I came in to the thread anticipating a highly placed tptacek comment defending Flock without grappling with any of their numerous problems, and claiming that "regular people" love Flock. Weird how predictable that's become.
They simply didn't properly identify the vehicle because Flock's ALPR gave them the pass. The innocent person would not have needed "photo proof" of his distant location if the ALPR didn't exist in the first place. Then he would not have been forced to spend a month of his life in jail.
We blame the technology because police misusing their powers is a tale as old as police, is demonstrably not fixable, and this technology is at fault for aggressively selling itself to police to give them these powers that we all know will be misused. Flock absolutely bears significant responsibility for creating the technology and conditions for this unjust behavior to exist, and continuing to advocate against those pushing back on it by trying to brand them as terrorists.
"Ownership" of data may have little or nothing to do with control of the data, depending on what other rights you agree to give up. Your Flock contract may specify your ownership of the data and then in the next sentence release to Flock all or most control of that data (you still own it!).
The people creating, funding, controlling, developing, deploying and using the tech are not neutral, and the technology is indistinguishable from those people. In light of that, I would argue your assertion, that the "tech is neutral", is nothing more than rhetoric and that in every meaningful way the tech lacks neutrality.
Isn't PG's conflation of Denmark's high income tax with a proposed wealth tax a clear flaw in his math and argument re: "the highest taxes in the world"? Why wouldn't you instead compare to other countries that also have both income and wealth taxes?
The data set IJ is providing here is situations where stalking was reported/suspected, investigated, discovered, and prosecuted. Other stalking cases could fail any one of those stages and be invisible to the public.
In my town, we have Flock. I request the audit logs that show how police are searching the Flock system.
In November 2025 and prior, the logs were listed by USERID and I could independently correlate quantity of searches by USERID to detect unusual search behavior. This same methodology has been used to catch police stalking in at least one other city.
In December 2025, Flock decided to "improve" its system. All searches on the audit log are now completely serialized, anonymized. This "improvement" came after 2025 turned out several cases of police stalking using Flock.
Since the crux of this seems to be about replacing middle managers, what do people think prevents AI from successfully managing 140 direct reports on day to day operations on behalf of a lone CEO? I'm reading "it doesn't work," but that sounds like more of a potential opportunity to me than a truism.
Where are the stories about all the other mail providers who routinely cough up everything about your email account, including full content, metadata, and full payment details, on a daily basis?
Proton is one of the few services who accepts anonymous payment, and cannot themselves provide encrypted content in cleartext. They cannot save you from yourself, though.
I'd like a service like yours that allows private signups and that works continuously to prove ongoing private operations. I don't need huge data plans, I'm fine with WiFi mostly. It needs to cost way less per month than your current pricing. It would be cool if you could find a way to serve people like me.
Can you please respond with a full throated opinion of what Palantir is today? This seems to be what everyone is thirsting for and what you are perhaps inadvertently dancing around.
HN's hidden Active section surfaces stories that are getting a lot of comments, which on its own is helpful. The most helpful part of Active is that it doesn't hide Flagged submissions. You may want to be especially aware of a submission that is getting a lot of comments but is flagged.
I appreciate this comment creating somewhere for people to discuss flagging. In my ideal HN you wouldn't be down voted but there would be a rigorous comment thread underneath it.