Dissecting Flock Safety: The Cameras Tracking You Are a Security Nightmare [video]

These cameras are showing up everywhere in my state. It's creepy. I had no idea what they were, and now suddenly they're at every intersection, gas station, you name it.

I don't like that the government is tracking everyone's movements so openly. I knew they were doing this with cell phone data, but that wasn't so brazen.

did you know that flock has a data sharing contract with ring cameras? amazon’s panopticon is much larger. i believe it is on by default and users have to manually opt out, but i don’t have a ring camera to verify.

Here in Austin, the city council no longer allows Flock ALPR's (automated license plate readers) on city streets, but Home Depot and other businesses still use them in their parking lots, and they scan your vehicle license plate every time you enter and exit the premises. Flock sells its data to ICE and law enforcement.

Plus they'll position them close to an intersection in the parking lot of a business so they can get around something like the restriction Austin put in.

Correct. Flock sells cameras and platform access, but gives data from their shared, nationwide surveillance utility to ICE and law enforcement.

https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-massachus...

https://www.404media.co/ice-taps-into-nationwide-ai-enabled-...

https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/surveillance-com...

that's an odly specific answer.

As the CEO of Flock, don't you feel you have more information to offer this community outside of the "we do not sell data" statement you've made over and over? The fact that you do not engage here in the ethical aspects of your product doesn't look good for you and only deepens suspicion that something darker is going on behind your doors.

Feel free to place a disclosure that you are a cofounder of Flock.

Only sharing specific clips is opt-in¹, but the program and its notifications are on by default. Maybe not surprisingly, consumers aren't asked if they want to participate, and the option is buried enough that most people will never see it.

¹ I'm being generous here. Police can still obtain Ring footage via warrants or "emergency" requests that don’t involve the user choosing to share anything.

Seems like a broad dismissal of the claim made upthread ("Flock sells its data to ICE and law enforcement"). Why do you think it is excessively specific?

Royal we.

This is part of the problem with Flock, IMO. Lack of adherence to or support of norms. Psychopathy actualized as a corporation.

The societal impact of disruption of trust, of personal privacy, is under-appreciated by the corporation. It's concerned with winning profit.

(Meta) It's an inspecific argument I'm lazily laying out, yes, however the problem is ridiculously obvious.

We should not have to ask to be respected, and here we are.

Democratic decline (both the systems and participation in), truth, self respect/understanding of one's own rights ... those qualities are dying at the relentless toxic, ethically under-explored capitalization of our laws and resources. (Especially USA, compare to corporate social responsibility countries, I suspect)

Tech disruption is amazing to watch, and participate in, like a fire consuming the forest. "But what about the children?"

The comment adjacent to mine links to several findings, including from the EFF, demonstrating doubt on your assertions here. Specifically the case of Texas using Flock data outside of their jurisdiction (on a national level even) to use against abortion seekers. You have no substantial comments to make on those or any of the other active discussions that have spawned on this platform over the past year? You're obviously reading them, yet you only remain "consistent" on a technicality.

What steps is Flock taking to address the privacy overreach? Do you have data sharing agreements with Palantir? If so, do they respect the same geofencing properties that your clients supposedly have full control over?

So your concern here is spam of unsolicited requests from LE to consider sharing data related to some local event?

> they'll position them close to an intersection

Does Flock control where the cameras are positioned?

This is totally disingenuous.

You are selling tools that have zero upside and a lot of downsides and that are used for structural violation of the privacy of citizens. Don't hide behind that you're trying to help people stay safe, that is not what you are doing and if you believe that you can take credit for the upsides then you really should take responsibility for the downsides.

hey, while I have you here Mr CEO, why are you comfortable allowing abusive cops the tech to stalk and harass former partners, I've met women that had ex husbands in the FBI that kept chasing them across country to continue the abuse and your camera systems help enable those acts.

I hope you lose sleep like those women do.

>Welcome feedback or new ideas to make our communities safe.

Nuture not control.

Living wage.

Access to day care.

Zero upside? LOL, no.

I'm looking for convincing decoy ALPR cameras because I don't think my HOA will go for a real setup, and I've got concerns over the product's security. I want the appearance of surveillance if I can't get the real thing. Being on a Flock/ALPR tracking app/site would be a huge win.

There is no benefit to signaling one's virtue in this scenario. It's like having a sign in your yard that says "Proudly Gun-Free Household".

