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Flock Safety's controversial CEO just got a taste of his own medicine

69 pointsposted 10 hours ago

by devonnull

(neowin.net)

49 Comments

CqtGLRGcukpy

10 hours ago

Non-cloudflare link that basically says the same thing: https://mstdn.social/@stux/117186158784673388

zbrozek

9 hours ago

Because they slow down and often block access to websites, particularly for people that try to avoid being fingerprinted or otherwise tracked. Pretty evil behavior.

It is very challenging to distinguish individuals interested in privacy from bots acting maliciously or with reckless indifference. If you devise a way to do this more effectively than Cloudflare, you should start a business to sell this as a service.

lynx97

8 hours ago

Sure, I am practicing understanding for the tyranny around me everyday when I wake up, as a meditation exercise.

Answers like yours kill the little remaining faith I have in people.

This same argument has been used to defend sloppily implemented CAPTCHAS destroying accessibility since what, 20 years.

nickff

8 hours ago

My employer is a small business that has an e-commerce website that is attacked by fraudsters trying to validate stolen credit cards or obtain customer information hundreds of times per day. Operations like CloudFlare are the only way to foil these actors. Just trusting you is not a viable strategy.

tobinfekkes

2 hours ago

I had this problem too for all my clients e-commerce websites, then solved it 3 years ago with very little code changes.

Happy to share it with you. Using small businesses for credit card testing is one of the most evil things on the Internet, so anything to stop it is worth it.

karmakurtisaani

7 hours ago

The people who downvote could propose how to solve the fraudster problem instead of shooting the messenger.

lynx97

4 hours ago

"We removed the wheelchair ramp because it was used by rodents to enter our building."

"Don't shoot the messenger!"

Security can't be a reason for discrimination.

gib444

7 hours ago

That isn't the done thing here, lamentably. Downvote is a de facto disagree button

salawat

7 hours ago

Your rate limits on adding and removing credit cards? Your input sanitization? Designing your system to not just disclose details around anything but that relevant to a logged in/authenticated user?

There are many practical ways to handle that sort of thing that isn't Cloudflare. It just requires thinking and a bit of dev time.

t. Been there, done that, cartels used an app to try to launder money through loyalty programs. Management was deadset against doing the one single thing that would make it impossible to do that at scale.

Ulterior motives abound everywhere but especially behind people claiming X is the only answer. Fingerprinting is far more intrusive than just only allowing one to add at max 2 cards a day per user.

yetihehe

7 hours ago

> Your rate limits on adding and removing credit cards?

All those requests will appear from different ip's and different browsers, made by someone who can spend months on trying to defraud you. How do you differentiate this from valid customer who happens to try to buy something between 20 tries by bots?

> Your input sanitization?

All those fraud requests will give you valid credit cards which will work perfectly, but then defrauded people or banks will try to chargeback later.

> Designing your system to not just disclose details around anything but that relevant to a logged in/authenticated user?

They can register as normal buyers.

> It just requires thinking and a bit of dev time.

And they can spend months trying to outthink you, then will drain your service in 4 hours when you are asleep.

> Management was deadset against doing the one single thing that would make it impossible to do that at scale.

So, did you actually ever implemented and checked a good solution? Cloudflare isn't perfect, but not everyone has resources to implement their own solution that is better than cloudflare.

> Fingerprinting is far more intrusive than just only allowing one to add at max 2 cards a day per user.

The fraudsters will appear as completely new users each time, adding only one card and making one purchase.

happymellon

6 hours ago

> All those fraud requests will give you valid credit cards which will work perfectly, but then defrauded people or banks will try to chargeback later.

How are they getting pass 3D-S?

If they are able to get past it, then your liability drops off.

Yes it could be designed better, but that is a separate discussion.

webdoodle

8 hours ago

Don't listen to these hecklers, you have every right to your privacy, and should demand it. Anonymity is paramount if people want to be able to talk without repercussions. Gaslighting, heckling and other forms of harassment are to convince you to self censor. Don't take the bait. Ignore them.

esseph

9 hours ago

> Because they slow down and often block access to websites, particularly for people that try to avoid being fingerprinted or otherwise tracked. Pretty evil behavior.

Bots and scrapers and hackers also try and avoid being tracked, which is by far a bigger problem for them and most websites than the 15 of us using tons of antifingerprinting techniques. Evil? No, that's silly.

neya

8 hours ago

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

salawat

7 hours ago

Hanlon's Razor is especially effective at getting Good people to put out their own eyes to keep them nice and soft targets for the malicious. I'll take being a harder to find likable by people I have no desire to be liked by to make myself a harder mark. The honest ones will understand. The malicious were never worth being close with, and I'm doing the world a service by getting the borderline enlightened.

Sufficiently advanced stupidity being indistinguishable from malice is also something to keep in mind.

polotics

7 hours ago

well in my experience mostly you get either:

- stupidity

- stupidity and malice

JohnFen

8 hours ago

Cloudflare doesn't reliably let me through.

dlcarrier

7 hours ago

It regularly blocks me too. I've begun search Google for: what does [url] say about [search query]

It'll make a Gemini summary of the page, and can be prompted for more details. It's really the only use for Gemini I've found reliable. I'd still rather directly view the output of the scraper bot, though.

