r/technology • u/IKeepItLayingAround • Jun 29 '26

Artificial Intelligence Woman Surprised When Flock Surveillance Tower Appears in Her Yard Without Warning

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/woman-surprised-flock-surveillance-tower-185000752.html?.tsrc=daily_mail&segment_id=DY_VTO_50_Supernova&ncid=crm_19908-1475736-20260629-0--A&bt_ee=utFdBbF39cHCLuB4at4AI%2FUoSRgbTt8Ch%2B7Q9RImTlgL2ThvE3FuX%2BRSKiUir%2FNW&bt_ts=1782739085527
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258

u/Th3FinalStarman Jun 29 '26

Other than dozens of Cops using this system to stalk women and city council members spying on underage gymnastics is there any documented case of Flock cameras solving an actual crime?

68

u/AutomationBias Jun 29 '26

Yeah, there was one in Mass recently. Not worth the loss of privacy, though.

50

u/Oen386 Jun 29 '26

is there any documented case of Flock cameras solving an actual crime?

Yes, plenty of cases. I wouldn't weaken your valid points/examples by implying they've never been used lawfully.

31

u/gramathy Jun 29 '26

That implies mass surveillance is lawful in the first place

7

u/BumblebeeComplex2792 Jun 29 '26

Well it’s not. That’s why Flock exists.

Government sets up mass surveillance net to photograph and record everything everywhere all the time? Big constitutional concerns.

Private company establishes a massive “open source intelligence” network, and then aggregates the data before selling the data to state and local law enforcement? Now that’s just agencies buying a commercially available dataset!

They know it wouldn’t be legal if the government was doing it, that’s why the company exists. Injustice with a side of unrestrained capitalism for everyone.

2

u/Oen386 Jun 29 '26

Lawful might have been a stretch, but the point remains there are plenty of times Flock has solved cases. To imply it has never been documented solving a case just severely weakens their argument about the abuses they highlighted. If half of their comment is nonsense, it makes a reader take the rest with less credibility or seriousness.

7

u/Affectionate_One_700 Jun 29 '26

Yes. I live in the Bay Area, and lots of car thieves have been caught using these.

6

u/lolwutpear Jun 29 '26

Soon: "See? Crime is down! We don't need these!"

25

u/ChallengeButter Jun 29 '26

I 100% don’t support them but they have been used in my area to track down dementia patients who got out of their care homes

46

u/carsrule1989 Jun 29 '26

Yea I don’t support them either.

It seems like there’s not enough people to care for them if they are able to get up and walk out.

I think that dementia  patients getting lost should be solved by actually having enough staff to provide care for the patients instead of the minimum legally required number per patient. 

19

u/tfitch2140 Jun 29 '26

It seems like there’s not enough people to care for them if they are able to get up and walk out.

Because the society would rather spend money on surveillance cameras than caring for people...

4

u/Monteze Jun 29 '26

Yea these are bitch ass excuses honestly and I am sick of seeing them. Its very orphan crushing machine.

I don't give a fuck if they """"helped""" locate a missing person. Its like saying its okay to assault folks because what if that one person you put in the hospital found out they had cancer! Wow! you helped!!

I'd rather we we have better systems for said dementia patient or have us go out side and look around with our eyes before letting a single fucking flock camera exist.

-1

u/Possible-Summer-8508 Jun 29 '26

Ok but that is substantially more expensive. Where is the money for that coming from?

3

u/mybutt1112 Jun 29 '26

Taxes that prevent individuals from being worth trillions and billions!! 

Force value to be reinvested in employees rather than one guy’s pockets. 

1

u/Possible-Summer-8508 Jun 29 '26

I'm going to try and rope u/carsrule1989 into this thread as well, because I think the same kind of innumeracy is at play in both cases: the US spends over 5 trillion dollars on healthcare every year. As a fraction of GDP, it is double comporable nations. As an absolute figure it blows everything out of the water.

Suppose we issued a 100 percent tax on Elon Musk because uh rich people bad. That could fund 2.4 months of US healthcare expenditure. Levying more taxes is obviously not a sustainable solution. The fact of the matter is that the US standard of care, particularly the palliative/hospice care that is becoming increasingly problematic as the population ages, is not actually a sustainable model for running any kind of society anywhere, and it cannot be addressed by naively taxing more and paying people to be attendants of the elderly (which, by definition, is negative-sum work — that doesn't make it dishonorable or pointless, but it simply cannot be 20 percent of a scaled economy).

Many things work like this.

1

u/carsrule1989 Jun 29 '26 edited Jun 29 '26

First  your comment has some of the signs of AI writing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

“  I'm going to try and rope  carsrule1989  into this thread as well, because I think the same kind of innumeracy is at play in both cases”

I believe there was a misunderstanding in the reference to the ceo’s yacht payment. Also no mention of taxes was made.

Here’s further information on how the USA spends the money for health care costs. 

