinil...
[1] https://github.com/garrytan/gstack
[2] https://github.com/garrytan/gstack/blob/main/docs/ON_THE_LOC...
[3] https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/17/why-garry-tans-claude-code...
Every single post on here about Flock should put in the title (YC S17).
> City Learns Flock (YC S17) Accessed Cameras in Children's Gymnastics Room as a Sales Demo
I wish I could upvote this twice.
It's it anything like the comments I see on here defending Flock, it'll just be a bunch of attempting to scare people with the idea of crime, and disparaging anyone in favor of privacy as being pro-crime.
Probably something like "but imagine how much money a few people are making from it!"
He goes to the same church where Thiel had his Greta is the literal anti christ speech.
If a school shooter was in your children's daycare, wouldn't you want there to be cameras so you knew where they were?
...is how I imagine that one goes.
"The sound of children screaming has been removed"
So you can then watch the shooting in nice graphic details, right? Or do you want cameras integrated with remote-controlled machine guns?
The current school shooting response systems have 70 drones with capsicain.
Cameras would get shot first. Come on.
Why? They likely don't plan to make it out and it'll make them more famous after.
Exactly. If anything they will want to target those schools more. They want to be famous, they idolize each other.
While I think this isn’t great.
Why is the camera there in the first place??
Presumably there are people that have access to it. And if you are demoing software that connects to cameras, then someone gave the sales guy access to those cameras.
I’m also assuming those probably weren’t the only cameras…
> Why is the camera there in the first place??
I imagine its for security. Ie if there are reports of robbery, you can find who did it. I know its not that popular in the states but its common elsewhere, but with better controls. (well, "better" as in controlled by shitty IoT devices)
I think the thing with flock is just how poorly put together everything is. They are obviously insecure, and the entire network has massive holes in it. Yet its still being rolled out.
Why would a gymnastics gym get robbed? It’s just a bunch of smelly equipment that’s hard to sell and probably very little cash.
Robbery may not be the main reason for a camera. Having a video of any incident that happens (broken equipment leading to injury, angry parent, etc.) would be valuable.
Looting is done for fun too. It must suck to have kids show up for practice in the morning and some of the essential gear is gone. It doesn’t matter if it is inexpensive to replace, you still have to cancel class and take a day or two up replace it, file a police report, etc
Right, but why is a Flock camera a better approach than: insurance, on-prem camera, etc. The Flock camera doesn't prevent theft. It increases remote viewing (especially if it's used in a demo to strangers they aren't customers yet, doubly especially if those strange customers are doing it because the might want to see young gymnasts)
normally a condition of insurance is that you have CCTV and other preventative systems in place.
> The Flock camera doesn't prevent theft.
Not directly, but it does increase the chance of the perpetrator getting caught (not flock, the camera) in theory this means that less people are about to steal/break stuff.
Also sign posts with saying that "this place has surveillance" tends to reduce opportunists.
On a side note I would recommend volunteering at a community centre/sports/scouts/library. First its extremely rewarding, and secondly you learn about how things are in the real world "for the normals"
At least for private households, it's not mandatory to have surveillance cameras at home. If you do have one though, they will demand footage and can deny your claim if it was off, or worse. https://youtu.be/UMIwNiwQewQ?t=903
Yeah, I wouldnt have that in my house
It's the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta.
Jewish Community Centers are targeted more for attacks than a YMCA.
Vandalism.
Possibly as a deterrent to a child (or adult) going through clothing/bags and stealing mobile phones while the owners are exercising.
here its mostly mobile phones.
School shootings?
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a faceless guy with a camera?
Any sane business that has lots of random people coming in will have cameras recording (except in bathrooms/locker rooms). There is too much opportunity for crime, and a camera is cheap. If something happens you pull up the feed from the last month and give the interesting parts to the police; most often you just delete everything after a month. More than one crime has been solved this way.
That said, if there wasn't a crime the camera footage should be deleted.
The problem isn't having cameras. Its that these cameras should be closed circuit with data residing locally, not being sent to a 3rd party that has full access to the video streams, and who processes them, combines them with other parties, resells data from them, or hands them over without a warrant!
Ok, and bear with me, but what if that third party needs to do a sales demo and the client can only be convinced by seeing live footage of stranger’s children in a gymnastics class or at the pool in their swimsuits?
I really don’t see how we can avoid having our cities hand over this data sight unseen to a company with a history of enabling stalkers and overzealous policing.
I haven’t checked this, but based on the enthusiasm for this technology, I assume that crime clearance rates are near 100% in cities with these cameras.
(/s)
This
> There is too much opportunity for crime, and a camera is cheap.
The camera doesn't prevent crime. It just displaces it. Even when it doesn't it will not prevent the crime from happening. It _may_ provide you an opportunity to prosecute the person who committed it.
In reality the only real reason to have one is to reduce your insurance premiums.
