Since the page is currently down and I have no idea what flocked means in the context of license plates, can I assume this is US specific?
There's a bunch of articles about them here: https://www.404media.co/tag/flock/
edit: grammar
The ones on their map near my location are all for automatic license plate recognition to enter parking garages. Not exactly the dystopian nightmare their homepage warned me about.
I trust the government a lot more than some random third party company ("flock"), though.
Some are for government spying while others are for government spying and other bad actors.
I’d love to gain access to said parking garage meter camera and scan plates too, only I’m looking for high value targets that just got to work and thus, left their home.
I’m looking at software used to capture, track, and pull data from all these sources in an attempt to build a dragnet like service where you can ask “where is license plate <bingo>”?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni...
I'm not sure why these are so bad but generally everyone loves things like Ring cameras which do the same thing but with people rather than vehicles. I suspect there's something in the American Psyche and how they treat cars, and the inherent trust of the billionaires and distrust of "The Feds"
The cameras don't track me either. They track a car. They have no idea who is driving the car.
> If it were released that everyone's ring cameras were being fed into some NSA program running facial recognition to track citizens movement I'm sure they would be upset about that too
That's the interesting bit, how did ANPR get into the US public consciousness now, rather than over a decade ago when it started to be used on toll roads
Let people slowly get interested in protecting their privacy; as they say, better late than never!
Ring camera footage requires law enforcement to get a warrant or for individuals to give consent to supply the footage.
Now tell me which system makes it easier for a cop to stalk their ex.
Then again, these modes of transport are less popular in the US; I guess such a surveillance system is extra effective in the US because of that.
As the cost of compute and wireless communications continues to drop, facial recognition will be prolific. There are more limitations with cameras, but AI will make it easy to backtrack movement to a place where they get a clean shot that can identify you.
As an example, the transit authority in NYC Metro was able to plug existing security feeds from trains into Amazon Rekognition to count heads, which feeds their ticketing app — you can see which carriages are full. As time goes on, they’ll become able to track the breadcrumbs individuals from seat to platform. (If not already)
Detectives do this manually today. I was on a jury where the purse snatcher was followed by various cameras until he got on a bus. They pulled the bus passes and tracked his pass back to his girlfriend.
They don’t say “hibf just walked into the 7-11” yet. The Feds probably have a system that can do that for car passengers traveling on “drug corridors” (ie. I95) today.
Please don’t make it seem like it’s a “popularity” thing; it’s a necessity thing.
[1]: https://www.traficom.fi/sites/default/files/media/publicatio... page 6
[2]: https://metropolitan-council.github.io/TBI_Household_Synthes... “Driving remains the predominant mode of travel in the region, representing 83% of trips in 2023.”
But, in Canada, there are local communities that plow bike infrastructure and locals bike in their deep winter.
It's a chicken or egg problem of building infrastructure for users and users demanding infrastructure. It's not some fact of nature that it's impossible. Different communities have different priorities. So, necessity is a bit strong of a word.
The vast majority of Americans live in cities. Half live in just 8 metro-areas, just as the vast majority of Europeans live in cities. Europe is far more dispersed though.
Some European cities I remember having pervasive cameras in public transport a decade ago, ostensibly to prosecute vandals.
Ring is problematic in some ways but doesn’t produce trivially searchable metadata.
LOVEINT is indeed a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT
That was just my reaction reading the OP.
First paragraph: reasonable, if ignoring that access it not likely to be unrestricted willy-nilly.
Second paragraph: not as reasonable given that Amazon likely comply without issue with us intelligence, and sell the data to third parties, which the police could just buy (similar has been done) to avoid consent or legal obstacles.
Third paragraph: out of nowhere, focus on police. No mention of intelligence agency staff or say Amazon staff doing the same thing.
I just had a wee chuckle to myself was all.
With the right access controls and approval processes, that can be fully solved in a week.
What do you think the chances are that we could invent a system like that? You don't think Flock and the police would find a way to circumvent it do you?
That is one aspect.
But they are also now "using AI to analyze vehicle movements for suspicious patterns and proactively alerting police to investigate". What could possibly go wrong with that?
Or that there are microphones in certain Flock devices, and they've discussed their intent to activate those and do that with speech analysis.
Garrett Langley, the CEO, has a disturbingly Minority Report-esque vision for a world with, in his words, "no crime", "thanks to Flock".
And these are all steps towards it. Interesting you mention Ring, because Flock has partnered with Amazon and is opting all Ring footage into Flock's network and analyses.
In my city, most vehicular movement between neighborhoods and in/out of the city is logged. Your safety and civil liberties are dependent on agencies following and auditing their work rules, as the law didn’t anticipate this gives them a lot of discretion.
Unlike ring cameras which people voluntarily install and the government needs a warrant to access, flock cameras are pretty much exclusively for the government to actively monitor citizens without any court oversight.
ANPR has been a thing for 30 years. Is America just slow on the uptake? Even then it looks like they've been in use for a long time there.
That's a "santa claus for adults" rumor.
Ring only complies with requests that they are legally obligated to. Otherwise users need to voluntarily share the footage, which more often than not they do.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2945470/ring-lets-police-ask...