Mass 50501 says, “Flock Off!”
Across the country—including within our own Commonwealth—cameras owned and operated by shady AI tech companies like Flock Safety are going up to track our movements and share that data with potential bad actors, with little to no oversight. We can demand they remove the cameras, but there’s no guarantee they’ll do it. We can demand they stop sharing data, but we have no way to verify that they’ve complied. The only surefire way to protect our residents’ privacy is to tell these companies to Flock Off!
Original Art by kj
That’s why Mass 50501 is launching a campaign designed to target these systems at the local level, convincing our local governments and companies to ditch these systems and stop these surveillance outfits from profiting off of our data. These cameras rely on the public’s assumption that they only collect license plate numbers, but the truth is they collect a huge variety of data including details like the make and model of car, identifying features like bumper stickers, and potentially even identifying details about the occupants of a particular car or passersby. This data is then fed into an AI algorithm, enabling customers to cast wide-net searches using natural language prompts.
Allowing the collection of this data in the context of an antagonistic federal administration endangers us all—it’s an invasion of privacy that we shouldn’t accept even under the friendliest administration. Right now, we’re seeing the ways the data these cameras collect can be used to target immigrants, including by local police officers running searches on ICE’s behalf. But it’s obvious to us that this situation poses a threat to all of us: from the big-bad threat of a hostile federal government going after people whose car was present at a protest, to the smaller, everyday threat of being put under police scrutiny because of a machine’s interpretations of one’s movement as suspicious. None of us should be put under this kind of microscope by our government.
Cambridge recently showed us that protection from AI surveillance is possible; after temporarily pausing deployment of their Flock cameras (a pause that Flock refused to comply with, by the way), their City Council voted to cancel their contract with Flock Safety on December 9th. This change was brought about by citizens lobbying their municipal government—a power we all have in this state.
Keep an eye on this newsletter, our socials, and our website for news as our campaign gets underway; and if you want to get involved, join us on Discord, where our teams organize.
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