Flock Off: Background

Flock Safety is a rapidly growing manufacturer and operator of surveillance infrastructure, most notably cameras, AI-enabled license plate readers (LPR), and drones [1]. Flock markets to municipal police departments, private businesses, homeowners’ associations, school systems, retail companies, and many other industries and entities [2]. 

Some of their products, including Flock Freeform Search [3] and Flock Nova offer “natural language searching” that can start with only a “vague description” of a target, “real-time alerts” when a suspect appears, and “access to thousands of shared cameras across partner agencies.” Flock says this data can help track down criminals and build profiles of potential threats. However, we believe that Flock systems actually make communities less safe by intruding on privacy and facilitating executive overreach. 

According to our friends at EyesOffMA [4], there are at least 359 Flock cameras active in Massachusetts, and the crowdsourced deflock.me map shows over 500 cameras in Massachusetts [5]. Cameras are put up based on individual customer contracts, and camera counts and locations are not public information.

Traditional LPR technology has been around for a while and is used in a bunch of applications. Most notably, they’re used in automated toll collection (like EZPass) and parking garages. Traditional automated license plate readers take photos of license plates and scan them, just like how you would scan an item’s barcode in the grocery store. Most LPR systems only capture the license plate area of vehicles and only use that data to generate invoices—they don’t hold onto it for general surveillance.

As noted above, Flock’s cameras and other AI-enabled systems go far beyond just license plate capture [6]; they record a wide field of view, whether cars are passing by or not, creating a record of all movement within an area. When this data is fed into an AI database like Freeform Search, it allows searchers to use natural-language prompts such as “tow truck,” “woman with red handbag,” or “tan Challenger with stripes” to pull up any photo that could fit those descriptions [3].

One of Flock’s primary features is access to a network of data; customers can opt in to data sharing with other Flock customers, or access data on a case-by-case basis, regionally, or nationally. If a customer chooses to share their data out, they get access to other customers’ data in return. 

It’s true that customers can opt out of data sharing, meaning that their data isn’t shared with other customers. In practice, though, police departments have trouble opting out [7].Moreover, Flock’s default contract language allows Flock to share customer data to aid in investigations even if the customer has opted out of data sharing [8], meaning Flock can, and likely does, release data to ICE and other federal agencies under this contract language.

Beyond these relatively above-board uses, the cameras have been proven easy to hack —see this video from Benn Jordan where he lays out how he “hacked Flock Safety cameras in under 30 seconds” [9]. A CPB subcontractor using similar technology has already been the victim of a cyberattack releasing data [10].

These systems are ripe for abuse—from corrupt police officers who use systems like these to stalk people [11], to federal agents using them to create profiles on protesters [12], any access to these systems allow people with bad intentions more tools to hurt people.

The requirements to enter reasons for searches isn’t a true guardrail; we’ve seen searches with as little justification as the letter “i”. Just because a text field exists that requests a reason for a search doesn’t mean that it’s a robust protection against unreasonable searches [13].

No! You should still care, even if your town has opted out (or believes they’ve opted out) of data sharing. First of all, amending your town’s laws to require legislative approval of these AI-enabled ALPR systems creates a more transparent and more democratic system, where experts and town legal counsel have an opportunity to see contract language and help advise police departments or school systems before the contract is signed, so that officers don’t need to become part-time contracts experts in between their other duties. As stated above, we’ve seen cases of Flock-collected data being leaked and police departments that believed they had opted out of sharing, but ultimately learned that they had been opted in [7,9]. Flock has no incentive to protect our data; if we want meaningful protections, we have to put them in place ourselves. 

It’s also important to care about this stuff because the level of surveillance we’re already seeing is just the beginning—Flock and other security surveillance companies are expanding their operations, and fast. Their goal is to fully surveil your “community, business or school 24/7 with coverage that never sleeps” [14].

We feel there’s a difference of kind here—those cameras in tourist-heavy areas aren’t fed into a nationwide database that federal officers can use to build profiles of peoples’ movements, targeting people based on their associations with others or their protest activities, or using movement data to track down individuals. These cameras also record at a much lower resolution, making identifying details less discernable, and their records aren’t able to be searched in the same way that Flock camera footage is. Privacy absolutists would likely object to those touristy cameras too, but we don’t go that far.

There’s a difference of kind here, too—CCTV data stays within the individual system recording the data (that’s the “closed circuit”), and home security systems’ data is typically not shared out to other customers and police without a specific request. If you do have a home security system, though, it’s worth doing some research to see if the company you’re working with has some of the same policies as Flock—some systems are more invasive than others! (We can already advise you to dump Ring, who has signed a contract to share their data with Flock [15].)

Much like birds [16], Flock cameras are government surveillance devices… No, just kidding; the poles might make a good bird perch (and we’re certainly pro-birds having a nice place to sit!), but other than that, no connection to birds.