Flock is a scourge on democracy. Flock is YC. But looks like they did YC nearly ten years ago. Who knows what their pitch deck looked like? If they pivoted since then to their current sinister incarnation? I don’t see any evidence that YC is still actively supporting them.
Benefit of the doubt: Funding them for a community/city-owned traffic camera type thing seems like it would have been a much more reasonable proposition than funding Flock for their current use case of allowing police to stalk their ex girlfriends or mistresses.
It’s not like this stuff wasn’t known to be a problem 10 years ago. We were already in Trump’s first term, it’s not like it was part of the early post 9/11 “secure everything” push. It was WAY after that.
It’s not an excuse, but gives some luxury of distance. We have a lot more hindsight now on how rotten things can become, so with that hindsight it’s easy to say that companies like Flock shouldn’t exist, or shouldn’t be invested in. Ten years ago required some more leaps in foresight that some people were making, I was, but even I didn’t think it would get as evil as it has.
The NSA spying scandal happened under Obama even! IMO that was the defining moment for electronic privacy as a real political issue; before that we were very much in post-9/11 state of exception mode.
ohyoutravel · · focus · HN ↗
Benefit of the doubt: Funding them for a community/city-owned traffic camera type thing seems like it would have been a much more reasonable proposition than funding Flock for their current use case of allowing police to stalk their ex girlfriends or mistresses.
MBCook · · focus · HN ↗
10 years ago is no excuse.
ohyoutravel · · focus · HN ↗
MBCook · · focus · HN ↗
It was all quite plain then. And the very heavy rhetoric made it very obvious which direction things would go.
jackb4040 · · focus · HN ↗