I am standing on the corner of Harris Road and Young Street outside of the Crossroads Business Park in Bakersfield, California, looking up at a Flock surveillance camera bolted high above a traffic signal. On my phone, I am watching myself in real time as the camera records and livestreams me—without any password or login—to the open internet. I wander into the intersection, stare at the camera and wave. On the livestream, I can see myself clearly. Hundreds of miles away, my colleagues are remotely watching me too through the exposed feed.
Flock left livestreams and administrator control panels for at least 60 of its AI-enabled Condor cameras around the country exposed to the open internet, where anyone could watch them, download 30 days worth of video archive, and change settings, see log files, and run diagnostics.
Archive: http://archive.today/IWMKe
Benn Jordan did a recent video on his…explorations of Flock cameras. Essentially, they’re easily hackable and really should be an urgent matter of national security.
A city in the KC Metro just signed a contract with Flock for drone cameras. Fuck that Big Brother bullshit.
Benn Jordan did a great video on this: https://youtu.be/vU1-uiUlHTo
He co-released a video with 404Media on this new dystopian finding today as well.
I feel like Flock Cameras would describe a random individuals walk home from work the same way Andy Samberg does in the music video “Like a Boss”.
The idea that you’re somehow not entitled to privacy based on the publicity of a space has got to be one of the most successful propaganda campaigns used to strip privacy against the will of people.
Fuck you, I want to take a walk and generally travel freely without being tracked by some fucking “Flock” or Ring camera, or uploaded unblurred to some randos Instagram where Meta and Clearview will train facial recognition and generative AI, or having my entire life story and biometric data collected at some airport.
Take me back to the thousands of years humanity existed without obscenely invasive tech.
It’s the “common sense” part of the laws.
A honest person has right to live without being tracked. You shouldn’t care how they’ll do it and you shouldn’t care if they go out of business.
And of course you shouldn’t fear to be public about it and demand answers, LOL, the most notable for me personally part about today’s politics is that in English-speaking countries that fear seems to have become a thing. Well, because any protest that’s more than a demonstration is becoming dangerous and costly.
While literal legalism always helps tyranny.
It’s not much different from USSR in the 70s and 80s, “yeah, you can have all your rights, a defendant and all, and correspondence and you won’t be tortured for submitting a complaint, and Soviet laws will be followed to the letter, but good luck, prove you’re not a camel”.
Since USSR and western nations no longer exist in the same time period, it’s easy to discard even the thought that the latter are gradually becoming similar to the former in some regards, and might even overshoot it.
Anyway, I live in Russia, here things are for the last few months at the point where I can get jailed for writing even this, just because. LOL again.
I do not consent.
Again? How insecure are these things? I am honestly wondering how easy it would be to get into one and shut down the entire system.
It’s obvious that these guys are fucking amateur hour Techbros, running this shitshow as they have. I don’t doubt they’re underpaying and undertraining the contractors they hire to install these things.
Tear em down
Or like someone in Hacker News comm suggested, use this to track a US Senator for 24 hours, make it all public, then see if they’re still OK with this…
Hacker News Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46355548
Without the ycombinator
That’s the first I’ve seen a HN web client. Why does it exist, and what’s the reason against linking directly to Y Combinator?
Peter Thiel invested in Flock through Y Combinator
YCombinator is a VC fund trying to pretend like they’re hacker(tinkering) friendly community, when their business model is boosting their own companies/startups. And companies aren’t hitting those profits with people tinkering.
https://soatok.blog/2025/12/17/the-revolution-will-not-make-the-hacker-news-front-page/
In all, that doesn’t align with the hacker ethos. They’re just capitalizing on what it stands for with a lot of techbro hubris.
The first step of limiting their influence is using a different opensource frontend.
They’ll just make it illegal for just them. Like the Internet privacy
This is the way.
I swear to God if this is AI upscaled
Original is better
The original is better because no higher resolution version actually looks like the original. It’s so weird, it’s not hars at all to make a higher res one that’s almost identical to the original yet all the ones I’ve seen just look like shit. I’m gonna take some time tomorrow and make a high resolution version with the details correct.
The high res one looks better as a cutout instead of the full background, but the jpeg adds to the charm IMHO.
The high-res one also removes all the shadows, I assume the upscaling algorithm believed they were blur
Um, so? What am I missing here? You’re in a public place with no expectation of privacy.
Public streaming webcams have been a thing for three decades. There’s even an entire Geocaching category where you must be captured to prove you were there.
Public streaming webcams have been a thing for three decades.
Most of those public streaming cams are streaming to a private server, and not 40k cameras contributing to the same global database. They’re also not being tracked with AI and storing license plate numbers, facial recognition, etc. to be categorized and later searched by law enforcement for, whatever reason they want.
This is ai-tracking is equivalent to having a government agent following you 24/7
You’re not doing anything wrong, so why are you worried the police is trailing your every move? amirite?
It is kinda insane. I mean if someone was standing outside their window with a notepad writing down everything they see and hear people would be creeped the fuck out. But put a camera there and the same asshole is sitting on a computer desk in a different city they are ok with?
Also the notepad guy is immediately faxing their notes directly to the police and any advertising data brokers who ask for them
My legs get tired
For your detractors, I’d like to point out that nothing stated here in untrue.
The problem is feeding 10’s of thousands of video streams, from a single entity, to the police and government. And now they’re using AI to sort the data, which is a powerful use case for AI.
Were we to magically feed all the webcams and doorbells and security cameras to a single source, it would still be a technological mess to sort out. Flock’s system is purpose built to track us.
This gotta be bait
WTF I love big brother now
The ai part? Not really the topics of this post though…
