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Why is there a flock camera indoors at a school in the first place? Are the schools supposed to be putting video and audio footage of children on 3rd party storage platforms? Are the parents aware of this? Perhaps PTA meetings should discuss. That seems like something that should be using close circuit PoE cameras to local NVR's with on-prem encrypted storage with a retention policy if there must be cameras. Encrypted CEPH perhaps? [3]
Just as one example Zoneminder [1][2] can be clustered and distributed assuming a large campus. I'm sure there must be other open source NVR's that can do the same. School IT staff should try out a small deployment first and then extend it year over year. Local AI should detect and alert on fights, abuse from teachers, anyone with a weapon, someone injured, etc...
Bob can be granted access to specific cameras that relate to his role to avoid Repetitive Strain Injury RSI among other issues.
Arguing over on-prem vs cloud misses the entire point.The architecture doesn't matter when the core requirement itself is just insane surveillance.We should be angry that our engineering is being weaponized to fulfill such a sick requirement in the first place.
There's a literature on this — surveillance in schools tends to shift student behavior in ways that aren't obviously good, and the effects on marginalized kids are measurably worse. But your broader point stands: the ethics question precedes the engineering one, and we rarely treat it that way.
Has anyone asked whether school IT staff would actually maintain a ZoneMinder instance properly? The on-prem argument assumes competent local admins — most schools have one overworked sysadmin. A forgotten NVR with default credentials in a closet might be worse than Flock's cloud, not better.
We went through something similar in our district. The cameras were sold to admin as a security upgrade, and the gun angle is exactly how they pitched it. The open source alternatives never got traction because procurement won't touch anything without a support contract and liability coverage.
why do sales employees have access (or ability to request access) to camera feeds at all?
i would like to know what other cameras adam snow, bob carter, cameran whiteman view regularly. "search him hard drive" as the kids say.
(p.s. https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety, sadly the "latest news" section does not have "flock sales employees caught watching kids", just hundreds of millions in funding to realize the minority report)
As someone who has been somewhat involved with this I'm disappointed and but not terribly surprised this goes even deeper than Dunwoody public spaces. There was a lot of community engagement on the Flock contract renewal but the vote was postponed twice. It seemed like once community engagement died down (because asking people to stay vigilant constantly is exhausting). Council seemed upset but when it came down to it they voted unanimously to continue and expand the Flock contract.
I feel like it really does a lot of harm to public trust. But also most people, even people pretty engaged in the community, just don't know or care about the consequences of being surveilled constantly. It's very hard to convey to them the potential harm this is doing to them or their kids.
The council meeting alluded to in the article happened a few days ago and is on YouTube[1]. Public comment starts around 23m, the commenters bring up some of the things in the article, and the council still moves to approve around 1h20m.
It may take time but make no mistake - this will become a bigger issue than it currently is. The fact that multiple high level Flock employees appear to be spying on children in highly suspect settings (gym, pool) is a massive, massive scandal. This just gave everyone at their city council meetings some of the most potent talking points to use against city adoption of Flock cameras.
Same pattern every time. Give employees broad internal tooling access, no audit trail worth mentioning, and someone will abuse it. Saw this at a telco in the early 2000s — it was worse than you'd think. The org chart changes, the behavior doesn't.
2016: Uber employees 'spied on ex-partners, politicians and Beyoncé'
2022: OnlyFans creator has alleged that she had sexual intercourse with multiple Meta employees and it successfully reversed the ban on her Instagram account
This is a nation feeding their children junk prison food, so no surprise they’ll also sell their video feeds to dubiously unaudited people.
It’s hard to understand though.
Not super surprising an employee comfortable with what Flock does, to not bear any moral burden from profiting off of it, would have a few creeps in the mix.
The sector is heavily regulated. I worked at a company in the same space as Flock a few years ago and production access was restricted to only those who needed it when they needed it (automated system that would give access for a defined period of time and then revoke it). It also required getting CJIS certified which was a massive pain in the ass and required things like being finger printed and sending forms to every individual state.
If Flock is just giving everyone in their company access to production data it's not that the sector needs ,more regulation, it's that someone need to audit Flock for compliance.
Bob also has some interesting searches. On September 30th, 2025 - Bob looked at just one camera. This camera is in the gymnastics room of the JCC. I personally am curious about why a sales employee from Flock would be viewing the gymnastics room. I think this also deserves an explanation.
I think it's worth speaking plainly and specifically about this.
The implied and speculated motivation is that Bob, and the other Flock employees watching people without their consent, is voyeurism. That means to look at people in otherwise-private places and in various states of undress, for sexual gratification. It is not uncommon for someone who believes nobody is looking to even adjust their clothes on their body, briefly exposing genitals, nipples, etc.
This is very concerning, but even more so because this includes children.
I'm happy to say that I would be fired if I did this, thought this, or wrote this comment.
EDIT: Parent used to say "it's common for salespeople to log in to customer environments to show potential customers what the product looks like with actual data in it."
I removed the part where I said 'it's typical for sales people to access customer environments', because I don't know how accurate that is, but probably happens more than anyone knows. Obviously it shouldn't happen without customers consent.
Also, reviewing the article again, the access patterns don't seem to match with this behavior, so there seems to be something else going on.
Just as one example Zoneminder [1][2] can be clustered and distributed assuming a large campus. I'm sure there must be other open source NVR's that can do the same. School IT staff should try out a small deployment first and then extend it year over year. Local AI should detect and alert on fights, abuse from teachers, anyone with a weapon, someone injured, etc...
Bob can be granted access to specific cameras that relate to his role to avoid Repetitive Strain Injury RSI among other issues.
[1] - https://zoneminder.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us20t1gQPOE [video][48 mins][tutorial using LXC on Debian and Proxmox]
[3] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzLV9Agnou8 [video][24 mins][ceph tutorial on proxmox][cat included]