Flock updates privacy, accountability, security, and transparency safeguards
flocksafety.com
flocksafety.com
Reading these actions, you can pick apart how to circumvent them, and the security audit is still pending — let's see how damning of a report they'll allow to be released.
Looks like they don't actually give a shit. These safeguards should be the required bare minimum.
P.S: Anyone know how London has solved this problem?
I also would STRONGLY encourage people to actually go look for any ALPR reported in their town, because DeFlock also allows crowdsourced corrections to misreported instances.
Where I live, it had been reported that we had 9 ALPR cameras, which in fact were not ALPR cameras but rather traffic management cameras - or in two cases not cameras at all. It gave the impression of a problem that didn't exist here.
The possibilities are endless:
- Is your employee visiting your competitors?
- Where has your husband/wife/lover been?
- What medical buildings has this person been to?
- Does this person go to churches / gun ranges?[Edit: I think Flocks "victims" have a decent argument for injunctions for the removal of the cameras on the basis that Flock is conducting an illegal search on behalf of the government.]
However, the government can generally do what the public is allowed to do. So, if there are companies serving a genuine market for monitoring your employees, etc. via video surveillance installed on private property... then the government would not be restricted from accessing what private businesses have access to buy.
Is there actually a legal precedent for this?
They lost me when the CEO lied to a city official in a public meeting. ( https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/tracking-alpr-c... )
I don't quite understand the leap that's made to argue in good faith they don't track people or build a profile.
Some research done by others has uncovered a good bit of how they’re designed to function. They’re aimed to get a good look at plates.
The same cameras can be sold for purely video functionality. Those would be aimed differently. Like at the entrance to a store, etc. Whatever the customer wanted.
They are all over the interstate in my area now. It's to see who's driving obviously, no? These cameras are top of the line with great resolution.
> “FLOCK already has their license plate reader systems in several neighborhoods in North SA [San Antonio] now,” James Glass, the deputy director of the Southwest Texas Fusion Center, wrote in an October 2020 email to colleagues. “In order to be granted free access to search the FLOCK system for license plate reader hits, we are asked to agree to sign this MOU.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/talon-flock-safety-cameras-p...
whereismycrush.com
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whereisthepolice.comWe shouldn't have these cameras at all but even if we were forced to have them the people running Flock are the last people who should be in control of them.
The way they act on social media and in interviews they just come off (and surely are) fragile ego children.
We should anticipate a future where a more competent malicious actor like Axon is leading this industry. As the Kleenex of surveillance cameras, Flock has poisoned the category, so I don't think switching brands will fool anyone, but we will have less of an attack surface.
My police chief is okay with it and the case number "abc123" is FOIA-exempt out of operational security concerns.
I'm one of the general public that is continually confused by their usage of the word "own". I can't imagine that their language update will make it any more clear.
If the data is on Flock's servers (it is) and accessible by Flock (it is) then it is Flock who owns the data, not the PDs. Sure, they can allow the PDs to have say over what is done with the data, but ultimately Flock has the ability to use the data however they'd like.
This is not hypothetical: Flock have used previously shared data with DHS [0] without the so-called owner's permission and use data for their AI training [1] without option to opt-out.
Their definition of ownership is further contradicted later in this post:
> we will now require case codes for all law enforcement searches by the end of the year.
To be clear, I think this is a good change, but if PDs "own" their data, then they should be able to decide whether or not they want to use this feature.
All in all, this is not ownership.
[0] - https://apnews.com/article/immigration-abortion-license-plat...
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/apr/...
The ToS is negotiable. As it usually is when talking large sums of money. You can retrieve this with a FOIA request and see how they tend to be unique to each city. Some customers like to define the relationship differently or make additional restrictions for data handling.
I really just want to point out that layman terms and contract law are two different things.
I wouldn’t care if anonymized data is being used,I would care if I’m told I control sharing but it turns out I don’t. It’s not clear to me Flock did anything wrong. It sounds like that department inadvertently shared with a federal agency because it wasn’t obvious to them they were doing so. (Federal agencies are clearly marked as such now, product complies with state law to prevent accidental sharing)
Totally agreed. My point is that their layman use of "ownership" is inaccurate at best, misleading at worst. I'm speaking to the words as they are commonly understood, not the legal definition.