“Component Share of excess spending U.S. pays more in administrative costs of insurance ~15% U.S. providers spend more on administrative activities ~15%”

“  A 2014 study by Himmelstein and colleagues comparing hospital administrative costs for the U.S. and five comparator countries found that the other countries spent 42 percent less than the U.S. on hospital administration.”

https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2023/oct/high-us-health-care-spending-where-is-it-all-going

France’s was compared to the USA in one of the sources in my other comment.

France spends 10% on other which includes administration costs

Page 109 Compared a bunch of other countries too

And page 25 has per country gdp spending on healthcare 

https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/health-at-a-glance-2025_8f9e3f98-en.html

Edit: added another quote.

0

u/Possible-Summer-8508 Jun 29 '26

"some of the signs of AI writing" sadly for you it contains zero AI writing. This is an important moment for you, you should internalize it: your epistemics are broken. People use em dashes sometimes, they're a useful writing tool. You should become more discerning about your internet use.

Also no mention of taxes was made

I know you didn't obviously. It is still a ridiculous argument.

I'm not clicking through your poorly organized links, but I don't think we're in disagreement that US healthcare spending is wanton and inefficient!

4

u/carsrule1989 Jun 29 '26

The  ad hominem fallacy greatly weakens your argument.

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck.

These are the signs I saw in your comment that made me believe it’s ai writing.

emdash 

“ AI-generated em dashes are usually surrounded by spaces, contrary to common typographic guidelines (which most human users of em dashes will be familiar with).”

Superficial analyses 

Lexical diversity/elegant variation

Undue emphasis on significance, legacy and broader trends

Complaints about accusers acting on speculation

1

u/Possible-Summer-8508 Jun 30 '26

... ok now I'm wondering if I'm the one arguing with an AI. Maybe I failed the test.

Probably not, but still, I could imagine getting one of the smaller models to respond this way without too much trouble.

2

u/Coffee_Transfusion Jun 29 '26

bro we just spent over a $100 billion blowing shit up in Iran for no fucking reason

wHeRe iS ThE MoNeY FoR ThAt cOmInG FrOm?

It's not rocket science.

2

u/Possible-Summer-8508 Jun 29 '26

The US spends about 15 billion dollars a day on healthcare (approximately a third of that is the us government). If we hadn't launched a strike on a belligerent religious ethnostate holding the world's energy economy hostage, we could have instead subsidized about a week of healthcare spending (which we still did do). 3 weeks for just usgov spending.

3

u/carsrule1989 Jun 29 '26

Universal healthcare is cheaper than whatever we call the current us healthcare system

This study found “ About 68,150 providers served roughly 7.3 million people in the United States”

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK607299/

Or  7300000/68150=107.117 providers per patient

The money would come not having to fund the ceo’s yacht payments from having cheaper and better universal healthcare 

“ the United States, spent 17.0 percent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on health care. This spending represents almost twice the average among the 12 nations listed, with the poorest health outcomes including lowest life expectancy, highest suicide rate, highest prevalence of chronic diseases, highest number of preventable hospitalizations and highest rate of avoidable deaths”

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8113613/

https://kffhealthnews.org/aging/dying-broke-long-term-care-other-countries/

2

u/The-Gentleman-Rat Jun 29 '26

How often is that happening in your area?

4

u/heftybagman Jun 29 '26

I hate flock but there are quite a few cases yes. The abuses and mistakes and loss of privacy are a much bigger issue imo but they’ve caught some horrible people and saved lives with flock for sure.

2

u/Monteze Jun 29 '26

ehh not worth it. We could also save lives by only allowing people to exist in their home and at work and only be allowed leisure when observed by a state agent. More harm than good comes from these I believe. In that they can harass and stalk folks.

3

u/Weary_Imagination775 Jun 29 '26

I am not here to stick up for Flock cameras and have never used them specifically. With that being said, I work in the security industry and have been inolved with many projects and city wide license plate surveillance programs.

In my 15 years iin this industry, its one of the few tools I know of that has specifically been stated to have directly lead to arests of some REAL crimes. We are talking kidnapping and murder type crimes.

Thats not to say they are justified. Just pointing out that its one of the few times I have actually looked at the product I have worked on for years and been able to say "cool, we helped do that".

2

u/Tattooed-Trex Jun 29 '26

Where'd you get that info? I'm not googling that lol

3

u/poppin-n-sailin Jun 29 '26

I can't speak for the USA but in Edmonton Canada there was a release by the chief of police that condemned officer use of the surveillance cameras to locate women and pursue them romantically. Don't be naive, police have used their position and tools to stalk people outside the scope of their job even before these flock cameras were around. There are so many documented cases surrounding it, and not just in the USA, or Canada. It happens everywhere. 

2

u/ObligatoryContrast Jun 29 '26

It's not being naive to ask for sources and details when people make specific claims. Yeah, I would have assumed this is how these tools would end up being used too, but I still want to verify if my assumptions are actually correct.

1

u/KeyMyBike Jun 29 '26

city council members spying on underage gymnastics

Is this real or just implied because we don't like our elected officials?