Flock Safety is the biggest player in a city-by-city scramble for surveillance
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I did some research on them and found that they are completely wireless (cellular network most of the time) and powered by a 65w solar panel. Since they capture every license plate that passes by, I wasn't thrilled it was a private company keeping the data, even if they say they only keep it for 30 days.
I did a FOIA request with my city to see how many are in use and their locations to share with my community. I also plan on asking why my city thinks it is a good use of tax dollars. I think it should be a requirement for cities to disclose their use since it is a private company installing private equipment (and a camera at that!) on public land to monitor the public.
The problem you have if Flock squicks you out is that you're not a normie. Flock's pitch to normies is incredibly compelling. Flock theoretically lights up any time a stolen car drives into your muni; stolen cars are a primary vector for crimes (here, especially: carjacking, but also thefts, burglaries, etc). The data it collects is shareable only, and with consent, to other law enforcement agencies. It records make/model/color/plate, but no other direct identifying information. Assume for the moment that it all works as advertised, and it's on paper a weird capability to push back on your local police having.
Our own OPPD messed up acquiring Flock. I think they tried to skip the pilot, and go straight to a muni-wide rollout, which required board approval. That blindsided the board. Instead of rubber-stamping it as expected, the board kicked it out to the technology and police oversight (CPOC) citizens commissions. I serve on one of those. Here's what we came up with:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v_sko3OljbZUEbcZbv_L9q9z...
What we ended up getting:
* A negotiated special-purpose police general order governing use of Flock, limiting it to violent crime, and installing procedural safeguards (most notably: a monthly readout to CPOC on Flock hits).
* A rollback down to 8 cameras from 20+.
* A one-year review of how Flock went.
The glaring hole left open: we have no direct public input on which munis we share Flock data with.
A year later, the monthly readouts to CPOC were FOIA'd and published, and the results are in: overwhelmingly, Flock stops in Oak Park were not responsive to crimes in Oak Park, but rather had OPPD doing warrants enforcement work for neighboring munis. Worse: the premise of Flock, that we could plug into regional hot-lists of stolen cars and cordon Oak Park off from them, turned out to be terribly flawed: the CPD hot-list is full of bullshit reports or recovered cars never cleared, so we were regularly pulling random innocent people over. The Flock technology worked fine! But the municipal systems it depends just aren't ready to safely use it.
The big thing coming off Flock for us is ACLU's CCOPS model ordinance, which adds mandatory board review for any surveillance technology (broadly defined in the ordinance). We worked for 4-5 months getting it prepped for the board, which has counsel drafting a local enacting ordinance; I'm optimistic we'll get it this year. CCOPS is something any muni can get; it's a good pitch, with something for a lot of different constituencies to like.
I think the "private company monitoring public land" thing is an argument that carries a lot of weight on Twitter and HN, but my experience in (our own specific) local politics is that it's a good way to get people to look at you like a Martian.
> It records make/model/color/plate, but no other direct identifying information. Assume for the moment that it all works as advertised, and it's on paper a weird capability to push back on your local police having.
Ex Flock employee here... the first part may have changed, but private organizations (HOAs, mostly) can also have Flock deployments, and are not subject to the same sharing restrictions.
Also, image recognition does a lot more, it can identify vehicles by mismatched panel colors, roof racks, trailer hitches, bumper stickers and other factors, too.
Good on you though, for actually going after this information and sharing it with your community. People absolutely have the right to know if they're being subjected to this.
It would cost money for your city to buy its own camera system. These are presumably free, or perhaps even paying private property owners to lease the parking space. They can then turn around and charge municipalities and cities (and car repo companies, etc) for access to the information.
The police, et al, have <rules> about what they can gobble up and save, but there's nothing in the constitution about buying evidence from data brokers.
I'd bet having the comings and goings of everyone from the local WalMart and a few convenience stores at key intersections is very useful for tracking people down. At least one brand advertises the ability to get notifications when a vehicle is seen on any camera.
Flock will indeed alert on matches.
Many comments here correctly point out that you don't have an expectation of privacy in public. But that rule was really created envisioning the occasional person observing the occasional person/act/event. Even a cop tailing you is so expensive that its not deployed everywhere. The rule did not anticipate a system where every person is observed all the time. This is a situation where "quantity has a quality all of it's own".
Mass surveillance needs to be held to higher standard than regular public observation.
