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People hate Flock so much its employees are now demoralized and quitting

49 points bundie 50 minutes ago 21 comments

smt88 39 minutes ago | parent

How could those innocent employees have predicted that helping to build out a surveillance state would make them unpopular?

SoftTalker 17 minutes ago | parent

I'm actually surprised. The usual thing is that people don't care, or think "I have nothing to hide" and just go on with their lives. That's mostly been the case with online surveillance, tracking, etc. done by Google, Meta, and the ad industry.

For some reason, Flock became a rallying point on both the left and the right.

beepbopboopp 11 minutes ago | parent

This ones easy, it's because the other ones provide a service people generally want, so the faustian bargain is always "Ill give you this thing I dont want to as long as you keep providing the thing I like."

Flock provides nothing direct to the consumer which means this is going to get worse and Id stake a wager they rebrand after raising their next huge round.

bicx 9 minutes ago | parent

I think Google/Meta surveillance just feels like something painless, benign, and invisible. You couldn’t see a reason a huge corporation would really want to target you or put you in danger. With Flock, your local law enforcement has access, and that feels like a much more real threat (warrantless tracking of your real-world activity with the ability to ruin your day/life), not to mention how it’s already been abused to track exes of officers, had be easily hacked in the past, and that AI face recognition matched the wrong people.

taormina 8 minutes ago | parent

It's like nobody, left or right, wanted for or consented to the surveillance state. Nothing like shoving the biggest, dumbest camera you can find in everyone's face to rub it all in. Obviously, the surveillance state is part and parcel post-9/11, but it's too easy to ignore the tech nerds when they talk about abstract things like "privacy" and "abusing the system". Then we get visible things for them to rally against like Flock.

Retr0id 8 minutes ago | parent

The bipartisan nature isn't that surprising, given that surveillance is more of an authoritarianism vs libertarianism issue i.e. orthogonal to left vs right (in an oversimplified kinda way).

jsrozner 21 minutes ago | parent

Shame is the best driver of social change (see, e.g., Rob Reich's The Common Good).

Now we just need the same shame for broader surveillance capitalism (Google, Facebook, AI companies, etc).

uberman 6 minutes ago | parent

I have a friend who is one one the best programmers I know. He worked for an ad tech company more than a decade ago optimizing time to respond for personalized ad delivery. He was not proud of working to act on fingerprinting to optimize delivery but it was a challenging task and he framed his part as addressing the challenge not the ethics. People in our circle where like "good for you optimizing network delivery to 50ms!" even people who despised the idea of tracking users around the internet to serve them ads.

I'm sure most people who work for flock compartmentalize their jobs to "I work on fingerprinting vehicles" or "I work on advanced OCR", or "I work on creating camera to camera trajectory graphs". This way they don't need to think about (too often) the larger ramifications of what they are doing. When the press points out what is the reality and that most people are pissed at Flock then the employees likely have to confront what they do in a way that they never had to.

gigatexal 6 minutes ago | parent

except when people have no shame, i.e the entirety of the trump admin

Analemma_ 12 minutes ago | parent

Unfortunately the selection effect here means that the remaining employees are gonna be super committed to thinking Flock is a good thing for the world, and will double-down on being defensive and angry any time Flock is challenged.

krupan 10 minutes ago | parent

Thankfully they will be greatly outnumbered among general society. Most humans are good people.

ticulatedspline 7 minutes ago | parent

It doesn't take a lot of bad people to subjugate a lot of good people.

wyrdcurt 11 minutes ago | parent

Related from a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49762835

andix 6 minutes ago | parent

My prediction: they are going to change their name and move a lot of their business to multiple subsidiary with different names. Until nobody notices anymore it's all one company formerly known as Flock.

adamnemecek 3 minutes ago | parent

This is not something you can hide like that, people notice cameras being installed.

ChrisArchitect 4 minutes ago | parent

[dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49762835

dkobia 3 minutes ago | parent

Axon which is already well established is quietly stealing Flocks market share while avoiding all the scrutiny.