The Bottom Line
- Automated License Plate Readers, or ALPRs, are smart, usually AI-powered, cameras that can read your license plate and record distinguishing features such as car color and physical damage.
- Your car's historical location is uploaded to a nationwide database that can typically be seen by any law enforcement agency in the state and, sometimes, the country.
- Police have an ongoing track record of arrests from false positives and misusing Flock's ALPR network to stalk people who are not suspects.
Imagine you're walking around town. Maybe you're shopping, walking your dog, or going to see a friend. You then notice out of the corner of your eye that someone is watching you. They're gripping a notepad in their left hand and have a pencil jammed between the fingers on their right. As you continue walking, the person is following you. When you round a corner, you hear them scribble down in their notepad. After every twist and turn, the person writes down your location and a description of you: the clothes you're wearing, your hair color, your scars.
If you were any ordinary person, you would probably call the police. You dial 911 and quickly reach an operator, and when you describe your situation she asks if the man is wearing all black. You tell her yes, to which she quickly replies "oh, don't worry about that."
What?
This is, in essence, what is happening every time you leave your house, but instead of a creepy person, it's a creepy camera. Disguised in black, these cameras are owned and operated by Flock Safety, a company your local police contracts for their cameras and advanced AI security software.
Law enforcement agencies think they're doing a good thing, as that person can tell them whether you were at the site of a crime and when. As far as they know, the person isn't hurting you and is simply watching. Unfortunately, they don't seem to understand why it might still be a breach of privacy.
What is an ALPR?
An Automated License Plate Reader, or ALPR, is a camera that traditionally tracks license plates. These cameras continuously record footage of the area and, when a car is detected, logs the car's license plate and the time it went by.
Many ALPR systems do much more than just read license plates, though. Flock's website doesn't even highlight license plate recognition as their device's main selling point. With the tagline "Go Beyond Plates," it boasts their cameras are "built to capture vehicle details, not just footage."
Flock's ALPR system builds a searchable database of all of your car's features, easily searchable using speech-like queries such as "find the red pickup truck with a dog in the bed." Flock's ALPRs can record your car's make, license plate, color, dents, stickers, and more.
Why You Should Care
One of the most common counter-reactionary arguments is, "if you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about." This argument is severely flawed, and my little story from earlier describes exactly why.
If you realized someone was following you, recording your every move, you would certainly find it creepy or downright scary. You would call the cops or take action yourself to get the individual off your tail.
It's no different with ALPRs. You're still being tracked, everything about your car is still being written down every time it makes a move, and people can still see and use this data. The only difference is that it's a machine communicating the information instead of a person.
If you're the type of person to truly not care about the person following behind you, recording your every move, imagine the stalker isn't smart. It can describe you, but maybe its vision is blurry or it didn't pass third grade reading class. One day you're wearing a green hoodie and a pair of jeans. The stalker notices this, and eventually you're surrounded by police officers with their guns drawn, pointed right at you. The local police got wind of your location from the stalker and recklessly decided that, due to your attire, you were the person who robbed a gas station at gunpoint earlier. They did this because the robber's stalker reported him as also wearing a green hoodie and jeans.
This is the reality for many people since Flock started installing their cameras almost six years ago.
False Arrests
On July 8th, four police cruisers boxed in a car reviewer and his wife after the police department got reports from its Flock system that his plates belonged to a stolen car. The cameras repeatedly misread the non-standard plates and, instead of doing their own research, law enforcement blindly trusted the hit and initiated their "high-risk" engagement with the reviewer.
A woman in Florida spent "the worst thirteen days [of her] life" in prison after being wrongfully arrested in connection with a fatal crash that happened on the highway. Her attorney was able to prove that the woman's car was too far to have caused the crash, did not have the same markings as in the footage, and was not at all damaged after the incident. It's all because the Highway Patrol put a woman's life in the hands of a Flock security camera and did no further research before tossing her behind bars.
In Los Angeles the police department conducted a review that identified over 161 individuals who were pulled over within a two month period because of police negligence and false red flags from the Flock security system. The report outlines that performing traffic stops on these individuals often called for "back up, air support, and a supervisor and ordering the suspect out of the vehicle."
These people have done nothing wrong and were likely completely unaware of the incidents they were accused of being connected to, but their lives were nearly (or completely) ruined by the camera system and the false sense of security it gave officers. Even if they have nothing to hide, there is still a very real risk while these systems constantly monitor innocent people.
Stalking
If you think my person-following-you-around-with-a-notepad-writing-down-everything-you-do analogy is far-fetched, you're in for a treat.
Those with access to the Flock system, like police officers, have been repeatedly caught using the system to track people who haven't done anything wrong. Often times, these people are the officer's friends or exes. This capability in the hands of anyone, police or not, poses a serious threat to those caught on an ALPR. Police officers aren't known for their non-violence; imagine a particularly nasty individual who happens to be a police officer goes through a breakup. They now have access to their ex's entire location history, a very dangerous tool.
Fox 5 Atlanta reports five police officers in Albany were arrested after using their ALPR system for personal reasons, and three more in Cherokee County, GA.
In Milwuakee, a detective was found to be using the Flock system to stalk two individuals during the same investigation into a different officer who searched for his ex-girlfriend and her current boyfriend over 200 times.
An officer in Pasadena was found to be using the system to stalk a female officer from the very same department.
As the list grows it becomes clear that this type of technology can't be trusted in our society. No matter what protections are in place and what audits are performed, there will always be a human being who has access, and sometimes that human being will be malicious.
Flock and other ALPR vendors have over 110,000 cameras installed all over the United States. As that number grows, and as the nation falls further into a dystopian surveillance state, it's important to remember that the people have power. We can change things. You and I can stop this. We just have to tell them to get the Flock out.