> crime has been solved
A perpetrator was potentially caught and now has to be tried or negotiated into a plea. I understand we use the term "solve" as a term of art but it's a particularly poor one. It speaks to the need of police to clear their books of negative indicators and not to any first order desirable social outcome.
> That said
That said, if during a demo, you access another customers equipment, I will _never_ do business with you. That's just extremely unprofessional behavior.
> The camera doesn't prevent crime. It just displaces it.
That's why I periodically leave a bunch of bicycles with cheap locks downtown. They act like a kind of criminal sacrificial anode, reducing crime in the rest of the city.
That's why the police don't enforce drug laws in _particular_ areas.
What you describe is obviously already happening on a much larger scale.
I'm not sure why people have trouble grasping something this basic.
Cops don't enforce drug laws in particular areas because wealthy people live there and not only will arresting wealthy people and their kids get those guys a call from their boss, but the courts will never make any money off prosecuting wealthy people that can afford to drop thousands of dollars on a lawyers and the court case. Drug laws are enforced in poor areas tho because poor people can't afford good lawyers or drag the process out for years and potentially cost the court tens of thousands on just a single case, they instead get give a disinterested public defender, or maybe a bottom tier of private lawyer if they can afford it, against a prosecutor who's entire job is to ram cases and plea deals through the system as fast as possible to make a profit and fund the court and local cops. Judges that don't convict enough get the boots, prosecutors who aren't big enough dicks get the boot, public defenders that don't recommend a ton of plea deals or are too good at their job don't get offered as many public defense cases.
Because many of us who live in cities have experience with police being completely feckless.
I have experienced multiple times when I tell police that I have video evidence of a crime happening as well as evidence of the identity of the criminal and they won’t even look at it. I once had a cop tell me that I shouldn’t bother with a report with witnesses and evidence and a known perpetrator since it would never get investigated. That cop got punished for telling the truth, although they were 100% correct, the detective on the case never even opened the file. The detective was not punished.
Lol
The founder of Ring cameras is convinced enough cameras will eliminate all crime in neighborhoods
> The camera doesn't prevent crime. It just displaces it. Even when it doesn't it will not prevent the crime from happening. It _may_ provide you an opportunity to prosecute the person who committed it.
And that is worth something in itself, at least in areas where disputes between people are the norm. Gyms in particular suffer from theft to sexual harassment.
Notably, it can serve that purpose without being part of a national network, or being remotely accessible by a sales team for the camera maker.
> Gyms in particular suffer from theft to sexual harassment.
And is there any evidence that deploying cameras has changed the rate?
Do you want to punish people or do you want to prevent people from being victimized in the first place?
Filming people at the gym is sexual harassment.
In many cases the people deploying these cameras have no idea the feeds are being resold to Flock. It’s not like they have a consumer brand and people are saying, “oh yeah, Flock, they’re the license plate camera folks…I definitely want one of those in my locker room.”
I feel like I’m missing something.
There is someone that is making the decision right?
Or are you just saying the person placing the cameras is decoupled from the person making the decision to aggregate them all.
But I still feel like the accountability is on who is giving the access to sensitive cameras.
We are opening up a wellness clinic and we were planning to use a managed service company for internet, network, and security. I was appalled by the managed services suggestions. Privacy of our patients and their data is critical, and the managed service company wants to send all of our feeds to third parties and give third parties direct access to our network.
We decided this was a privacy and security risk, and have gone in a completely different direction, but it would not surprise me if most businesses used one of these companies and just went with whatever they suggested without understanding at all what is at stake or who has access to the data.
It's "hilarious" how incompetent some companies are.
One background check firm used by a previous employer of mine sent me an email saying:
"Hi FireBeyond, doing a background check, just want to verify that all these details for you are correct:
full legal name, address, dob, full ssn, phone number, USCIS#..."
and then the kicker:
"and also want to make sure we have the correct email address for you"
Oh. You just sent all this shit to an email address and "oh, let us know if this your email address"?!?
Meanwhile, they've found my fiancee on FB and are messaging her out of the blue to "verify" she knows me (to be clear, this was meant to be a standard background check, not a security clearance or anything similar).
To their credit, that employer, when I told them all this, were as horrified as I was and fired them as their background check provider.
Most often the business hires a security contractor to take care of it, and signs the contract without understanding the terms. You should be able to trust your suppliers enough that you can do the above, they are the experts in the thing (cameras in this thing, but could be things like plumbing or accounting) and you have your own business to run. "Should" is key though, all too often someone doesn't do right by their clients.
>Most often the business hires a security contractor to take care of it, and signs the contract without understanding the terms.
The bulk of the responsibility here would lie on whoever signed I think. It's one thing to click "I agree" when you are making a SaaS account for downloading cat videos. But at a job, you are getting paid to read these things and to make informed decisions.
> Or are you just saying the person placing the cameras is decoupled from the person making the decision to aggregate them all.
