Completely frivolous comment: people who insist on capitalizing “realtor” are hilarious. I know “Realtor” is a registered trademark, but that just makes it funnier to me.
On topic, we’ve stopped going to a popular pizza place near us because the owner put a Flock camera up.
Most people do not want to be surveilled all the time. Most police departments would like to surveil everyone all the time. City governments tend to do what the police department wants unless a lot of people get mad.
A private organization that is tied into governments and police departments across the country have cameras everywhere that can track license plates and have 24-hour video for tracking people and it is completely unregulated.
Would be a great angle as a buyer's agent to proactively show clients flock camera locations. At the same time, would be an interesting way to hinder the sale of a property by falsely reporting flock cameras where none are.
I know most of these flock cameras are going up in low income black neighborhoods [1] to "protect" them, but don't these wealthy neighborhoods need "protection" too?
Beside the mass surveillance issues that are very real, let me just add that HOAs need to be made illegal except for condo buildings that obviously need to maintain and manage that building. There is absolutely no reason why a single family house needs to be in a mandatory HOA.
We've all heard or experienced the silly rules about how your house must look and the fines associated with it. None of that should be legal.
The one thing HOAs do is trash pickup but that should be a municipal government function. It is it everywhere else in the developed world.
And why do they exist? If you find yourself asking that about anything uniquely American the answer is almost always "systemic racism". And that's the case here. HOAs became popularized in the 20th century with racially restrictive covenants (ie to prevent the owner selling to black people) [1].
So where are we now? Instead of the HOA president spending their day driving past "problem" houses to look for any rules violations, are we going to have them doing that with Flock cameras instead? What a dystopian nightmare.
There are a few exceptions, I live in an odd neighborhood where a group got together and rehabbed a bunch of dilapidated homes facing an alley. They got permission from the city to make the alley a pedestrian mall and green space. Our HOA exists to maintain the pedestrian mall that is essentially our front yard.
You’re gonna run into a little bit of resistance on principles with that argument. For context, I would have absolutely no interest in living in an HOA neighborhood and I don’t support them at all.
But we do have a fairly strong precedent for freedom of association in this country and the freedom for people to join into groups and figure out how they want to live.
Not sure how you could write a law that would get rid of the kind of HOA’s. You don’t like without running straight into things like religious colonies, and a variety of other living arrangements.
Seems to me the current approach where you’ve been certain kinds of discrimination and so on is a little more sound. I could think of other reforms as well, for example perhaps a time limit on HOA‘s or the requirement of some sort of super majority or consensus to be taken at intervals to prevent automatic dissolution and restrictions on size structure.
> So where are we now? Instead of the HOA president spending their day driving past "problem" houses to look for any rules violations, are we going to have them doing that with Flock cameras instead? What a dystopian nightmare.
This actually very much understates the problems. HOAs are no longer small organizations where the local biddies gather to feel like they are back in high school because they have nothing better to do with their time. They've become defacto governments.
True story I at one point bought in a development that had an HOA the rules of the development were that for the first 5 years or until have the development was done then developer would be in charge of the HOA and then it would revert to the homeowners at 4 years 6 months the HOA board (who was the developers) voted to merge with another HOA to a that ran a dozen other developments and complexes throughout the state.
HOAs are now massive multi-million dollar corporations that controls vast swathes of land, and rule over their tenants without any of the checks or balances or recourse one has available against the government.
For those who say "just buy in a non-HOA area" the problem is that almost all new builds have HOAs built in from the start as part of the developers plan and so the options for those not wanting to deal with an HOA are increasingly limited.
In short abolish HOAs. If people want to get together to form groups of homeowners that's fine but there is no world in which someone should be able to take your house because your grass is too long.
> Why would you want to live in an area that has that creepy of a tech product facing the pool? I wouldn’t want the hoa or an enterprising creep of a cop spying on my kids or myself either.
You've all spent two decades strapping microphone/camera/gps combos to the side of your head and filling your homes/cars/tvs/fridges with big tech cameras and microphones but this is the line apparently.
I'm not well versed in American privacy expectations but it seems kind of arbitrary from an outsiders perspective.
