Flock Safety

Aakash Gupta

@aakashgupta

Ring paid somewhere between $8 and $10 million for a 30-second Super Bowl spot to tell 120 million viewers that their cameras now scan neighborhoods using AI. The math is wild. Ring has roughly 20 million devices in American homes. Search Party is enabled by default. The opt-out rate on default settings in consumer tech is historically around 5%. So approximately 19 million cameras are now running AI pattern matching on anything that moves past your front door. Today the target is dogs. The same infrastructure already handles “Familiar Faces,” which builds biometric profiles of every person your camera sees, whether they know about it or not. Ring settled with the FTC for $5.8 million after employees had unrestricted access to customers’ bedroom and bathroom footage for years. They’re now partnered with Flock Safety, which routes footage to local law enforcement. ICE has accessed Flock data through local police departments acting as intermediaries. Senator Markey’s investigation found Ring’s privacy protections only apply to device owners. If you’re a neighbor, a delivery driver, a passerby, you have no rights and no recourse. This tells you everything about Amazon’s actual product. The customer paid for the camera. The customer pays the electricity. The customer pays the $3.99/month subscription. And Amazon gets a surveillance grid that would cost tens of billions to build from scratch, with an AI layer activated by default, and a law enforcement pipeline already connected. They wrapped all of that in a lost puppy commercial because that’s the only version of this story anyone would willingly opt into.

Massimo

@Rainmaker1973

A surveillance network designed to solve crimes has been repeatedly misused by police officers to monitor people they know personally. Flock Safety operates a system of more than 120,000 cameras spanning 49 states and serving over 5,000 law enforcement agencies. The cameras capture photographs of license plates and other vehicle details, then store the information in a searchable database. Officers can query a specific plate to map a vehicle’s recent movements or receive automatic alerts when a car connected to a crime or missing-person case passes a camera. Yet at least two dozen officers have resigned or faced arrest for allegedly using the network to stalk romantic interests, according to figures reported by CNN. In Milwaukee, officer Josue Ayala was accused of searching the Flock system 124 times to track his romantic partner and another 55 times to track that person’s former partner. He later agreed to resign and pleaded guilty to attempted misconduct in public office. A detective involved in investigating Ayala was himself later arrested after admitting that he had also used Flock to track individuals and had secretly attached a GPS device to one person’s vehicle. The system generally does not require officers to obtain a warrant before searching vehicle records. Privacy advocates caution that data shared among local departments or with federal agencies could effectively create a nationwide surveillance network. Flock retains vehicle data for 30 days by default. Critics note that this retention period can expose highly sensitive patterns of movement, including visits to medical offices, places of worship, political gatherings, and private residences. Supporters highlight the system’s role in recovering stolen vehicles, locating violent suspects, and finding missing people. Flock reports that its technology assisted roughly one million investigations last year and helped locate more than 10,000 missing individuals. Research on the cameras’ broader impact on crime remains limited. One study conducted in Atlantic City found no overall reduction in violent crime, although it did observe associations with fewer shootings, vehicle thefts, and property crimes. In response to concerns, Flock has introduced tools that flag unusual search patterns. Some police departments have begun requiring case numbers for queries and conducting regular audits of system use.

Markets & Mayhem

@Mayhem4Markets

Americans who agree on almost nothing have found one thing to agree on. They don't want to be tracked. Flock Safety sells license plate readers to police departments across the country. Every passing vehicle gets photographed. Every plate feeds into a searchable national network thousands of agencies can query. The company is backed by nearly $1 billion in venture capital. The opposition cuts across every political line. Libertarians see government intrusion. MAGA sees the deep state. Traditional conservatives see a violation of small-government principles. Progressives worry about the groups surveillance always targets first. Centrists find it offensive that a system tracks everywhere everyone goes, even when nobody is suspected of a crime. Different reasons. Same verdict. An ACLU lawyer working the issue nationally called it "very inspiring and refreshing." The most telling criticism comes from another surveillance company. Steve Lindsey co-founded LiveView Technologies, which builds the mobile security towers at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. He says the problem isn't the cameras. It's the business model. A department buys a handful of cameras and gets access to the entire national database. Everyone else gets access to their data. "Once the network gets big enough," he said. "Every person [criminal or not] is being tracked." A company built on that model has every incentive to hold the data as long as possible. The data is the product. The ACLU also says Flock's claim that customers "own" their data is hollow. The standard contract gives Flock a perpetual, royalty-free, worldwide license to use it. The ownership pitch gives buyers what the ACLU calls a "meaningless false sense of security." Then there's the honesty problem. Flock told police in Loveland, Colorado it had no federal contracts. A local NBC affiliate found public records showing shared access with Border Patrol and DHS. The company admitted it wasn't being forthright. In Cleveland, audit logs showed most searches of the city's data were run by outside agencies, some as far away as California. Out-of-state agencies had run immigration-related searches in the city's system. Flock's chief communications officer said the tech is here to stay. "There will be cameras in public, and if it's not Flock, it'll be someone else." Maybe. But a country that can't agree on anything just agreed on this.

