Flock Safety is a company that provides automated license plate reading services to local police departments. It now owns a massive network of cameras that police departments rent access to. These cameras have enormous surveillance potential.
There is a camera near the Chevy dealership in McCordsville that grabs many students’ license plates on their way to school. There is another set near the Meijer. Police can easily locate an individual car using these cameras. This may not seem so bad, it can help to catch criminals, and police seem like trustworthy holders of this information.
The thing that is concerning about Flock is that the police agencies do not own these cameras. No government agency does. All the cameras are owned and operated by Flock and rented to organizations. This is attractive to law enforcement because law enforcement can access a national database instead of having to deal with a complex bureaucracy. As law enforcement can opt in to sharing data with a national database, a local police officer can run a nationwide search without a lot of bureaucracy.
This increases the potential for abuse for personal gain, as there are fewer barriers to surveilling a person’s every movement. This potential for abuse combined with weak security practices has led to serious debates about the ethicality and implementation of these cameras.
This is an expansion in surveillance, but some people still may be fine with this. Flock is still expanding and collecting new types of information. They can buy data from data brokers, and link that to a license plate, now a police officer can get a complete dossier in a matter of seconds.
So every morning when driving to school, a new data point is generated in the Flock’s database. In combination with corporations have been investing in these cameras for their own corporate surveillance network.
These cameras offer greater crime solving potential, but also many opportunities for loss of privacy.