There is pressure on both sides of the issue. A lot of people prioritize security over privacy. My subdivision has a single entrance. I've been lobbying the HOA members to support installing a prominent camera there to dissuade thieves. It's less important to me that it works then that it is visible. (I have one at my driveway entrance; the one at the subdivision entrance would help the whole community.)
I would certainly not support a Flock camera wired into their network, but do support a camera limited to HOA control. It would make me feel a little easier about trips away. The potential loss of privacy in my comings and goings seems like a reasonable price to me.
If they put up a fake camera, what happens when an incident occurs and the footage is requested? Does it just become an internal secret that it’s not a real camera?
On the other hand, installing a real camera means costs associated with monitoring so you also need to convince everyone it’s worth that cost.
When my wife and I moved into our previous house (in a bit of a rough neighborhood), the owners before us had an ADT security system installed. We didn't re-up the contract, but we kept the sign.
Can someone explain to me why you wouldn't want a camera accessible to police monitoring the comings and goings of your residence? Seems it would make it trivial to catch any criminal behavior.
And the pool makes sense as well as pools are incredibly dangerous. If children are regularly breaking in and swimming at night, which has been known to happen, it's a huge liability to residents not to mention the possibility of someone drowning
I guess it could be private effort (everyone I know has a ring or Google home type system monitoring their residence 24/7), but I think the hysterics around Flock is mostly an online phenomenon.
If only everything worked perfectly as intended. In the real world there are unintended consequences of most things we do and we need to balance.
The question isn't what good can these do, the question is does the good outweigh the bad? At best we can say the jury is still out on that question - and we can only say that on the assumption that Flock and the law (likely both) does something about the ways the system can be abused.
"Flock’s array of license-plate cameras was built to fight crime. But at least 50 law enforcement officers were charged with or accused of misusing it and other systems."
I just don't buy it. The media is hugely negative on anything tech related, it's basically a meme now.
The fact is crime in cities has gone down A LOT, as I am often reminded, and this corresponds with rise of Flock and better policing. It's not definitive but I'm personally very happy police have access to these systems as I have had people break into my garage before and other theft or disturbances.
I have neighbors and that’s good enough. We all think Flock is creepy and nobody wants to be listed in a database. At this point everyone’s had their PII leaked more than once, so everyone knows the risk.
I personally have an NVR that isn’t connected to the internet and I encourage others to do the same if they want cameras.
You're absolutely right! If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. That's why I installed a camera in your bathroom and made it publicly accessible to the internet. If somebody commits a crime in your bathroom, they'll be trivially caught.
Find me some evidence that Flock ever helped catch a criminal.
If it was just 2-4 weeks of camera footage archives accessible to local police with paper trail on an as-needed basis, I doubt there would be much opposition.
don’t forget!!!
Y Combinator invested in Flock Safety in 2017.
> You're thinking Chinese surveillance
> US-based surveillance helps victims and prevents more victims
https://x.com/garrytan/status/1963310592615485955?lang=en
Brought to you by the king of double standards, Garry Tan, CEO of YCombinator.
the sad thing about american propagandists is that they willingly participate completely free of pressure from their government
For the love of money
Completely frivolous comment: people who insist on capitalizing “realtor” are hilarious. I know “Realtor” is a registered trademark, but that just makes it funnier to me.
On topic, we’ve stopped going to a popular pizza place near us because the owner put a Flock camera up.
Found a link to the original reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/realtors/comments/1von5bt/just_had_...
Thanks, HN linking to X linking to Reddit..
Can someone explain why Flock is such a politically charged topic.
I’m only now becoming aware of it, and feel like I’m out of the loop on key aspects.
Most people do not want to be surveilled all the time. Most police departments would like to surveil everyone all the time. City governments tend to do what the police department wants unless a lot of people get mad.
A private organization that is tied into governments and police departments across the country have cameras everywhere that can track license plates and have 24-hour video for tracking people and it is completely unregulated.
Is it really? It seems that the fight against total surveillance is bipartisan.
"charged" doesn't mean polarized. And "bipartisan" doesn't mean anything except in the broken system of the states.
HOA and Flock. That is one hellish dystopia over there now.
Would be a great angle as a buyer's agent to proactively show clients flock camera locations. At the same time, would be an interesting way to hinder the sale of a property by falsely reporting flock cameras where none are.
