145
Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. 404 Media Tracked Themselves. (www.404media.co)
submitted 2 months ago by tonytins@pawb.social to c/technology@lemmy.world
55 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I am standing on the corner of Harris Road and Young Street outside of the Crossroads Business Park in Bakersfield, California, looking up at a Flock surveillance camera bolted high above a traffic signal. On my phone, I am watching myself in real time as the camera records and livestreams me—without any password or login—to the open internet. I wander into the intersection, stare at the camera and wave. On the livestream, I can see myself clearly. Hundreds of miles away, my colleagues are remotely watching me too through the exposed feed.

Flock left livestreams and administrator control panels for at least 60 of its AI-enabled Condor cameras around the country exposed to the open internet, where anyone could watch them, download 30 days worth of video archive, and change settings, see log files, and run diagnostics.

Archive: http://archive.today/IWMKe

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[-] archchan@lemmy.ml 31 points 2 months ago

The idea that you're somehow not entitled to privacy based on the publicity of a space has got to be one of the most successful propaganda campaigns used to strip privacy against the will of people.

Fuck you, I want to take a walk and generally travel freely without being tracked by some fucking "Flock" or Ring camera, or uploaded unblurred to some randos Instagram where Meta and Clearview will train facial recognition and generative AI, or having my entire life story and biometric data collected at some airport.

Take me back to the thousands of years humanity existed without obscenely invasive tech.

[-] vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 6 points 2 months ago

It's the "common sense" part of the laws.

A honest person has right to live without being tracked. You shouldn't care how they'll do it and you shouldn't care if they go out of business.

And of course you shouldn't fear to be public about it and demand answers, LOL, the most notable for me personally part about today's politics is that in English-speaking countries that fear seems to have become a thing. Well, because any protest that's more than a demonstration is becoming dangerous and costly.

While literal legalism always helps tyranny.

It's not much different from USSR in the 70s and 80s, "yeah, you can have all your rights, a defendant and all, and correspondence and you won't be tortured for submitting a complaint, and Soviet laws will be followed to the letter, but good luck, prove you're not a camel".

Since USSR and western nations no longer exist in the same time period, it's easy to discard even the thought that the latter are gradually becoming similar to the former in some regards, and might even overshoot it.

Anyway, I live in Russia, here things are for the last few months at the point where I can get jailed for writing even this, just because. LOL again.

[-] Ledivin@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago

A honest person has right to live without being tracked.

The implied corrolary here is that a dishonest person doesn't have this right? How is one determined to be dishonest?

[-] vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 2 months ago

It's more of an emotional antipode of how tracking everyone is justified - "you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide" and all such.

Whether, say, a convicted rapist (I suppose that's dishonest enough) should be tracked or not is a question in the system of values my previous comment represents.

First, whether them being a confirmed (by a proven deed) threat justifies tracking them, second, whether tracking them violates rights of those around them - their coworkers, their family members, their friends, and so on, third, whether it's possible to make tools for tracking them without introducing a technical possibility of tracking random people.

Second and third are not the same, second is about how tracking technically only them exposes those on their social graph, third is about initially illegal, but technically possible use, that would eventually become legal, because of slippery slopes.

[-] HootinNHollerin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 21 points 2 months ago

Tear em down

[-] perishthethought@piefed.social 28 points 2 months ago

Or like someone in Hacker News comm suggested, use this to track a US Senator for 24 hours, make it all public, then see if they're still OK with this...

[-] talentedkiwi@sh.itjust.works 17 points 2 months ago

They'll just make it illegal for just them. Like the Internet privacy

[-] JustARegularNerd@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 2 months ago
[-] 0_o7@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 2 months ago
[-] JustARegularNerd@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 2 months ago

That's the first I've seen a HN web client. Why does it exist, and what's the reason against linking directly to Y Combinator?

[-] 0_o7@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 2 months ago

YCombinator is a VC fund trying to pretend like they're hacker(tinkering) friendly community, when their business model is boosting their own companies/startups. And companies aren't hitting those profits with people tinkering.

https://soatok.blog/2025/12/17/the-revolution-will-not-make-the-hacker-news-front-page/

In all, that doesn't align with the hacker ethos. They're just capitalizing on what it stands for with a lot of techbro hubris.

The first step of limiting their influence is using a different opensource frontend.

https://github.com/rajatkulkarni95/hckrnws

[-] swampdownloader@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 2 months ago

Peter Thiel invested in Flock through Y Combinator

[-] RalfWausE@feddit.org 1 points 2 months ago

Fuck "Hacker News", the people that hang around there are in major ways responsible for the shitty state the internet -and the world- is in now.

load more comments (2 replies)
[-] verdi@feddit.org 1 points 2 months ago

Ycombinator is the Thiel funded Altman led cancer VC that originated the surveillance capitalism ~~neonazi~~ techbro situation we have today. It spearheaded the death of US democracy.

