><i>“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.</i><p>the two things i still dont understand are:<p>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 <i>might</i> be addressed in the article, but the paragraph where it looks like it might be mentioned is also where the article is cut off)<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p><a href="https://jasonhunyar.substack.com/p/why-are-flock-employees-watching-720" rel="nofollow">https://jasonhunyar.substack.com/p/why-are-flock-employees-w...</a><p>404 media is massively underplaying what happened.<p>> [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.<p>> [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.<p>> [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.<p>> [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.<p>> [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.<p>Note these people are targeting a community center across multiple months.
dang or moderators, can this be resubmitted with the excerpts here?<p>Even if there's an unseen side to this story that <i>somehow</i> contextualizes this in a less nefarious light, it deserves more attention than it got on first posting.<p>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.
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I’ve seen dozens of these types of demos and it’s always live footage from a semi public place like this.<p>It’s much easier to just show live footage rather than rig up canned looping footage.<p>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
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);`"<p>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.
Dunwoody asked the JCC for camera access in case of live shooter events but then used it for many other reasons.<p>“ 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”<p><a href="https://substack.com/home/post/p-196010541" rel="nofollow">https://substack.com/home/post/p-196010541</a>
This is the nudge nudge wink wink of Flock.<p>"So here's a data sharing scenario, prospect agency"<p>"Isn't that illegal in [insert our state]?"<p>"Well, that's for your agency and your state to determine".<p>"Will that feature be turned off for our agency if it is is prohibited or illegal in our state?"<p>"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."
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.<p>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.
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.
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."<p>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.<p>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."<p>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 <i>810x</i>-ed [1] his "logical lines of code/day" compared to what he was doing in 2013.<p>And, lest you think generating "<i>600,000 lines of production code in 60 days</i>" [2] is potentially problematic, has also fully solved the primary failure modes of AI coding identified by Andrej Karpathy, once and for all: <i>"Karpathy's four failure modes? Already covered."</i> [1]<p>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 <i>it's not X it's Y</i> in his manifestos.<p>Plus volunteering this [3] in an interview:<p><i>“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. ...)<p>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...</i><p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/garrytan/gstack" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/garrytan/gstack</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/garrytan/gstack/blob/main/docs/ON_THE_LOC_CONTROVERSY.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/garrytan/gstack/blob/main/docs/ON_THE_LOC...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/17/why-garry-tans-claude-code-setup-has-gotten-so-much-love-and-hate/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/17/why-garry-tans-claude-code...</a>
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(Not who you responded to.) You clearly don't know anyone who lives with a condition that would cause manic episodes.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Just commenting to say, from a place of empathy, that you're right and that it's hard for people to understand what mania looks like in someone if you haven't experienced it first-or-second-hand. You see it a few times and it becomes obvious. In the moment it can be disorienting and cause you to question your own reality because theirs seems so influential and motivated. I hope you're doing well these days.
Every single post on here about Flock should put in the title (YC S17).<p>> City Learns Flock (YC S17) Accessed Cameras in Children's Gymnastics Room as a Sales Demo
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?<p>...is how I imagine that one goes.
So you can then watch the shooting in nice graphic details, right? Or do you want cameras integrated with remote-controlled machine guns?
"The sound of children screaming has been removed"
Cameras would get shot first. Come on.
This is massively underplaying what happened. From the original source:<p>> [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.<p>> [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.<p>> [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.<p>> [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.<p>> [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.<p>This reads like Flock employees are individually using the camera system to watch people in sensitive settings.<p>I'm unsure why 404 media is portraying this as related to a demo, it's seems like these are individuals acting independently.
While I think this isn’t great.<p>Why is the camera there in the first place??<p>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.<p>I’m also assuming those probably weren’t the only cameras…
> Why is the camera there in the first place??<p>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)<p>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.
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.<p>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?<p>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.<p>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.<p>(/s)
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This
> There is too much opportunity for crime, and a camera is cheap.<p>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.<p>In reality the only real reason to have one is to reduce your insurance premiums.<p>> crime has been solved<p>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.<p>> That said<p>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. 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.<p>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.
> Gyms in particular suffer from theft to sexual harassment.<p>And is there any evidence that deploying cameras has changed the rate?<p>Do you want to punish people or do you want to prevent people from being victimized in the first place?
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.
Filming people at the gym is sexual harassment.
> The camera doesn't prevent crime. It just displaces it.<p>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.
The founder of Ring cameras is convinced enough cameras will eliminate all crime in neighborhoods
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.”
> Presumably there are people that have access to it.<p>Could also be AI.
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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.<p>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.
There is also another movement to stop Flock. And a discussion [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47772012">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47772012</a>
This story is a duplicate of a well-attended thread, without Significant New Information (SNI):<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47784045">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47784045</a>
One of the previous discussions [1]<p>[1] - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47784045">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47784045</a>
I swear it is like we stumbled into a real life PKD book.
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.<p>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.
If that data crosses onto government servers at any point, yes.
All Flock data access logs should be subject to the same.
<a href="https://archive.is/JXgLO" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/JXgLO</a>
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.
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Yeah