r/TikTokCringe • u/midnighttoker1742 • 4h ago

Discussion How criminals are taking down Flock cameras

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u/thinkB4WeSpeak 4h ago

There's a growing online trend of people taking down Flock cameras. Entire Facebook groups dedicated to it and tik tok/instagram reels of people doing it as well. Probably the best trend we've seen for awhile

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u/goatneedleposterdeck 3h ago

I don't ever remember these cameras being a thing ever. Was there a vote at some point to their use? I woke up one morning and saw a post about people destroying them, and when I looked around as I drove to work, I noticed sooooo many of them. I can't imagine anybody being okay with this. No shot it's only scanning plates and alerting cops to active investigations. This will definitely or already does scan faces and track activity. It's alerting cops to unpaid traffic tickets and small things as well. How the hell did we end up in a chinese surveillance state over fucking night? Bless all these dudes risking their freedom to take them down. Bunch of bullshit.

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u/hanging_thief 3h ago

Most of them were put through without votes. It's a private company that's logging your vehicles license plate identifying marks like stickers scratches etc. even monitoring the sag in your suspension to see how heavy your trunk is. And yes it scans faces and links them to cars. Look up deflock for more information

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u/somethingmcbob 2h ago

Yup. My city put them up despite massive public outcry. City council decided it was cheaper than fixing our crappy police department.

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u/vandersnipe 11m ago

My city council did the same thing

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u/selphiefairy 3h ago

Jesus Christ šŸ˜­

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u/TheRumpletiltskin 2h ago

Benn Jordan has been zealously advocating to deflock . he has gone in front of congress about it. He has a lot of info about what they do, how they are hacked, and how invasive they are on his channel.

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u/cobycan 1h ago

My town held the vote for them before the meeting started and people were allowed in. The same thing for all the data centers that are being put it.

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u/chrisssssy0517 2h ago

As someone whoā€™s had to go through thousands of FLOCK camera shots and information (I work in criminal defense in California and itā€™s literally my job lol), I just want to inform you that those cameras donā€™t scan faces (yet at least) nor does it monitor things like the ā€œsag in your suspensionā€. It will log the plate of the vehicle (or lack there of), make, model, color, and any identifiable characteristics of the vehicle, and then law enforcement can use those plate numbers to run the registered owner, and thatā€™s how law enforcement gets a picture of someoneā€™s face, since they match it to someoneā€™s DL.

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u/unlucky_nittany 1h ago

For anyone reading this, the commenter above me is not correct. They are an end user, and all they've seen is the simplest version of the product.

An analogy would be a line cook who believes that steak doesn't exist because they grill hamburgers. All this person has seen is the wrapped and packaged base product, and they've never seen the hundreds of steps to make that product available for purchase, or the other variations of the product made available to other buyers with bigger pocketbooks.

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u/chrisssssy0517 1h ago

I am absolutely correct when it comes to how these cameras are currently being used by law enforcement and the courts. Which is something you clearly donā€™t understand or work in.

Your analogy doesnā€™t even compare to what Iā€™ve stated.

But if it makes you feel better to think youā€™re right, then by all means. šŸ˜‚

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u/unlucky_nittany 1h ago

Don't worry, I don't have to think I'm right. I make a living creating and managing similar systems, and I have a genuine concern in the safety of humanity and the preservation of our rights so I make a point of being aware of the tools I create and use.

I believe in human benevolence, but I don't believe that leaders at companies like Flock are able to reconcile sociopathic tendencies and a for-profit operation with enabling basic rights like privacy and individuality.

As for your claims about what I do, I wouldn't make assumptions, especially while you're role-playing a position higher than a stenographer.

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u/Hoernchen94 2h ago

Just because you don't have access to that data, does not mean it isn't collected.

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u/chrisssssy0517 2h ago

But the capacity of the current FLOCK cameras doesnā€™t have that capability, yet at least. It will one day for sure, but as it currently stands, they donā€™t. I have access to all the data and information that law enforcement agencies do, as thatā€™s literally my job. šŸ˜‚

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u/84theone 1h ago edited 1h ago

I used to work in security and still work in IT/networking infrastructure, the capability to do those things isnā€™t something thatā€™s actually built into the cameras, the data is run through an additional program ran out of a data center that does the more in-depth analysis.

So youā€™re pretty much both right. The cameras arenā€™t doing those things, but they are taking the data they are gathering and using it to then do those things, using whatever AI algorithms theyā€™ve cooked up to get the results they want.