Feel free to spin up a FOIA request for your local jurisdiction using previous requests as a template.
I would love a national ID that I could use everywhere. Again ripe for abuse but I can see the benefits outweighing the negatives.
I myself will stay far away from any Leopards Eating People's Faces Party areas and their "stable society."
>I myself will stay far away from any Leopards Eating People's Faces Party areas and their "stable society."
And here is a prime example of why discourse is so hard in the modern era. Please don't create outrage where none exists. Please don't bring politics into something that is not political.
As society progresses its harder to just go with the flow and not have different types of regulation. You would expect everyone to be a rational actor, but they are not. There is a minimum level of conformity required for most functioning societies.
Happy that people disagree with my take on public surveillance but disappointed with your sense of false outrage and brashness. It so sad this is what pollutes so much of our information and discourse.
Why does a position need to be political? Of course in modern US politics, party lines are stronger than ever and by identifying strongly with a party you generally identify with certain positions. But I don't believe its true that to have a position or view of the world means you have a political position. Being political, and outraged for that matter, happens when you tell someone to go somewhere else to live or explicitly bring (by naming) politics into a discussion.
I like the idea of having cameras everywhere, along with the idea that I like all police to wear cameras to hold everyone in the interaction accountable.
Mass surveillance involves giving the government, an inherently political entity, and its partners in the private sector increased power over public life. It's hard to get a more political issue than that.
Has nothing to do with Republicans. I have a problem with most power at a fundamental level. I largely side with the animals who I think should be armed to bring balance back to the world.
Might want to slow your dismissal of who exactly disagrees with you.
Nobody is "creating outrage where none exists" nor are they bringing "politics into something that is not political."
We're discussing public policy around surveillance and many of us disagree with your position.
BTW, the term "Leopards Eating People's Faces Party" refers to a lot more than just Republicans - it was commonly used against Brexit supporters, as one example: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/leopards-eating-peoples-faces...
I stopped watching politics about 5 years ago and I constantly have to fight my YouTube feed to keep it out. I've never heard that term and I'm glad I don't know what it means. It shows the political deprogramming is finally happening.
Instead of argue with you, because I do really think that's a hard and in depth argument, I'm telling you about those like me who don't believe control is necessary for society. So much so that I think you should be able to disagree with me, and the only limiting factor here is land/area/which society.
I predict that you will fall victim to the control you want to protect you, and can think of no better way to prove my argument than have you live it.
You don't get to trample all over civil rights and then accuse the other side of "making it political".
So by supporting the idea of both cameras recording in public spaces and the ability to collect data off those cameras, you’re trampling all over civil rights?
Whether the trampling is done by the one wearing the boot, the one cheering it on, or some combination of both is only of academic interest. The anti-due-process attitude is contrary to some of the most fundamental tenets of our legal system.
Q: If it weren't ethically dubious and of questionable constitutionality, why not just put cameras in the intersections themselves (which The Government certainly controls), rather than leasing spots on private lots adjacent to them? Why not extract this data from extant highway cameras (which The Government can surely access for free)?
A: Because, like a masked cartoon burglar hiding in the bushes, they don't want the public to know what they're doing, because they know what they're doing is Bad.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/22/us/politics/dia-surveillance-data.htmlA. Actions that are considered crimes do not change over time.
B. Incentives to catch and prosecute crimes are not KPIed based on incarceration rates.
Nah, lets give it to a company to make it easier to punish people.
In fact, despite massive increases to surveillance tech, including cops having the location of anyone's cell phone whenever they want it thanks to private companies that are allowed to sell such data to cops with pretty much no limits, even though the cops themselves are not supposed to have such data, the clearance rate for violent crime is abysmal, 30ish percent.
Meanwhile property crime clearance rates are EVEN LOWER, at about 12%.
We don't even keep good stats about white collar crime meanwhile...
Before we give the cops more toys to harass us with, can we at least make them demonstrate they actually use the tools they have? Right now cops demonstrably do not do their jobs.
Setting up security camera at a public park to investigate crimes: OK
Setting up security camera at a public park to track citizens through facial recognition: Not OK
It is clearly legal for a company to willingly share data with law enforcement, a restriction on that would be a First Amendment violation. It is clearly legal for the government to compel a company to provide data as means of investigating crimes "upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
The question is whether the government, in cahoots with a company, can perform mass warrantless searches on every citizen under the plain-view doctrine when they have no reasonable articulable suspicion that a crime has been committed.