HOA busybodies might be worse than spying cops.
Why so much emphasis on Flock here? In manhattan i feel virtually every place has cameras.
You will be hard pressed to find a block without them. What’s stopping a company from paying these people for their footage in return for “safety”?
The comments under the post are difficult to read.
Really shouldn't have clicked the link or signed in to this cesspool...
I know most of these flock cameras are going up in low income black neighborhoods [1] to "protect" them, but don't these wealthy neighborhoods need "protection" too?
1: https://www.wvtf.org/news/2026-08-14/flock-cameras-trigger-p...
Wealthy neighbourhoods need actual protection, not protection-as-an-excuse-for-surveillance.
Beside the mass surveillance issues that are very real, let me just add that HOAs need to be made illegal except for condo buildings that obviously need to maintain and manage that building. There is absolutely no reason why a single family house needs to be in a mandatory HOA.
We've all heard or experienced the silly rules about how your house must look and the fines associated with it. None of that should be legal.
The one thing HOAs do is trash pickup but that should be a municipal government function. It is it everywhere else in the developed world.
And why do they exist? If you find yourself asking that about anything uniquely American the answer is almost always "systemic racism". And that's the case here. HOAs became popularized in the 20th century with racially restrictive covenants (ie to prevent the owner selling to black people) [1].
So where are we now? Instead of the HOA president spending their day driving past "problem" houses to look for any rules violations, are we going to have them doing that with Flock cameras instead? What a dystopian nightmare.
[1]: https://www.bostonfairhousing.org/timeline/1920s1948-Restric...
What about an HOA for the management of roads and rainwater runoff (ponds, etc)?
The answer is likely that it makes sense for maintenance purposes, but the legal authority granted to an HOA is overly broad.
There are a few exceptions, I live in an odd neighborhood where a group got together and rehabbed a bunch of dilapidated homes facing an alley. They got permission from the city to make the alley a pedestrian mall and green space. Our HOA exists to maintain the pedestrian mall that is essentially our front yard.
You’re gonna run into a little bit of resistance on principles with that argument. For context, I would have absolutely no interest in living in an HOA neighborhood and I don’t support them at all.
But we do have a fairly strong precedent for freedom of association in this country and the freedom for people to join into groups and figure out how they want to live.
Not sure how you could write a law that would get rid of the kind of HOA’s. You don’t like without running straight into things like religious colonies, and a variety of other living arrangements.
Seems to me the current approach where you’ve been certain kinds of discrimination and so on is a little more sound. I could think of other reforms as well, for example perhaps a time limit on HOA‘s or the requirement of some sort of super majority or consensus to be taken at intervals to prevent automatic dissolution and restrictions on size structure.
See, that's the great thing about America. We can have neighborhoods with HOAs and those without. You get to choose!
In most cities it's illegal to build a new neighbourhood without an HOA
> So where are we now? Instead of the HOA president spending their day driving past "problem" houses to look for any rules violations, are we going to have them doing that with Flock cameras instead? What a dystopian nightmare.
This actually very much understates the problems. HOAs are no longer small organizations where the local biddies gather to feel like they are back in high school because they have nothing better to do with their time. They've become defacto governments.
True story I at one point bought in a development that had an HOA the rules of the development were that for the first 5 years or until have the development was done then developer would be in charge of the HOA and then it would revert to the homeowners at 4 years 6 months the HOA board (who was the developers) voted to merge with another HOA to a that ran a dozen other developments and complexes throughout the state.
HOAs are now massive multi-million dollar corporations that controls vast swathes of land, and rule over their tenants without any of the checks or balances or recourse one has available against the government.
For those who say "just buy in a non-HOA area" the problem is that almost all new builds have HOAs built in from the start as part of the developers plan and so the options for those not wanting to deal with an HOA are increasingly limited.
In short abolish HOAs. If people want to get together to form groups of homeowners that's fine but there is no world in which someone should be able to take your house because your grass is too long.
From the original thread:
> Why would you want to live in an area that has that creepy of a tech product facing the pool? I wouldn’t want the hoa or an enterprising creep of a cop spying on my kids or myself either.
You've all spent two decades strapping microphone/camera/gps combos to the side of your head and filling your homes/cars/tvs/fridges with big tech cameras and microphones but this is the line apparently.