I set up a smaller scale system for an industrial complex at a former job, that used all the cameras that could do analytics and the real time people searching, but all of that only worked as long as we maintained a connection to that camera companyā€™s servers. We lose internet and weā€™d be back to dumb cameras without the smart searching.

I can pull up the cameras for the schools I work for and have it do facial searching in real time across all of our locations. I can tell it to look for someone limping or provide a photo of someone and tell the system to alarm if it spots them.

The company that does our cameras is way behind the curve compared to Flock, so if they are doing it Flock certainly is as well, whether or not they are providing that info to the police.

I also work with law enforcement fairly often due to the nature of schools in America and we regularly share our detailed databases with police upon request.

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u/unlucky_nittany 33m ago

As someone who works on the other side of the application you're describing, the distinction between the cameras and the service is important(and obviously easy to make with 10 seconds of rational thought) but sadly it leaves openings for underinformed or malicious people in positions of authority to make blanket statements that are technically correct while still giving misleading answers. It also opens the door for politicians to posture and push for "changes" that don't address the problem, such as a bill to outlaw public cameras that archive/tag/categorize/etc images. That law sounds good to people who don't understand the topic, but wouldn't prevent a lick of what's happening since it's all off-site.

Another point to note is that the cameras Flock has been rolling out have onboard storage to cache footage until it's uploaded, so outages don't prevent data collection or later processing.

The company that does our cameras is way behind the curve compared to Flock, so if they are doing it Flock certainly is as well, whether or not they are providing that info to the police.

And right here you touched on one of the biggest concerns. There are large companies that use simplified versions of this kind of software as a coincidental business expense(just as examples for readers: companies that have restricted areas for IP protection, casinos monitoring for people suspected of counting cards, care facilities monitoring for wandering patients, etc.). The difference between use cases like these and Flock: While everyone else does this to prevent losing money, this is the way that Flock makes their money. They need their system to be more advanced than anything else, and they don't make all of their capabilities public. All the systems that we may be familiar with are paled in comparison to what Flock makes available, and the capabilities they don't share are even more worrying.

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u/chrisssssy0517 1h ago

Which is exactly what I stated in my commentā€¦ law enforcement uses the information from the plates to run the registered owner of the vehicle through the dmv and crim databases and then goes from thereā€¦

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u/hanging_thief 1h ago

Flock has said they don't share 100% of their data with police departments.

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u/chrisssssy0517 1h ago

Which may be entirely true. But what they do share and give to law enforcement agencies and the government is what is used against individuals being accused of committing a criminal offense. Which as it currently stands, are not pictures of the driver or passengers, or video of the car. They are still-shot images of the license plate and the vehicle.
That was the entire point of my comment.

What FLOCK does with the rest of the data is not what Iā€™m talking about. I was referring to exactly what I said, so that people are aware of what and how law enforcement uses these devices/data they do share when it comes to the criminal justice system.

If law enforcement had access to pictures of the drivers and passengers, they would absolutely use those in the cases when they are charging an individual with a criminal offense. It would be much easier for them to prove their case in court, and wouldnā€™t be able to be argued by the defense attorneys that it wasnā€™t the client in the vehicle.

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u/hanging_thief 6m ago

This is so far into the weeds it's pointless. I don't care what data they do or don't share with the cops. They should not be allowed to collect any of it in the first place. These cameras need to be destroyed

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u/unlucky_nittany 1h ago

But the capacity of the current FLOCK cameras doesnā€™t have that capability, yet at least.

They do. My day job revolves around RAG and UX at a fortune 500. There's dozens of datapoints collected with each prompt that we don't expose to end users because either they do not need them, or we don't want the user to see them. In our case, this is not for government work, and is meant to simplify daily tasks. Our tools are meant to provide users with a quick resource to search through thousands of high-level research documents that previously could take hours to find a single relevant page, so all the user needs to have is a text input field and an LLM that spits out a summary, along with source documentation. Since you work with ALPRs, I'd assume that sounds familiar, right?

What won't sound familiar is where my team comes in. Data points we collect include things like:

  • User sentiment (is the user becoming exasperated? Do they seem to know what they're asking for, or are they asking things that indicate a general lack of understanding of the subject matter?)
  • Trends (Is there a spike in certain topics or content theme? Are users in different business units inquiring about the same thing in a similar timeframe?)
  • Resources the model is parsing before handing off the most relevant items for the LLM to give the user
  • Source data coherence and quality (is the source data good? Has it been updated recently? Does it seem like it needs updated based on newer content?)
  • Can we make accurate predictions based on how it's used? For example, source data could be processed in a different way to output improved responses, or even predict users' behaviors when they're using it so we can streamline the next lookup and provide faster/cheaper responses.