Just like police using infrared cameras peering into people's homes to find marijuana grows was "legal" until the courts found it to be a Forth Amendment violation.
And why is someone who believes the constitution actually means something labeled "a sovereign citizen"? Were the people during the civil right's movement wrong because they believed the government could do a better job?
> My understanding of the rule that has emerged from prior decisions is that there is a twofold requirement, first that a person have exhibited an actual (subjective) expectation of privacy and, second, that the expectation be one that society is prepared to recognize as "reasonable".
as people knowingly expose their licence plates in public places, as this is a legal requirement for the use of highways, they also reasonably believe they have an expectation of privacy against a constant and continuous search because "the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places".
Of course, you know, this is just my opinion, man.
That isn't to say that you can't make a good civic argument against increased public surveillance; only that the current practices are not meaningfully disputed as unconstitutional.
Sure. By eyeballs.
But when you install technology that makes the license plate a tracking device where they can map out your movements minute by minute as if you had some radio beacon hidden under the bumper, they're not "publicly reading" it. Why would the radio beacon be illegal without a warrant, but this be legal without it? They accomplish the same.
So in terms of concern about the enforcement of bad laws surely the correct way to deal with those is in the legislative process, rather than on relying on gaps in human enforcement later on?
Otherwise why artificially make law enforcement more inefficient?
In emergency situations, you rely on whatever mechanisms are still partially functional. We're 0.003 milliseconds into the fatal crash, and here you are saying "but are we really going to rely on the airbags, shouldn't we fix the seat belts"? If this is what passes for insightful and mature for you, we're all fucking doomed.
>Otherwise why artificially make law enforcement more inefficient?
How exactly does one grow up thinking that the measurement they want to optimize for in law enforcement, above all others, is "efficiency"?
Because one, it all comes from the same pot of money. What happens to training and selection budgets that weed out the racists, misogynists, bullies and the like. Those available for responding to violent crime, investigation of rapes and homicides etc when Police forces have to routinely expend their resources catching speeders and/or checking number plates?
And two, because to name a few of the more well known dictators; Hitler, Stalin, Mao and more recently the Kim's, all did, or do just fine without number plate readers. If the technology is available, how much notice of any laws preventing its use are future dictators going to take anyway?
Collectively wasting energy trying to ban number plate readers and the like will make zero difference to whether we end up living in dictatorships/police states. And in the meantime it is better to hold off society pushing in that direction by spending the money on things people care about.
We're all doomed.
>What happens to training and selection budgets that weed out the racists, misogynists, bullies and the like.
No such mechanisms exist. They were talked about during any planning sessions, they weren't requested or required by the legislators. They weren't designed, tested, or implemented. In fact, police academies and similar systems probably select for bullies, racists, and misogynists. I don't say this lightly, the few anecdotes that come out of those places certainly support the idea, and the results don't seem to contradict it in the slightest.
Only a deliberately cultivated naivete and some serious distance from these institutions could have one believing such mechanisms exist.
Also, do you mean literally written down on paper, or entered into a database as an instantly searchable, permanent and AI analyzable record? The two are very different.
There's a few videos on the youtubes where perfectly law-abiding citizens were pulled out of their vehicles at gunpoint due to false positives from systems like this.
IIRC they both said that mass surveillance that would "out" people's private lives (e.g. going to a gay club) might cross the boundary into an unreasonable search.
This is where you need to keep in mind that there's a spectrum and a balance. Ultimately it's up to the Supreme Court to decide where the cut-off points are. To take your example and riff on it a bit:
- There's you walking to work and mentally taking note of everyone you walk past
- There's you walking to work with a video camera and casually recording everyone you walk past
- There's you walking to work with a video camera and getting into people's personal space to make sure your video accurate captures enough of their facial features to make a positive biometric identification
- There's you walking to work, seeing someone in particular, and following them to their destination while recording the entire time
- There's you putting up a high-resolution camera in front of your house to record everyone walking past, whether or not you're watching it at the time
- There's you putting up time-synchronized high-resolution cameras on every light post in your neighbourhood
- There's taking your network of time-synchronized high-resolution cameras and adding facial/person recognition to it so that you automatically get a timestamped path of where everyone walked at what time
- There's expanding your network of time-synchronized high-resolution cameras with person recognition to cover your entire city and selling access to person-location data
Figuring out where the acceptable/unacceptable cutoff line is for private citizens, corporations, and governments is going to be an interesting question that'll have to be answered in the near future.