[-] django@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 2 months ago

This is the way.

[-] ksigley@lemmy.world 18 points 2 months ago

I do not consent.

[-] baller_w@lemmy.zip 13 points 2 months ago

Benn Jordan did a great video on this: https://youtu.be/vU1-uiUlHTo

[-] CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.works 8 points 2 months ago

He co-released a video with 404Media on this new dystopian finding today as well.

[-] ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online 11 points 2 months ago

Again? How insecure are these things? I am honestly wondering how easy it would be to get into one and shut down the entire system.

[-] Dogiedog64@lemmy.world 9 points 2 months ago

It's obvious that these guys are fucking amateur hour Techbros, running this shitshow as they have. I don't doubt they're underpaying and undertraining the contractors they hire to install these things.

load more comments (3 replies)
[-] baggachipz@sh.itjust.works 9 points 2 months ago

[-] AtariDump@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago

[-] Makhno@lemmy.world 9 points 2 months ago

Original is better

[-] M137@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago

The original is better because no higher resolution version actually looks like the original. It's so weird, it's not hars at all to make a higher res one that's almost identical to the original yet all the ones I've seen just look like shit. I'm gonna take some time tomorrow and make a high resolution version with the details correct.

[-] ouRKaoS@lemmy.today 3 points 2 months ago

The high res one looks better as a cutout instead of the full background, but the jpeg adds to the charm IMHO.

[-] ozymandias117@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago

The high-res one also removes all the shadows, I assume the upscaling algorithm believed they were blur

[-] _g_be@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

I swear to God if this is AI upscaled

[-] excursion22@piefed.ca 9 points 2 months ago

Benn Jordan did a recent video on his...explorations of Flock cameras. Essentially, they're easily hackable and really should be an urgent matter of national security.

[-] NikkiDimes@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Dude, he just released another one where they accessed dozens of real, currently in use cameras. They didn't even "hack" them, they just used a search engine to find publicly exposed cameras, opened their unsecured internal web panel, and could download and view any footage over the past 31 days, including from the new face tracking cameras that zoom in and pan on people's unsuspecting faces as they walk by.

Truly wild.

[-] Bytemeister@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

Reading flock their own response about their security and recording it via one of their active and installed cameras was fucking great. I mean, it was nightmare shit, but at a certain point, you have to appreciate the irony.

[-] cardfire@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 months ago

My own mother (pensioner) sent me the video asking "is this real?" But could only follow the first minutes of it.

I lol'd at that part and had to explain the brilliance of it. Then she lol'd, too.

It's nice to share in the shadows humor, as a family, while we feel our liberties erode.

[-] W3dd1e@lemmy.zip 4 points 2 months ago

A city in the KC Metro just signed a contract with Flock for drone cameras. Fuck that Big Brother bullshit.

[-] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 1 points 2 months ago

red light companies most likely use some form of AI/facial recognition.

[-] BanMe@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago

I was living in a 10th story penthouse apartment as a new building started beside us. The contractor put a webcam high up on the structure so people could watch construction live on a website. They left the control panel fully exposed so all you had to do was find the IP address of the camera and boom, you had full control. I would point it directly at my apartment's window and wave, or my friends would do silly shit. Every morning the cam would be reset, but they never actually secured it. That's when I realized how fucked we were, 20 years ago.

[-] LunaChocken@programming.dev 2 points 2 months ago

I wouldn't be surprised if it got found by Shodan, which scans the entire internet, indexes it and is easily searchable.

There's actually quite a few open webcams on the internet that shouldn't be.

https://github.com/00xNetrunner/Shodan_Cheet-Sheet

[-] Taldan@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Honestly? Good. These cameras should either be public or dismantled. I'd like to see them dismantled, but worst case scenario is the current one where they're selectively used by law enforcement

[-] mlg@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

iirc they weren't even the first ones to discover this because there was already someone on the blackmarket selling data collected from exposed cameras and endpoints which included PII of entire police departments.

[-] modus@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

Is there a directory of these cameras? Or are they gonna make me do all the legwork?

[-] nwtreeoctopus@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 months ago

These specifically or just Flock cams?

Here's a start: DeFlock Me

[-] modus@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

I meant the unlocked interfaces. I'm familiar with deflock.me and have contributed to it. But thank you.

load more comments
view more: next ›
this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2025
145 points (99.3% liked)

Technology

82128 readers
588 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
technopagan@lemmy.world
L4s@lemmy.world
L3s@hackingne.ws