If anyone knows a good scraping bot that lets you view the output directly, without running it through an LLM, please let me know.

user

9 hours ago

[deleted]

cocacola1

8 hours ago

It’s been interesting to see this vitriol towards Flock increase over the past couple of months or so.

bamboozled

7 hours ago

What is interesting about it ?

alexjplant

6 hours ago

Because Flock is the first company to so brazenly violate the post-2011 social contract: if you're going to track somebody you need to give them coupons and content as compensation. They have failed to provide the people whose privacy they are violating with internet drama and buttcheeks videos. Other companies with many times greater reach and market cap collect GPS, cell tower, and 802.11 ESSID data to observe their users' movements; they track them across web sites and apps without explicit consent to serve personalized advertisements and adjust prices for durable goods and services depending upon user behavior. They do this with impunity because people enjoy short-form videos and image macros and will readily trade their privacy for easy access to them. Flock has nothing to offer in this regard. This is why they are shunned whereas other companies that understand how this game is played are forgiven for equivalent or worse sins.

camillomiller

6 hours ago

I think they spelled satisfying wrong

artisinal

9 hours ago

In the USA, is it really that easy to find the home address of a business owner?

The EU briefly had a similar registry but that got shut down quickly.

stingrae

8 hours ago

Basically yes. There are a large number of public repositories of data that can dox a persons address. Like property tax rolls, company filings etc. some of these are actually required by Europe (https://developer.apple.com/help/app-store-connect/manage-co..., which I do not appreciate)

dlcarrier

7 hours ago

Yes, but only for the business directly owned. In the US, it's perfectly legal to run things through shell companies that make things much more difficult. E.g. instead of directly owning the company, he could put his share in fully-owned shell company, based in a country that doesn't report the owner.

hattmall

8 hours ago

Not really, it looks like this guy originally registered the business at his personal residence which is not really common. Kinda surprised if he still lives there considering how FLOCK has expanded.

lotsofpulp

9 hours ago

Land records are public in most US locales. You can type in almost any residential address on homes.com and it will show you who owned it when and with what loan terms.

user

9 hours ago

[deleted]

ChrisArchitect

10 hours ago

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49483052

platesmead

6 hours ago

"Doxxing is bad except when it's against people I dislike"?

If people don't want CCTV, campaign to make it illegal.

beAbU

an hour ago

Flock is not CCTV though. There's nothing 'closed circuit' about it at all, and that's the problem.

platesmead

44 minutes ago

Okay, reading car plates. Again, campaign to make it illegal.

Simulacra

3 hours ago

The irony is over the top with this guy. He says that Americans need to "compromise" on their privacy, but then absolutely loses it when the Panopticon is turned on him.

webdoodle

8 hours ago

Ironically most of the people reading this are doing so on an always connected phone with a fused battery, that they can't trust, because they don't control it. It also has significantly more capabilities that a flock camera, and they likely pay for it too.

kadoban

8 hours ago

That's not ironic, that's _hey, look over there!_

ethanwillis

8 hours ago

It's called choice. Maybe a dumb choice, but a choice!

HDBaseT

8 hours ago

false equivalence.

yonran

8 hours ago

The article is very one sided, implying without evidence that Flock is for recreational tracking of individuals. With San Francisco SFPD’s ALPR cameras at least, this would be an abuse of the cameras according to the policy linked from https://transparency.flocksafety.com/san-francisco-ca-pd. Here are the Authorized purposes:

Locate stolen, wanted, and or other vehicles that are the subject of investigation

To apprehend wanted persons subject to arrest warrants or who are otherwise lawfully sought by law enforcement.

To locate victims, witnesses, suspects, missing children, adults, and/or elderly individuals, including in response to Amber Alerts and Silver Alerts and others associated with a law enforcement investigation.

To assist with criminal investigations initiated by local, state and regional public safety departments by identifying vehicles associated with targets of criminal investigations.

Counter-terrorism: Identify potential threats to critical infrastructure sites.

For other law enforcement purposes as authorized by law: Investigations of major crimes.

Which of these uses do people not like? Or which other policies are people concerned with in other jurisdictions?

defrost

8 hours ago

Not on the list, but documented:

* Live monitoring of teenagers in gyms for sales purposes,

* Multiple counts of stalking by LEOs,

* Instances of unsecured access,

* Multiple erroneous plate matching directly leading to "swatting" of women and children on day to day shopping trips.

yonran

6 hours ago

The Dunwoody MJCC monitoring seems the worst incident in that Flock never issued a postmortem on how the terms of the sharing were violated.

Abuses in violation of policy are a problem like in any organization that can be reduced through auditing, discipline, etc. And it seems that the ones that have been caught (Jarmarus Brown of Orange City, FL; Asad Zahir of Shively, KY; Emily Pacheco of New Bedford, MA) have been disciplined and/or charged.

Insufficient security of devices is a problem but does not have to do with my comment about the intended uses.

Officers have to be trained about OCR errors, just like we have to know when to trust an LLM. The SFPD policy I linked says officers shall “Visually verify the alphanumeric characters on the plate” before stopping a car identified by ALPR. And like LLM hallucinations OCR errors will go down over time.

lostlogin

6 hours ago

> The article is very one sided

Of course it is. If we want a Flock press release we can just read one.

Plenty of things have lots of great upsides, and it’s the downsides that stop wider adoption and cause regulation and limits.

soulofmischief

8 hours ago

The unwarranted mass surveillance and dragnet part. We have a thing called the fourth Constitutional amendment here in the United States. We also have the first amendment, which the Supreme Court has ruled in the past must not be subject to a "chilling effect".

The Flock camera system, and any dragnet surveillance system, is a direct chilling effect to the rights to freedom of speech, freedom from religious persecution and freedom of assembly.

The inalienable aspect of these rights means that literally no example or rationalization you can provide would justify impacting those rights for even a single individual or group.

You know them personally?

I can't speak for them but I, for one, don't.

chews

8 hours ago

161 people in LA were stopped for bad data using flock cameras. The contract with them is canceled but the damn things are still up giving data to DHS probably.