A 33-year-old woman became pregnant due to a failure in her birth control but is not looking to have a child and is looking to have an abortion. She goes to her OBGYN and finds out that the fetus is around 7 weeks of gestation, and therefore, cannot have an abortion in her state.
She schedules an abortion procedure with a doctor out of state that does allow abortions after 6 weeks. She drives to the airport, flies out to the state, has the procedure, and then flies back home. Per her state's law (let's say it's Texas) she did not utilize the highways or drive through a town like Amarillo to receive the abortion.[1]
Systems such as these, selling user data to both state and federal agencies bought data that included her travel patterns in it. The system (recognizing her license plate, vehicle make and model, and the state having that plate registered in her name) shows that she has traveled to a clinic in the state, then later to the airport (with TSA facial identification indicating she did indeed fly), she was then spotted at a clinic in another state by their Flock cameras, then flew back home and drove home. But also, the government agencies bought data from a period tracker and it also had her information in there. With GPS, IP Address, and other data they were able to attribute data to her that showed that she was late on her period.[2]
The state then charges her with the crime of receiving an abortion out of state, even though she did not break any law. She did not receive an abortion in the state, nor travel through a city that prohibits that. But good luck explaining that to an Attorney General who decides to follow the "spirit of the law" in this case rather than the text of the law.
This is what people are afraid of. No human being would ever be allowed to conduct this level of spying on anyone without violating their right to privacy. But because we allowed this data to be collected and shared for commercial purposes, it's somehow legal and okay? We are becoming a police state where who you know, where you go, what you do, your patterns, your habits, your scrolling, your fitness tracking, your purchases, and the amount of time you spend walking around Walmart are now all available to a government. These aren't systems you can "opt" out of. Facebook tracks and sells your data through their Pixel whether you have an account or not. These Flock cameras track and sell your location data whether you're driving, walking, riding a bike, etc. There is no opting out, there is no not participating, there is no way to protect your privacy and continue to exist in this world.
These are very real fears that people have, and all it takes is for a government to get through its bureaucracy once to determine how to process this deluge of information and then there is no turning back.
[1] https://www.texastribune.org/2023/12/13/abortion-travel-ban-...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2022/05/10/1097482967/roe-v-wade-supreme...
In addition to the underlying extraconstitutional erosion, the Supreme Council has directly created many legal justifications, both for indirect violation through government-corporate synergy and even for blatant direct violation by the nominal Government. Personally I look at the Bill of Rights as a list of test cases by which to judge effective outcomes, and they're basically all failing.
I'm guessing they couldn't make this claim if it wasn't at least partly true, and they already include the caveat of 'solved' so it's not just 'tips'.
Truly impressive honestly, for a company started in 2017 to have that much of an impact.
Frankly I suspect all this means is they served up a location hit to X requests, and they have a crime stat somehwere that says Y crimes have occurred. X/Y = 10%. Woo, what heros.
Anyways here's their own post about how they came to that conclusion for anyone who cares to read. https://www.flocksafety.com/resources/how-many-crimes-do-aut....
It's one thing for a business to install security cameras to locally monitor their premises, but the low cost and scale this is being deployed at is terrifying.
A decade ago, maybe you could avoid being tracked if you took only back roads in the country and avoided towns and cities. But now every house you pass with some private security system or vendor in it (in addition to all of the other sources, plus those set up on roadways) is reporting back to someone, and they're selling either the raw video or the processed data.
Lots of people reading this probably subscribe to such a system and don't even know that they're contributing through whatever private system they or the property they reside in are using, because it's buried and obscured under ridiculously vague terms about third-party data sharing vendors.
This article has done the disservice of making it seem like a single company expanding over a few years in an otherwise empty market. But it's not an empty market, it's just a new player gaining share as commodity-level tech matures.
Kind of interesting you can pay for a private service which will uncloak license plates. I wonder how much it is as I'd love to uncloak neighborhood speeders too.
https://oldtimemusic.com/the-meaning-behind-the-song-1000-ey...
