Discussion

Why Are Flock Employees Watching Our Children?

Bender: Why is there a flock camera indoors at a school in the first place? That seems like something that should be using close circuit PoE cameras to NVR's if there must be cameras. Zoneminder [1] 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.Bob can be granted access to specific cameras that relate to his role to avoid Repetitive Strain Injury RSI and improve workplace efficiency.[1] - https://zoneminder.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

josefritzishere: Flock is so wantonly irresponsible. Their security focus is borderline non-existent. This sector desperately needs to be regulated.

enaaem: From the article: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.

lynndotpy: 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.

Geee: My guess is that this is part of a demo or onboarding for new customers, and they're using their cameras for this.

john_strinlai: "interested in entering a contract with flock? great! let me show you some kids in the pool, so you can see how high quality our cameras are.oh, pools aren't your thing? how about some kids doing gymnastics, perhaps?"

kube-system: The main reason that organizations choose commercially managed solutions is because they don't have local expertise or staff to do things themselves. I do agree that on-prem solutions are better, but Zoneminder is probably not a great option. Besides being old and clunky, it also isn't anywhere near a complete solution, and the IP cameras people often choose to connect to them are often security nightmares. There are many good and complete commercial offerings that are secure and keep video locally.

EvanAnderson: Commercially managed doesn't have to mean off-prem.Agree re: Zoneminder being a bad choice today. I hear good stuff about Frigate[0] but I haven't had time to try it yet. Outside of the FLOSS space Milestone XProtect isn't awful.[0] https://frigate.video/

Bender: I totally get what you are saying and there are certainly some schools that lack IT staff, budget and experience but there are some schools that have big budgets and plenty of IT people sitting on their hands that could slowly build this out, document it in a way that schools could budget around YoY and set examples for other schools. Maybe even use it as a project to get students some college credits.If there are better options than Zoneminder please do share the tutorial videos with others here so they have greater options. I am old and clunky so ZM works for me. There are probably some school IT admins reading this.Just my own philosophy but I am leery of expensive turn-key commercial solutions as they lead to proprietary solutions that school IT won't understand and will just lead to dead cameras and empty NVR's when law enforcement need them the most.

rcoveson: I'm happy to say that I would be fired if I did this, thought this, or wrote this comment.

JohnMakin: 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.

Geee: 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.

mixdup: I've worked in enterprise IT departments for nearly 20 years and not once during a demo for any product has a sales engineer logged into a live customer or showed actual customer data

john_strinlai: just when you thought it was bad, it gets worse.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)

tclancy: How else would they sell to additional customers if they couldn't demo random video feeds from all over?

john_strinlai: perhaps by setting up a dedicated "demo feed”, rather than access the cameras of live customers, like every other product that i have sat through a demo forcan you imagine sales force or dynamics poking around some random company's live data during a demo to some other company?

mixdup: access to every camera on the system is the selling point