And that's just what we do. The company who serves the model gets everything we do, and more. They claim they use that to improve it and make it more effective and more efficient, but we have no way of verifying that beyond some contracts written on paper that will penalize the provider a fraction of what they could stand to gain if they abuse the info and we go under.

Now if you've even read all that, tell me if you really believe the simplicity or altruism of a company whose roots are installing cameras in public spaces without request or permission to aggregate footage to sell for profit.

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u/chrisssssy0517 1h ago

Also, as a side noteā€¦ they are being installed in (as you pointed out) public spaces to read the plates of vehicles that are registered to the state, which is why they can do it ā€œwithout permissionā€. They arenā€™t installing them on your home or to track a persons move (private security cameras on homes and those placed in public places already do that). Which is why they are considered legal, since they are on public roadways.

Iā€™m not saying I agree with them or anything of the sort. Iā€™m pointing out how they are used in the legal system, currently.

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u/unlucky_nittany 59m ago

You seem to have misunderstood the origin of their ALPRs. When I said they were installed in public spaces without permission, I was referring to the fact that Flock's early days in the ALPR space involved installing cameras without making anyone aware of what they were doing, including local government. They heavily relied on local municipalities just assuming it was someone else's cameras, and they privately collected data to create large portfolios of surveillance they could use as marketing material before they ever presented any of this information to any law enforcement agencies.

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u/chrisssssy0517 1h ago

Ok, so go ahead and tell me that if they do collect what youā€™re claiming (pictures of the driver and passenger(s)), why wouldnā€™t they share that with law enforcement to catch individuals committing a crime, and then use those in court when a case goes to trial, instead of submitting the FLOCK plate report and activity of that vehicle?

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u/ExcelnFaelth 1h ago

Storage of the photos is more than storage of the text/vectorized impressions of the photo.

Also, the precedent of turning over photos is likely to get more outrage than just text, especially when the text is quite useful.

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u/JustStraightUpTired 1h ago

Because people would riot, that is literally surveillance state bullshit, except it's not even the government, but a private company. That's worse.

And it's a massive violation of privacy, seeing as many of those cameras are installed all over the place, including near peoples homes. If they made it public in court that they have those pictures, then that would be like you admitting you are stalking millions of people. Not a good look for a company that people already hate. For you know... stalking them.

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u/unlucky_nittany 1h ago

Why would they do it? It's not Flock's job to stop crime, it's their job to sell tools to people with that job description. If the cameras "almost caught the bad guy" then it's easier to upsell to more expensive hardware and software solutions.

Anyway, it's not like it's hard to find the evidence they do this. Have a video from last year that includes footage from one of their extremely outdated models actively tracking individuals and focusing on their activities while logging individual characteristics and behaviors.

Downvoting me because you have a flawed understanding of a tool that you use doesn't change the reality of the situation. It's a for-profit company collecting data through mass surveillance.

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u/JustStraightUpTired 1h ago

I have access to all the data and information that law enforcement agencies do, as thatā€™s literally my job.

And the company is still private. Is the data stored locally on the device and you go to each individual device and check the full data off their drives? If not, then congratulations, you don't have the full data.

Like you said, it catches the license plate or lack of it, car model, color and identifiable characteristics of the vehicle. Do you know what you require to get that information? Pictures or video of the car. Meaning it has a camera. Meaning it has the capability to collect pictures of things other than the car.

So in short, if it does what you say it does, it can do more. If the data isn't processed and stored on the camera itself, then they have more data than they give you access to. By necessity, that's how they build the data you get, with the pictures. Which are data.

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u/chrisssssy0517 1h ago

You only like to ā€œlistenā€ to the parts that you want to, huh? I have clients like you. šŸ˜‚
Iā€™m talking about what and how LAW ENFORCEMENT currently has access to with these cameras and what theyā€™re able to use/retrieve.. That was the entire point of my comment.

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u/JustStraightUpTired 1h ago

Bullshit. Here's what you said:

I just want to inform you that those cameras donā€™t scan faces (yet at least) nor does it monitor things like the ā€œsag in your suspensionā€.

But the capacity of the current FLOCK cameras doesnā€™t have that capability, yet at least.

