Flock

The United States is plunging head-first into becoming a surveillance state, and it's all thanks to ALPRs, or Automated License Plate Readers. These types of cameras have been around for a long time now, but an aggressive startup, Flock Safety, is incorporating AI into the process (just like every startup nowadays). On top of that, they're developing a new system called Flock Nova that can "solve cases in one click." In other words, they want to automate the process of putting people in jail while making tons of money off of it.

This company is simply taking advantage of police departments around the country like an untapped market. Flock stores all of the license plate information on their servers, no matter what any of their marketing material or messages to police officers or city council members says. This is proven by the fact of how incredibly insecure these cameras are; so insecure, in fact, that anybody on the street can access their Bluetooth and video streams with enough effort.

If Flock can't bother to make their publicly accessible cameras secure enough to prevent random people from viewing their footage, how can they be trusted to protect the license plate and vehicle data they're collecting?

Flock likely knows that their cameras are insecure. They just don't care. When police chiefs see what they do, Flock knows that they will approve them for purchase because of the cameras' supposedly undeniable utility. Officers see that the cameras automatically track license plates across their whole city, and even better, across other cities that also use Flock cameras! Might as well hop on the bandwagon, right? It will accelerate the investigative process so much! Police, unfortunately, tend to lack the technical and business knowledge of what these cameras are actually for.

The real cost is ordinary citizens' privacy. Flock gets to throw these cameras all over the country, not to help keep people safe, but to create a treasure trove of data. Companies, data brokers and governments alike will fork over an arm and a leg to get access to that juicy tracking data of peoples' every movement from everywhere in the country. In Flock's eyes, the return on investment is too good to pass up. It might not be sustainable (or legal), but hey, it's a quick buck, right?

There isn't a question any more of whether or not these cameras are actually helping law enforcement because Flock does not even have the best interests of police departments in mind. Flock Safety is not a security company; they are a data broker, first and foremost (again, the words of Benn; his video on this topic is great). The worst part is that cities across the United States seem to think Flock is the former.