>“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.
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?”
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
(Not who you responded to.) You clearly don't know anyone who lives with a condition that would cause manic episodes.
They're terrible. Imagine being super focused and productive and excited by how much you're accomplishing as you're banging out innovative code and solving complicated problems with brilliant elegant solutions. Next thing you know you've been awake for two days and your mind no longer works but you're still super motivated and trying to make sense of what you're working on but it no longer tracks and you literally can't keep a line of code in your head long enough to combine it with the one that comes after it. And then you give up and try to watch streaming content for the next two days while your body begins to hurt terribly and you're dehydrated because you kept forgetting to drink water and you can't follow any plot-lines and your mind is mush and then when you finally fall asleep you wake up feeling like you got hit by a truck because you're so undernourished because you had no appetite for much of the episode and your body is literally failing / on the way to starvation.
For bonus points, you might even experience disordered thinking with hallucinations and paranoia and think someone has hacked into your computer and is trying to frame you for crimes and then destroy all your devices and drives, which I did once late at night before things got much worse and I came to in an ER and had to be restrained. It's super cool.
Calling out signs that someone might be experiencing this type of disorder is not being critical of their passion. It's putting notice out that they might not be operating in the same reality that you and I currently occupy.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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".
I was attacked by "a good dog" and then blamed for provoking the dog (like that is valid excuse for starting an attack). I defended myself, and dog owner joined the attacked together with their dog!
After that, I have cameras everywhere, I even record many interactions on my phone. I refuse to be at mercy of random beasts and their "owners". If people start using leashes and muzzles, I may consider taking down cameras!
What does this have to do with cameras covering little kids doing gymnastics?
I'm sorry you had a bad experience and using cameras to protect yourself is a thing but filming kids doing gymnastics seems very very far from purely defensive.
Why does the video footage need to be able to be viewed live, remotely, by a sales team and a prospective client in another state?
Predators have access to these cameras. There are numerous instances of police using these systems to stalk women.
If I want video proof of what happened at a school, I’m much more comfortable with it being held on premises in a tamper evident location. That eliminates some of the predators from the situation.
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.
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!
The incentives of panopticon company seem peversly aligned to bring out the worst in humanity and fearmonger politicisns into endless societsl scaffolding.
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?
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.
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?”
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.
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...
ok.
They're terrible. Imagine being super focused and productive and excited by how much you're accomplishing as you're banging out innovative code and solving complicated problems with brilliant elegant solutions. Next thing you know you've been awake for two days and your mind no longer works but you're still super motivated and trying to make sense of what you're working on but it no longer tracks and you literally can't keep a line of code in your head long enough to combine it with the one that comes after it. And then you give up and try to watch streaming content for the next two days while your body begins to hurt terribly and you're dehydrated because you kept forgetting to drink water and you can't follow any plot-lines and your mind is mush and then when you finally fall asleep you wake up feeling like you got hit by a truck because you're so undernourished because you had no appetite for much of the episode and your body is literally failing / on the way to starvation.
For bonus points, you might even experience disordered thinking with hallucinations and paranoia and think someone has hacked into your computer and is trying to frame you for crimes and then destroy all your devices and drives, which I did once late at night before things got much worse and I came to in an ER and had to be restrained. It's super cool.
Calling out signs that someone might be experiencing this type of disorder is not being critical of their passion. It's putting notice out that they might not be operating in the same reality that you and I currently occupy.
...is how I imagine that one goes.
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…
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.
Jewish Community Centers are targeted more for attacks than a YMCA.
That said, if there wasn't a crime the camera footage should be deleted.
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)
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.
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.
What you describe is obviously already happening on a much larger scale.
I'm not sure why people have trouble grasping something this basic.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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...
I was attacked by "a good dog" and then blamed for provoking the dog (like that is valid excuse for starting an attack). I defended myself, and dog owner joined the attacked together with their dog!
After that, I have cameras everywhere, I even record many interactions on my phone. I refuse to be at mercy of random beasts and their "owners". If people start using leashes and muzzles, I may consider taking down cameras!
I'm sorry you had a bad experience and using cameras to protect yourself is a thing but filming kids doing gymnastics seems very very far from purely defensive.
I want to have video evidence, if some crazy person blames kid for provoking the attack!
Why does the video footage need to be able to be viewed live, remotely, by a sales team and a prospective client in another state?
Predators have access to these cameras. There are numerous instances of police using these systems to stalk women.
If I want video proof of what happened at a school, I’m much more comfortable with it being held on premises in a tamper evident location. That eliminates some of the predators from the situation.
Could also be AI.
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.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47772012
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47784045
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47784045
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!