Benn Jordan – This Flock Camera Leak Is Like Netflix for Stalkers [video]
33 comments
·December 22, 2025j3s
flock is the most heinous reflection of the ills of our current socioeconomic structure. absolutely nobody should be okay with mass surveillance, much less mass surveillance enabled by a private company.
simlevesque
It's what happens when we rank private property over human lives. We deserve this.
fuckflock
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givemeethekeys
At what point does the top brass at Flock get arrested?
gruez
For what? Under current jurisprudence collecting license plates images isn't illegal, because there's no expectation of privacy in public. They could post the information online if they wanted to and they'd be in the clear.
irilesscent
Lying about claims of security. If they said the feeds would be available on the net freely accessible to anyone with a browser and the counties agreed this would be different.
null
reactordev
Oh they’re buddies with all the departments. Fat chance.
SamInTheShell
Rather just see them get Flocked honestly. Seems like the type of tech a child would dream up only to realize when it's too late that it's dystopian, creepy, and a detriment to society.
cons0le
In your dreams maybe
fuckflock
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Bender
Children could go missing thanks to Flock. HN would tell me to never attribute to malice ... but there may be criminal negligence.
fuckflock
[dead]
monkaiju
i guess that while it is alarming that these feeds were "unsecured" I'm just as concerned that they exist at all. Folks worry about it getting into the "wrong hands" but from my POV it was put up by the wrong hands.
While both a problem I am far more concerned about the power this gives our, increasingly authoritarian, government than about individual stalkers/creeps.
SamInTheShell
It's 2025. The ISP gateway I got comes with more default security than these cameras. The barrier to entry on security is lower than it ever has been in history. Whoever let this past the QC phase is an idiot.
embedding-shape
> Whoever let this past the QC phase is an idiot.
It's all a matter of perspective. I'm sure to some executive somewhere, the person/s who approved all of this is seen as heroes, as they shaved of 0.7% or whatever from the costs of the development, and therefore made shareholders more money.
Until there are laws in place that makes people actually responsible for creating these situations, it'll continue, as for a company, profits goes above all.
jandrese
It probably makes close to no difference in development or production, but it does significantly cut down on the number of tech support calls from people who can't figure out how to set the password, or immediately forget the password they set. If it has no password then you can just plug it in an have it work. Sure it's totally insecure, but its also trivial to install.
embedding-shape
Generating a password that is unique to the device and print it with a sticky label on the underside of the device isn't exactly rocket-science, and ISPs somehow figured this out at least two decades ago, which was the first time I came across that myself. Surely whoever developed this IP-camera has an engineering department who've also seen something like this in the wild before?
braingravy
Yep. Until we start holding decision makers responsible for the consequences of their decisions, they will always choose the selfish option.
SamInTheShell
So you're trying to justify this type of rampant negligence in tech? Do you think justifying such malfeasance makes up for fact we literally have surveillance networks that bad actors can tap to do really awful things?
Anyone that cares about their perspective has missed the point.
embedding-shape
> So you're trying to justify this type of rampant negligence in tech?
Don't know how you reached that conclusion, I obviously isn't trying to justify anything. But maybe something I said was unclear? What exactly gave you the idea I'm trying to justify anything of this?
MSFT_Edging
I don't think the person you're replying to is justifying it, but saying there's no laws to prevent the abuse.
Personally I think tech CEOs should be put in stocks in the town square on the regular but they're protected from any form of repercussions besides extreme cases of fraud. Even then, they're only held accountable when the money people have their money effected, not when normal people are bulldozed by the abuse.
eptcyka
Why stick your neck out, swim upstream to do a good job that will not be recognised as such?
Fix the corporate incentives and engineers will be able to do the right thing without suffering. Not everyone gets the luxury of a secure career doing morally ok things.
hrimfaxi
An explanation is not a justification.
TheRealPomax
Counterpoint: whoever let this past the QC phase got paid very generously, and everyone involved is ignoring the laws that already exist to combat this, because law enforcement, too, gets paid generously. And the laws that forbid that aren't getting enforced because the police doesn't police the police, and dad has made it perfectly clear that flagrantly ignoring the law is fine if you're in power.
ck2
remember when people first started experiencing TSA and there were massive protests at how obscene and violating it all was, then uncovering how useless they were as fake security theater
and they were going to get it all shut down
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS NOW
so good luck getting rid of flock where people don't even know it's happening
Not sure if people realize that cellphone locations, several layers in the firmware and software, can be had without warrant by anyone YEARS LATER
huflungdung
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tptacek
I would love to watch a shorter version of this video that just discussed the deltas between the status quo and Flock, rather than breathlessly reporting the implications of cameras as if they were distinctive to Flock. He'll spend 30 seconds talking about how you can see every activity and every person on the camera --- yeah, that's how cameras work. There are thousands of public IP cameras on the Internet, aimed at intersections, public streets, houses, playgrounds, schools; most of them operated that way deliberately.
There are Flock-specific bad things happening here, but you have to dig through the video to get to them, and they're not intuitive. The new Flock "Condor" cameras are apparently auto-PTZ, meaning that when they detect motion, they zoom in on it. That's new! I want to hear more about that, and less about "I had tears in my eyes watching this camera footage of a children's playground", which is something you could have done last week or last year or last decade, or about a mental health police wellness detention somewhere where all the cops were already wearing FOIA-able body cams.
If open Flock cameras gave you the Flock search bar, that would be the end of the world. And the possibility that could happen is a good reason to push back on Flock. But that's not what happened here.
fuckflock
"STaaaaHP TAlKinG AbOUt SoCIal EffECTs! ONlY tALk aBOuT TeCHnoLOgY's CaPAbiLiTiEs!"
Of course someone with 400k karma on the site funding this atrocious shit would seek to redirect the conversation.
Be better.
> The financing was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with backing from Greenoaks Capital, Bedrock Capital. Meritech Capital, Matrix Partners, Sands Capital, Founders Fund, Kleiner Perkins, Tiger Global, and Y Combinator also participated.
https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/flock-safety-secures-major-...
For more context here Flock Safety is a YC-backed company [1][2]
[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety
[2] https://x.com/garrytan/status/1856016868580151615