Owen Gregorian

@OwenGregorian

New bill aims to block federal funds from cities, police that use controversial Flock Safety cameras | Brandon Cruz, New York Post Rep. Thomas Massie is introducing a bill to strip federal funding from any local governments or police departments that deploy controversial Flock Safety security cameras, the Kentucky Republican announced on Saturday. Flock Safety, the Atlanta-based company behind the controversial smart-cameras that can track a car based on its dents, bumper stickers and roof racks, is now the target of new legislation being sponsored by the Libertarian congressman in an effort to strengthen the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and government surveillance. “I’ll soon be sponsoring a bill to withhold federal money from municipalities and police departments that deploy Flock (and other style) cameras to surveil law-abiding citizens,” Massie said. Massie, who is retiring from Congress after his seventh term in office ends this January, posted the comments on X along with a “don’t flock on me” parody flag. Flock has quietly become law enforcement’s go-to surveillance tool around the country and has already wired itself into more than 5,000 police agencies nationwide with nearly 90,000 cameras since 2018, according to DeFlock, an activist group tracking the company’s surveillance and expansion. Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley, who once described DeFlock as a “terroristic organization” before later apologizing for his remarks against the group, previously said that the cameras are a vital tool in helping modern-day police solve crimes, recover stolen vehicles, locate gunshots, track fleeing suspects and issue Amber Alerts. But critics claim that the cameras serve as the local government’s “Big Brother”-style mass surveillance, with billions of monthly plate reads flowing into police databases shared across agencies each month. Massie’s bill comes as 18 officers in Georgia — including a police supervisor who used the camera system to track her boyfriend — have been arrested for misusing Flock Safety camera data, according to reports. There has also been a growing movement of anti-Flock vigilantes across the country vandalizing the cameras in their hometowns, including one recent incident in Connecticut where four cameras were chopped down just last week, sources told The Post. A spokesperson for Flock Safety told The Post that Massie’s bill would “have real consequences for public safety.” The company estimates it has supported more than 1 million investigations, assisted in 20% of all solved cases in jurisdictions that partner with it, and has helped locate more than 10,000 missing people to date. “Rather than banning a critical public safety tool, Congress should consider strong, clear safeguards that ensure accountability, oversight, and responsible use are enshrined in law,” the spokesperson said. “We do not have to choose between protecting privacy and giving law enforcement the tools it needs to keep communities safe,” the representative added. “We can — and should — do both.” https://t.co/Omo19dWReO

Sam Richards

@MinneapoliSam

Anoka County's Sheriff Signed a $174,999 Flock Safety Contract – Exactly $1 Under the Threshold Requiring Public Board Approval https://t.co/8zECxaj36h

IT Guy

@T3chFalcon

A Georgia police supervisor was just arrested for using Flock cameras to track her boyfriend's vehicle more than 30 times. Flock Safety cameras are license plate readers mounted at intersections, neighborhood entrances, and parking lots. They photograph every vehicle that passes. log the plate, make, model, color, location, and timestamp. upload it to a searchable database accessible by thousands of law enforcement agencies nationwide. no warrant required to search it. no oversight on how many times you search. no alert sent to the person being tracked. The supervisor just searched. 30 times. for her boyfriend. this is at least the 19th documented case of a law enforcement officer using Flock cameras to stalk or surveil someone for personal reasons. 19 confirmed. documented. arrested or investigated. Flock says it has internal safeguards. In almost none of these cases did the safeguards catch anything. The patterns were discovered after the fact. by audits. by victims. by https://t.co/zyZV3pgFr0, a civilian website that Flock has repeatedly tried to shut down. The reason the number is 19 and not 190 is not that it only happened 19 times. it's because most searches never get audited. Most targets never know to look. And every search log accepts whatever reason the officer types. Flock is in over 5,000 law enforcement agencies. tens of thousands of cameras. accessible by hundreds of thousands of officers. The safeguard between that database and your location history is the integrity of the person searching it.