alt Hacker NewsCurious how/why all this negative attention is focused directly on the Flock brand (current example notwithstanding)?
Seems like if I were a competitor of Flock I'd be pretty happy right now and all this negative press is making them artificially cheap to buyout right now.
Motorola/Vigilant, Rekor, Leonardo/ELSAG, and Axon are huge companies making mint off the same thing and no once in 20 years have I seen this level of attention... not on the overarching issue of surveillance-state-ing, but of one particular company.
Replies
1) Flock developed a nationwide network to track innocent people, tried to get in as many places as possible, and handed law enforcement agencies carte blanche access with virtually no oversight. Their whole schtick was being the mass surveillance company, and striking fear into people's hearts, in order to prevent crime. Despite being founded in 2017, they quickly reached hundreds of thousands of cameras installed.
2) The US Executive branch formed concentration camps and a private army, and started using this nationwide mass surveillance network to track down any brown people with a Spanish accent to lock them up in dangerous squalid conditions and/or deport them with no trial. This is an immediate, nation-wide harm being done to millions of Americans, and this new company is enabling it.
Flock has over 80% of the US market.
You've seen this level of attention on a market leader before: on Microsoft, on Adobe, and others.