Can’t believe I hadn’t heard about Flock cameras until this year.
Flock cameras, for those who don’t know, are cameras sold to police by the company Flock, placed at high-traffic intersections and “high-crime neighborhoods” 😐 to catch photos of cars coming in and out of different areas.
Though they’re often referred to as “license plate readers,” it turns out they can also identify make and model of car, sometimes driver, unusual additions, stickers or decorations, and damage patterns. By placing them at key intersections, police can start to form a database of driver movement that they can later connect to crime.
Police do not have to cite a case number, report number, or even any specific reason at all to run a search, and there is no paper trail left by the searches they run.
Data is deleted from Flock’s servers after a month. Problematic because cases often take more than a month to resolve, and in that time police only download the hits that are relevant to them. (Ex: They grab these 3 camera hits and not the 100 others you could use to prove your client was delivering for UberEats; they grab camera matches for Event A and not alibi hits for Event B, which are under a different car.)
Police basically get a full picture of your movements in a city for free all the time.
These things look like a solar panel + a little camera underneath it on a pole.
Source regarding a place where lawsuits are pending.
It’s unconstitutional to get cell phone data without a search warrant because of the ease of it and the overwhelming data privacy breach. Essentially unknown if judges will treat this the same — so far they’ve been trying very hard to find ways that this is okay and fine.
Flock disclaims all ownership over the data — they sell the software and cameras and lease the server space, they say, and so the data belongs to the police.
I’ve seen it start cropping up the last couple months in police reports. “We saw the allegedly stolen car on Flock cameras, and sent like five cops in full tactical gear to take down the horrendous criminals… the car owner’s teenage child and their friend.”
And folks if you see programs for you to sign up to give your doorbell camera to police, please don’t! Phase one of those programs is identifying community cameras so they can ask you for footage; phase two is linking up your cloud storage so they can access what you have; phase three is literally always finding a way to control and retain the data themselves. If you read their community initiative plans, they usually even tell on themselves and say this is their goal.