You're probably right this this problem is not unique to Flock: other SaaS companies probably make the same misleading claims about ownership.
I can't go walk my dog around the neighborhood without looking up and seeing police accessible cameras. They can track my movements with no probable cause and no warrants.
My understanding is that IF they are tracking your historical movements over time from multiple different cameras, that constitutes a "search" and the Fourth Amendment requires a warrant in that case.
There have been slightly different variations to this in the courts lately, such as google location history and geofence warrants, but unless you know of a legal precedent (besides "they're getting away with it right now") that says historical movements don't need a search, I'm inclined to believe that they do.
Whether or not that is currently being successfully tested in court is another story.
It doesn't deal with the lingering threat that remains of the people who would be willing to do this kind of stuff for money.
The problem is ultimately that there are people motivated to spy on their neighbours and bring about a totalitarian surveillance nightmare in exchange for money.
You're just playing whack-a-mole as long as these people can still operate in society. They'll be back, and more insidious and more determined to destroy society.
What's the solution to that?
It shows not only ALPRs but all of the other surveillance nodes.
Part of the reason I wrote that post is it is better to retain the data indefinitely and have a warrant standard than continue to reduce the time period in which the data is retained.
The company is dead to rights in the eyes of the public.
Guns have safety triggers but cops still have no problems with discharging them too quickly and wrongly.
Let’s learn from guns, we should have limited them in the US decades ago and today the problem is hugely based on lack of will for action at every step in history.
Now, flock investor should get more hate.
Make a site specific to your area. I’ve created https://stopflock419.com for my part, and I’ve already had five people in my area reach out to me (after spreading it around via friends and family).
Local campaigning is easier than you think! Most of the councils who approved these were a) lied to about the cameras’ capabilities and b) generally just on autopilot, they aren’t Flock fanboys, they just kind of take the police chief at their word that these are good tools.
Just another example of tech bros enriching themselves and destroying as much as they can along the way.
Even this isn't true (unless you meant morally, which I can't agree with) in the USA. There are times and situations where you absolutely have a right to privacy in public. For example, the government still needs a warrant to listen to you on a phone call in a public phone booth. The government needs a warrant to attach a gps tracker to your car even if it's on the public streets.
Personally, I would love extending protections against private corporations (not just government), and prevent the storage and aggregation of surveillance sensor data.
Plainly, I think it makes sense to not be constantly in view of a single entity when in public.
Abuse is possible, but I don't see why we can't limit it with laws and regulations. And the potential gains in terms of preventing crime and catching criminals are huge.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/violent-crime-rate-us
When there are other things we could be spending effort on that don't entail mass surveillance, why are you so interested in it being done with AI cameras? Besides, it's still only reactive. You'll still have criminals but you'll catch them a bit more often. You're not addressing the root issues that cause crime.
What is to be decided, is how many single points does it take to be considered “precise” measurement. If I put a camera every 500ft of roadway, is it tracking how? Probably. Still not your though, it’s a car. Is a car an extension of you? Do your rights extend to the car?
In case law, even though a phone is not you, it’s considered an extension of you. A car is not. A phones location data continues even when in the privacy of your home, or in a private building. A church, a hospital, whatever.
That is why cellular gps data requires a warrant.
Dispersed points on a map, with a timestamp, and image of the rear of a car are not the same.
It might as well be the same for all intents and purposes though. If you place a Flock camera every 100m, the accuracy effectively becomes <50m. You can reveal basically every outdoor movement of a human with that level of precision.
Across weeks and months it can be used to profile you. The statistical analysis capabilities are insane. It also is not just "license plates" its everything. How you look, how you walk, your clothing, everything gets captured.
These cameras aren't just placed on road sides, the capture footpaths, parks, entries to peoples home, swimming pools even!
On the contrary, you should absolutely have a right to not be pervasively tracked and surveilled.