Flock Off

There's been a lot of news surrounding the company Flock and its cameras. The company is mostly known for its automated license plate reading cameras.

The premise is simple, license plates are pretty simple to use optical character recognition (OCR) on. As you drive by, it takes pictures of your license plate, reads it, and records when it took the picture. Then Flock users, normally police and law enforcement officers, can enter a license plate to see when and where that particular car and plate were seen. All of this can be done without a warrant since it's being captured by a private company and not the government.

There are many privacy implications to all of this. You're being tracked simply by driving your car. You can't opt out, you can't say no. You can go to your local government and try to get them to cancel their contract or not purchase or renew, but even that might not work. Local officials and police departments have found both creative ways around that, or simply just ignored their constituents concerns.

And if you're thinking, "hey, I don't have a car, I don't drive. I'm safe!" Oooo boy, do I got some news for you. Flock has some cameras that track people as well.

“This is a classic bait-and-switch. Your town was pitched a tool to catch stolen cars and find missing kids,” Tom Bowman, policy counsel, security & surveillance, at the Center for Democracy & Technology, told 404 Media in a statement. Instead, cops now have the capability to search for a specific person or description of a person across a wealth of camera networks at once. “It's like being sold a smoke detector and only later finding out it's been recording every conversation in your house.”

Add to that, they have some grade-A security policies too.

I will also say to Flock's credit, they do have some decent auditing systems. But that doesn't mean they don't tell police to be vague with their lookups. That auditing though has exposed how cops surveilled a woman thought to have had an abortion, or to stalk people, or to monitor someone and use it as probable cause to search his car for weed. It's pretty fucking creepy. Some good news though is that a judge has ruled that the searches are public record and can be requested by the public.

Now, I've seen some arguments talking about how we all go around with smartphones that allow us to be tracked, and that's true. But ultimately that's a choice each individual makes. Users can limit what apps they download, install a more privacy-focused operating system like GrapheneOS, keep their phone off unless needed, or even get an older dumb phone. We don't have the choice with these cameras other than elect officials you hope will listen to you when you say you don't want them. And even then, that assumes your neighboring townships and cities don't install the cameras.

Stanley from the ACLU added, “Imagine that your police department stationed officers on corners around your community writing down notes on where you are at what time, but also what you’re wearing every day, what objects you might be carrying — and writing down those details on everybody, 24/7. You would ask, why are they keeping notes on everybody? That’s pretty intrusive. But that’s basically what these systems do.”

I would encourage you all to sign up for 404 Media and follow their Flock reporting.