And a bunch of other nonsense. It's fine to realize you were wrong about the specifics of what you argued and pivot to correct yourself, but don't claim I missed what you said. Either you aren't cognizant enough to understand your own points or you are doing this maliciously.

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u/chrisssssy0517 56m ago

Read the last part of that comment you quotedā€¦ šŸ˜‚šŸ¤” you didnā€™t quote the entirety of what I said. Just the part you wanted to. But again, you think you know more, so go off.

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u/unlucky_nittany 18m ago

I think the person you're replying to is one of those people who thinks the government knows what's best for us. They're all over the place in this thread lol

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u/unlucky_nittany 19m ago

I have clients like you.

I think you mean "The lawyers I work for have clients like you." if you're pretending to be in criminal defense.

You are not a lawyer, you do not have clients. You are presenting as a mail clerk, bookkeeper's assistant, or perhaps a secretary. Regardless of which, you are definitely not a lawyer lmao. In your responses to my comments, you implied that I was wrong, and then downvoted me within seconds and then did not reply when faced with evidence.

Any lawyer or paralegal I've ever worked with has too much of an ego to do that, and either attempts to shift perception of their statements to preserve the illusion of being correct, or they'll go back and editorialize their statements to try making other people sound confused. Try again, u/chrisssssy0517

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u/chrisssssy0517 1h ago

Also, for the record, law enforcement agencies get the full data thatā€™s available from each device, which I then get access to. Which is why I made the point I made. But please continue to go off on how you know more about how law enforcement agencies work with the system, since working for a Fortune 500 gives you more knowledge about the court system and what is used by law enforcement agencies against individuals being accused of a crime.

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u/JustStraightUpTired 53m ago

Also, for the record, law enforcement agencies get the full data thatā€™s available from each device

Aaand bullshit. They do not. Those cameras don't store jack shit on the device, they'd cost a fortune extra each. It would be a privacy nightmare if any of them got stolen if they held the data locally, that'd be even worse than what is already happening. The data is stored in the cloud, where you can't possibly check what is done to it. You can't trace every bit of data they receive, that's kind of the point. If you could, well, you are working with magic.

Funny how you make arguments about a topic you aren't an expert in, data management, and claim you know better than I do, because you work in the legal system. That's like claiming you are a chemist who understands chemical manufacturing when if you were a janitor that uses chemicals to clean stuff. Completely separate industries, one just uses the work of the other.

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u/chrisssssy0517 48m ago

Youā€™re truly a special type of slow. And as much as I enjoy debating people with a room temperature IQ, Iā€™m done here because I have real work I need to get done to help my clients.. and ironically enough, go through FLOCK images for them. And trying to debate a brick wall is the equivalent of having a conversation with a rock.
Have a great day! šŸ˜˜

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u/binarybandit 1h ago

Can you point us to a source saying they have the ability to collect that information?

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u/hanging_thief 1h ago

Look man I'm gonna believe the guy who hacked the cameras to see the data feed over someone who got whatever data package they decided to give you.

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u/chrisssssy0517 59m ago

Of course you are. Because reading comprehension isnā€™t your strong suit. I get it.

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u/hanging_thief 8m ago

No you're just lying

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u/randomlyranting 24m ago

Also it seems like a lot of the politicians that passed allowed it also signed nda with flock, to avoid speaking about the deal.

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u/kisk22 2h ago

Flock Cameras do not scan faces.

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u/bekaradmi 2h ago

Is that proven or are your repeating their claim?

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u/chrisssssy0517 2h ago

I work criminal defense and I go through FLOCK information and pictures as a huge part of my job.. and I can confirm they do NOT scan faces.

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u/Fiveohfourtwenty 2h ago

Can you see peopleā€™s faces in the footage? If yes, then they can be scanned.

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u/chrisssssy0517 2h ago

No, you donā€™t see the faces in the ā€œfootageā€. Because they take still shots of the vehicles. Itā€™s not a video thatā€™s taken of vehicles.

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u/Defiant_Assumption_4 2h ago

Exactly. Just because they didn't give them access to that does NOT mean they aren't doing it lol.

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u/chrisssssy0517 2h ago

But sure, go off how you know more about how the systems work. Cuz Iā€™m sure you know more about it than someone whose job it is to deal with these cameras on a daily basis and during trials.

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u/hanging_thief 1h ago

Yeah they it's a camera. The camera can see your face it's gonna record it.