The problem isn't zero upside, as other commenters have pointed out. The cameras have legitimate, lawful, and useful purposes. You will not gain any traction with the public or with lawmakers as long as your arguments ignore that reality.

The problem is that the downside is unbounded.

We clearly don't have the control over our governments, in either direction or degree, that would be needed to ensure that the unbounded downside of ubiquitous networked cameras won't manifest itself.

From the ACLU article above:

Every community in the nation that is home to Flock cameras should look at the user agreement between their police department (or other Flock customers) and the company, to see whether it contains a clause stating that the customer “hereby grants Flock” a “worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free free right and license” to “disclose the Agency Data… for investigative purposes.” This is the language that will govern in a community unless a department demands changes to the standard user agreement that Flock offers. That is something we absolutely urge any agencies doing business with Flock to do — and, the ACLU of Massachusetts found, is exactly what the Boston police department did.

---

What assurance does any member of the public have that your company does not and will not ever share data to which you claim a "worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free free right and license" to? Are you saying that the "customer" has the ability to choose a "do not share" flag or something? What happens when they flip that flag at some point in the future? What redress does a victim have if you share data you did not, at that point in time, have permission to share?

Here was the CEO back in 2017:

"Alexro, there are clear and large signs about the cameras at the entrance to our neighborhoods.

"Our neighborhoods are not large public roads, they are typically 100-400 home communities. You would never have to enter the community."

Now, it's clear that the cameras are not always obviously marked, they are not always in small communities, and they are often now on public thoroughfares. i go past at least one every day and it is not within a subdivision, rather it's on a main thoroughfare. It is marked, but a sign that is readable at 5 MPH is not necessarily readable at 35 MPH. It doesn't help to mark it "Flock" because I don't know who it is for.

Presumably, someone who has permission to the data can use it for legitimate investigations. Or they can use it for illicit investigations. Or share it with others for their own investigations. Or exchange it for other data they care about. And since we're not the "customer", what can we do about it? We're the target.

He's not arguing that the data isn't shared. He's saying that they don't sell it. Local PDs generally want to share their data with other law enforcement agencies.

I don't like that this is the case, but you understand that a pretty huge fraction of the country doesn't share your set of political premises that providing data for immigration enforcement is unethical, right? (I do, but that shouldn't matter for the analysis.)

It seems weird to me to hyperfocus on Flock's role here rather than the role your own local municipalities play in deciding how to configure these things. Not sharing with ICE is apparently quite doable? At least to the point of requiring a court order to get access to the data, which is a vulnerability all online cameras share.

Later

s/company/country, thanks for the correction!

Did you mean country?

>but gives data from their shared, nationwide surveillance utility to ICE and law enforcement

I don't think anyone with a network like that can not "give" the contents to the feds for very long without drawing ire.

Because the specific part here is selling the data and them doing it.

Flock does not sell data, they willingly give it away for free. And, technically, they don't do it - their customers do, and Flock knows and lets them.

Personally, in my view, this is worse. But they don't specifically sell data.

I think complaints about real things make a more persuasive argument than, you know, falsehoods.

Ah yeah the poor businessmen, god forbid they draw ire. Much better to just act unethically.

My neighborhood is very safe and we have no such cameras. What problem are you trying to solve and why do you think cameras are the only solution?

Not sharing data with ICE would immediately make my entire city safer

Texas cops used your data to harass abortion recipients. FBI agents used it to abuse former partners.

You want to make the world safer? Shut down your company.

That is irrelevant to my comment. Yes, it's abundantly clear what he's saying, he's said it so many times already, I don't need to read it again. I'm asking why he's not contributing more to the actual discussions surrounding his product instead.

What's the upside then, since it is so clear to you? Show me the stats on how these cameras actually reduced crime instead. Because to me they only show a possible decrease in one form of crime and a guaranteed increase in another.

"We don't sell data. We just provide it for free to our sibling company, which sells data"

Being right on a technicality doesnt mean that everyone else is lying. We are not stupid, we were not born yesterday: we all understand that "selling data" does not literally mean exchanging money for data. It can also mean treating data haphazardly, or having a culture of extreme data collection. Both of which describe flock.

since the flock CEO’s comment is dead, i hope you don’t mind if i reply to him here.

