The thing to understand about the Flock Safety story out of Dunwoody, Georgia — the story reported by Jason Koebler at 404 Media on April 30 and amplified to the front page of Hacker News shortly afterward, where it accumulated 459 points and 122 comments — is that the camera in the children's gymnastics room is the part that lands in the headline, but it is not the part that organizes the story.
The part that organizes the story is the phrase demo partner program.
The phrase was supplied by Flock itself, in a statement to 404 Media, after a Dunwoody resident named Jason Hunyar filed a public records request for the city's Flock access logs and discovered what those logs contained. Hunyar published his findings on his Substack on April 8, in a post titled — and one is forced to admire the lack of editorial subtlety here — "Why Are Flock Employees Watching Our Children?" The records he obtained showed Flock sales and business-development employees accessing live cameras inside a Jewish community center pool, a children's gymnastics room, several fitness studios, a playground, and a school. The cameras had been folded into Flock's network by the city. The network had been folded into Flock's sales pipeline by Flock.