That's exactly what's happening.
People are buying webcams which are cheap and have in their ToS something to the effect of "we get to sell everything the camera can see". Which, in turn, allows them to partner with Flock and sell video footage directly to them.
Consider the fact that at one point, Amazon partnered with Flock to sell their ring camera footage to Flock. [1] It only got botched because of the creepy superbowl commercial selling the spying as "finding lost puppies".
[1] https://apnews.com/article/amazon-flock-super-bowl-surveilla...
> Presumably there are people that have access to it.
Could also be AI.
So there are people sitting in cubicles in various companies/orgs that flock sells the access to and they are watching your children on a screen.
Usually the government is trying to wrap the spying/privacy breaches by "save the children", but this time if you want to save your children from some older dude watching them on a screen, you actually have to be against this privacy nightmare.
The crazy thing is that this isn’t even a hypothetical. Some random dude was watching your kids from an office building with spy cameras
Isolated information isn't a problem. If it takes effort to access information then mass information abuse doesn't scale, it is free of cost, and consequence, access that is the issue here. Flock is attempting to destroy barriers to access around real time surveillance. There is a clear distinction between someone having a business surveillance system that points at the street that the police can get access to with some sort of device specific request and no-requirement needed brows the world access that Flock is pushing. This is different. This is evil.
IOW, Flock is building the Telescreen from 1984.
There is also another movement to stop Flock. And a discussion [1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47772012
This story is a duplicate of a well-attended thread, without Significant New Information (SNI):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47784045
What other companies are pushing into this space with similar offerings, but flying under the radar compared to all the bad press Flock has been getting?
One of the previous discussions [1]
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47784045
I swear it is like we stumbled into a real life PKD book.
Probably A Scanner Darkly but I’m also sure parts of The Three Stigmata of Eldritch Palmer will come true too.
https://archive.is/JXgLO
This is massively underplaying what happened. From the original source:
> [Randy Gluck - Flock Growth/Strategy] clicked through 3 private cameras at the JCC before he settled on JCC camera ‘Main Pool Right’. It was over 3 hours later before his next view on traffic cameras.
> [Bob Carter - Flock VP of Strategic Relations and BD] also has some interesting searches. On September 30th, 2025 - Bob looked at just one camera. This camera is in the gymnastics room of the JCC.
> [James Harding] The 1/7 session is the more notable one. He manually clicked through every JCC baseball field camera one per second, then paused 16 seconds before hitting Fitness, then Front Pool(1), Front Pool(2), Front Pool(3) — with 4-7 second pauses between each pool camera. Then after browsing other cameras, came back to Holding Cell 1 and 2, then Brook Run Playground 4 times over 33 seconds, then went back to Fitness again 12 minutes later. [...] his saved dashboard includes both holding cells and all three pool cameras, which is an unusual set of cameras to keep on a monitoring dashboard.
> [Yoruel Sanguillen] was manually clicking through JCC cameras one per second — baseball fields, cafe, camp cameras, clock tower — then hit Fitline Desk and paused 58 seconds. Moved to Front Pool(1) and paused 47 seconds. Then FitLine Weight, Fitness, paused 72 seconds, then Fitness North Exit and rapidly through all three Front Pool cameras in 3 seconds before moving to Guard House.
> [Kayce Lowe] came back on 2/14 - her first views were Gymnastics M/H front view left, Fitness, Gymnastics, Fitline Hall, FitLine Weight. She picked up exactly where she left off.
This reads like Flock employees are individually using the camera system to watch people in sensitive settings.
I'm unsure why 404 media is portraying this as related to a demo, it's seems like these are individuals acting independently.
All Flock footage should be subject to FOIA requests.
Just broadcast all the cameras everywhere on the internet all the time. The panopticon is coming.
An underrated comment. But sunlight is the best disinfectant.
I think it's the fundamental issue with these cameras, that it takes pictures of us, but we ourselves cannot access it. Even though it was us who has paid for it!
Including the footage from Flock cameras placed by private businesses on their own property?
If the government has access to it and it isn't otherwise publicly broadcast, yes. It is straight up illegal for the government to do it itself, just because they found a loophole of buying the surveillance they want from private institutions instead of using their own camera doesn't mean it is right or should be allowed to continue.
And you better believe Flock considers it a sales channel to also sell to data brokers and such institutions with the aim of having them be able to share data with agencies who'd otherwise be prohibited (and they also won't turn off such sharing functionality just because you're an agency in that state - that's not their job).
If that data crosses onto government servers at any point, yes.
All Flock data access logs should be subject to the same.
If a demo environment isn't tightly scoped and audited, it's production in practice. The demo label doesn't matter.
So flocker-cams spy on children as they are doing physical exercise? That can't be an accident.
The incentives of panopticon company seem peversly aligned to bring out the worst in humanity and fearmonger politicisns into endless societsl scaffolding.
Yeah