They use DoltDB to version control their machine learning feature store:
I think Flock has a good product (and ditto I think Dolt is neat!) But that said, this 10% metric is so ridiculous it rises to the level I need to make a comment. Imagine I did something to decrease crime by 10% in two cities, and then went and made a claim like "I decreased crime 10% in the US" -- this is Flock's claim. (The study to get the 10% clearance estimate is crazy bad as well, but this 10% of solved crimes in US is such a bizarro projection to the entire US it is inarguable as to its absurdity).
Basically, assume any parking lot or other surveillance camera you come across is reporting back either the raw data itself or the processed data, like which license plate has been seen. Even the tiny mom-and-pop's, through some deal with either their (or whoever they lease property from's) surveillance or software provider.
And it's regularly been abused by bad actors among debt collectors, private investigators, police, and background check companies selling their access. Like to amateur rap crews from North Carolina, in this example:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2018/10/12/how-a...
So.. yeah, call attention to the practice and the fact it's expanding, that more and more companies are gaining and selling the data. But it minimizes the scope and scale of the problem to focus on one relatively new company's actions over the course of a few years.
If the right to privacy arrived at from this discussion kills a product line or a business, oh well. Human rights > profits, broadly speaking.
"Just because you can, doesn't mean you should."
What about setting up a camera on your roof aimed at your neighbor's bedroom window, and livestreaming it online? What about secretly recording the conversation that you're having with someone in a restaurant? What about recording the comings and goings of the people who enter or leave a gay bar, or a mosque?
It’s the difference between recording and monitoring. You’re allowed to record in a public space, but you’re not allowed to monitor it.
In the US. In much of the world it is.
But again, enforcement of this is terribly weak. It is virtually impossible to verify, and even if the government somehow did, it is trivial to circumvent as you just have to tilt the camera a few degrees or slightly change the block-out zones on the camera, and you can't really see the difference from the outside. On top of the police having a vested interest in the breaking of this rule because it helps them tremendously during investigations.
it won't be cost effective to repair the cameras, so they'll go away.
The million (almost 2 million) dollar toilet comes to mind.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/24/us/san-francisco-toilet.h...
Its even worse in some places. I see schools, colleges, libraries are getting installed on public land. I mean where are we gonna end up with this.
In short there are vanishingly few privacy laws in the US, and the few that do exist are mostly undermined by fake consent in EULA/TOS documents-that-nobody-reads. Even when a company somehow does manage to run aground of some law, they generally just end up with financial slap on the wrist while keeping their ill gotten data gains.
The best time to push for meaningful privacy legislation was over the past 40 years when all of these surveillance databases were being built out. But the second best time is now, especially as more people gain awareness of how pervasive and invasive this totalitarian industry has become. The records being created and kept by this industry would make a dyed in the wool Stasi agent blush, and Americans need to start rejecting this fallacious narrative that things that are reasonable for individuals to do at a small bespoke passing scale remain legitimate when scaled up to industrial levels.
Any time someone is doing something to you that you don't like and it's legal just do it back to them twice as much, and publically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
Are a very useful combination.
My 2 cents: I live in the Atlanta metro and it’s crazy just how much Flock has permeated communities. From main streets to small neighborhoods flock safety cameras are in use everywhere, it is off putting. I’m not sure if HOAs are the ones OKing them or if it’s the city but having a private corporation able to run cameras that read plates and can potentially surveil home consistently seems like undue erosion of privacy
Which also means... I know I'd really be pissed if I was stuck helping foot the bill for an entire gander of them when the HOA dues come in...
I’m sure the claim will be that the system is secure and not easy for criminals to use for criminal purposes but everyone here knows or should know that’s a falsehood. It cannot be secured and will be used by adversaries against law abiding citizens.
The same argument can be made about internet-connected security cameras in general, that they could allow for remotely casing a potential target, and they're generally considered to be a deterrent, and not an enabler of crime.
1. https://www.foxla.com/news/la-county-assistant-da-charged-wi...
The pretense of volition has been completely removed. You will not be allowed to participate in the modern world unless you give up some of your privacy; and if you give up some of your privacy in order to participate in the modern world, you aren't allowed to complain about giving up the rest of your privacy for any reason at all. If you really cared about privacy, you'd stop working, stop living in a building, stop paying taxes, stop living in a city, stop driving, stop walking down the sidewalk, keep your face covered, keep your mouth shut, and die in a ditch.