Your wealth and power will not save you. Your rich friends will not save you. Turning off the monstrosity you are helping to create and reckoning with what you have already done in the world is the only thing that will. If there is still any shard of humanity left in you, I hope this finds it. It is not too late to turn away from the path you chose. But it soon will be. And there will be a reckoning either way.

> My neighborhood is very safe and we have no such cameras.

Good for you.

> why do you think cameras are the only solution?

Straw man.

I want to deter criminals from even thinking about targeting my neighborhood. The appearance of surveillance might serve as a powerful deterrent. Inclusion on a site that warns criminals where ALPR cameras are located would be a boon to this effort. Convincing decoy camera housings, the subject of my post, might be enough to get the neighborhood listed without actually having go forward with a full Flock installation.

Let me be extremely clear: there's no member of the set of humans that actively avoid ALPR cameras that I want coming to my home uninvited. Not a single one.

I take down scam bandit signs [0]. Since I noticed the Flock signs in one neighborhood, I no longer enter that neighborhood to take down the scam bandit signs.

[0] "Text us to see if you qaulify for (some non-existent) government program to get free (things)"

I hope that neighborhood enjoys the flock cameras more than the visual blight and their neighbors getting scammed.

It's not a "technicality!" diogenes_atx made a very specific, false claim. Don't do that!

> we all understand that "selling data" does not literally mean exchanging money for data.

You're completely wrong there. That is exactly what it means.

If what you mean is lax security practices, or collecting data in general, just say that. There's really no need to bend over backwards to defend this.

You think people will choose to target your neighborhood without the perceived threat of surveillance? Why?

Looking at your user page, I don't imagine you park your car on the street, do you? A lot of people have to. When (not if) it gets vandalized or stolen, it's nice to be able to identify the perpetrators and hold them to account.

Of course the rest of the justice system has to be firing on all cylinders to make that happen... but still, when you're a crime victim, more information is better than less.

I'm not bending over anywhere - I just disagree with you. Your opinion is not "blessed", it is just as much able to wrong as everyone elses.

They do not sell data, they willingly give it away for free - which is a form of selling data, with a price tag of $0.

Most reasonable human beings will actually say this is slightly worse than "selling" (literal) data. Therefore, I think most people would agree with me, and not with you.

In my mind it's very similar to claiming you're not a thief because you give away the stuff you take. No, you're still a thief, you just love being a thief so much you don't even do it for monetary gain. Which is... worse!

> Looking at your user page, I don't imagine you park your car on the street, do you?

Yes, I do. And I've even had one stolen. And even that isn't enough to persuade me that putting cameras everywhere is going to make us safer. People are scared of their own shadow, it makes zero sense. Theft and other crime is as old as humanity, it is a delusion to think that living in the panopticon is going to make you save from small crime. But what it will do is enable much bigger crimes.

As far as my car: we have this amazing thing called insurance. And they were most reasonable when my car was stolen and yes, I'm still pissed off about it. But cameras would not have stopped that.

Car theft tends to be perpetrated by a small number of repeat offenders. Cameras would indeed have helped in your case... but only if they were installed in the last neighborhood where the thieves were active, if the police used the evidence to track them down, if the prosecutor's office used the evidence to charge them, and if the courts used the evidence to lock them up.

Admittedly those are all big leaps of faith around here, where car thieves are handled on a catch-and-release basis and where we usually don't even bother with the 'catch' part. You could argue that law enforcement doesn't need any new toys if they don't use the ones they already have, and I certainly wouldn't disagree with that.

I think a lot depends on who owns and controls the cameras. I'd object to ALPRs being installed in my rural neighborhood, certainly. But I see little other than upside in private security cameras whose footage I can choose to share with the police, or with anyone else for that matter. Which is why that's what I have.

At the same time, cameras in urban settings are much less scary and offensive to me for some reason, partially because I disagree that anyone has any expectation of privacy in such settings, and partially because I believe that ship has sailed and anyone bothering to object is just wasting their breath.

The best we can hope for is aggressive public oversight of such cameras. The company itself can't be expected to show any leadership in that area; it has to come from us.

Sure, but that's exactly where it fails: that oversight. So you end up with all of this data in the hands that you least want to have it, and never mind the criminals that gain access to it in the inevitable data leaks and then all of that data gets used against you.

There is zero correlation between these cameras being installed or not and crime incidence rates or the number of cases solved.

Ironically, what did reduce crime - considerably so, even - was COVID. But I don't see anybody arguing for a curfew to reduce crime either.