alt Hacker NewsCity Learns Flock Accessed Cameras in Children's Gymnastics Room as a Sales Demo
Comments
Meanwhile YC President Garry Tan continues to support and defend Flock. I'm curious how he'd spin this as a good thing.
While I think this isn’t great.
Why is the camera there in the first place??
Presumably there are people that have access to it. And if you are demoing software that connects to cameras, then someone gave the sales guy access to those cameras.
I’m also assuming those probably weren’t the only cameras…
So there are people sitting in cubicles in various companies/orgs that flock sells the access to and they are watching your children on a screen.
Usually the government is trying to wrap the spying/privacy breaches by "save the children", but this time if you want to save your children from some older dude watching them on a screen, you actually have to be against this privacy nightmare.
There is also another movement to stop Flock. And a discussion [1]
Isolated information isn't a problem. If it takes effort to access information then mass information abuse doesn't scale, it is free of cost, and consequence, access that is the issue here. Flock is attempting to destroy barriers to access around real time surveillance. There is a clear distinction between someone having a business surveillance system that points at the street that the police can get access to with some sort of device specific request and no-requirement needed brows the world access that Flock is pushing. This is different. This is evil.
This story is a duplicate of a well-attended thread, without Significant New Information (SNI):
If a demo environment isn't tightly scoped and audited, it's production in practice. The demo label doesn't matter.
One of the previous discussions [1]
All Flock footage should be subject to FOIA requests.
>“The city of Dunwoody is one city in our demo partner program,” a Flock spokesperson told 404 Media. “The cities involved in this program have authorized select Flock employees to demonstrate new products and features as we develop them in partnership with the city.
the two things i still dont understand are:
1) why is there not a dedicated demo environment for demos, like practically every other software? i cant think of any reason why they need live data for a demonstration. (this might be addressed in the article, but the paragraph where it looks like it might be mentioned is also where the article is cut off)
2) is the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta (MCJCCA) city-owned? if not, the city should not be able to give permission to use the cameras. if so, was the MJCCA notified that the cameras would be used for demo purposes? were the parents notified?