I'm not well versed in American privacy expectations but it seems kind of arbitrary from an outsiders perspective.
I don’t know what you’ve been doing, but I have spent the last decade continuously reducing my exposure.
Really, the standard argument "There's a X% loss of privacy, why expect any privacy at all?"
There is pressure on both sides of the issue. A lot of people prioritize security over privacy. My subdivision has a single entrance. I've been lobbying the HOA members to support installing a prominent camera there to dissuade thieves. It's less important to me that it works then that it is visible. (I have one at my driveway entrance; the one at the subdivision entrance would help the whole community.)
I would certainly not support a Flock camera wired into their network, but do support a camera limited to HOA control. It would make me feel a little easier about trips away. The potential loss of privacy in my comings and goings seems like a reasonable price to me.
If they put up a fake camera, what happens when an incident occurs and the footage is requested? Does it just become an internal secret that it’s not a real camera?
On the other hand, installing a real camera means costs associated with monitoring so you also need to convince everyone it’s worth that cost.
When my wife and I moved into our previous house (in a bit of a rough neighborhood), the owners before us had an ADT security system installed. We didn't re-up the contract, but we kept the sign.
You get burglarized a lot?
A little. In the last one the culprit was caught on a game cam, the property was recovered, and the burglar did some jail time.
Is your community experiencing an epidemic of theft that needs dissuading? So much that you feel unsafe taking trips away from your home?
Can someone explain to me why you wouldn't want a camera accessible to police monitoring the comings and goings of your residence? Seems it would make it trivial to catch any criminal behavior.
And the pool makes sense as well as pools are incredibly dangerous. If children are regularly breaking in and swimming at night, which has been known to happen, it's a huge liability to residents not to mention the possibility of someone drowning
I guess it could be private effort (everyone I know has a ring or Google home type system monitoring their residence 24/7), but I think the hysterics around Flock is mostly an online phenomenon.
If only everything worked perfectly as intended. In the real world there are unintended consequences of most things we do and we need to balance.
The question isn't what good can these do, the question is does the good outweigh the bad? At best we can say the jury is still out on that question - and we can only say that on the assumption that Flock and the law (likely both) does something about the ways the system can be abused.
> Can someone explain to me why you wouldn't want a camera accessible to police monitoring the comings and goings of your residence?
You can't be serious.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/08/02/how-pol...
"Flock’s array of license-plate cameras was built to fight crime. But at least 50 law enforcement officers were charged with or accused of misusing it and other systems."
They're stalking people with them.
I just don't buy it. The media is hugely negative on anything tech related, it's basically a meme now.
The fact is crime in cities has gone down A LOT, as I am often reminded, and this corresponds with rise of Flock and better policing. It's not definitive but I'm personally very happy police have access to these systems as I have had people break into my garage before and other theft or disturbances.
You don’t buy it? Do you think the charges were fabricated?
This assumes the police are always upstanding and never have ulterior motives. Which has proven not to be true. [0] and tons of others
[0] https://www.kcra.com/article/new-bedford-police-officer-on-l...
This assumes that the benefit of allowing police to effectively do their job outweighs instances of abuse of that power.
I don't get this argument. Police aren't perfect therefore police shouldn't be granted the ability to do their job?
You might have an unusually positive perception of the competence and professionalism of your police.
I have neighbors and that’s good enough. We all think Flock is creepy and nobody wants to be listed in a database. At this point everyone’s had their PII leaked more than once, so everyone knows the risk.
I personally have an NVR that isn’t connected to the internet and I encourage others to do the same if they want cameras.
You're absolutely right! If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. That's why I installed a camera in your bathroom and made it publicly accessible to the internet. If somebody commits a crime in your bathroom, they'll be trivially caught.
Find me some evidence that Flock ever helped catch a criminal.
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety
Benjamin Franklin, Philadelphia, 1756.
“Where there is no law, there is no freedom.”
John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1689)
If it was just 2-4 weeks of camera footage archives accessible to local police with paper trail on an as-needed basis, I doubt there would be much opposition.
But then this happened in my county:
https://www.lakemchenryscanner.com/2026/06/19/prosecutors-sa...
Have you seen American cops?
Privacy. Controlling your own data.
The police aren't your friends