The furor in America continues to build dramatically. Not about gas prices or affordability. Not about tainted lettuce at Taco Bell. Not even about UFOs or data centers. No, the greatest threat to democracy today has been declared to be . . . . Flock cameras.

If you haven’t been following this, Flock Safety has deployed somewhere around 100,000 devices across the US that use cameras, image recognition, and machine learning software to identify license plates, quickly locate gunfire, and provide video surveillance.

The concern is that these devices are causing dangerous intrusion into personal privacy. This has reached near-hysteria due to recent revelations that in at least 12 states, a number of police officers—who are the audience these devices are intended to help—have made unauthorized use of the devices to track their own personal targets. In one case, an officer in Massachusetts is accused of accessing Flock cameras hundreds of times to track his estranged wife’s location. In Milwaukee, an internal affairs officer supposedly tracked 10 individuals who were not under criminal investigation—while investigating the inappropriate use of technology by other officers.

Flock says the cameras store only limited information for a finite amount of time, and that they have been responsible for catching all kinds of criminals and solving cases that would have gone cold without this technology.

While there’s no question there has been unacceptable abuse, it’s not clear why the anger is directed at Flock and not at the local jurisdictions who have allowed their police officers to misuse the system without repercussions. It’s likely not the first technology to be misused by bad actors, nor will it be the last. Perhaps we should be asking why these abuses were allowed to continue for so long unabated? Where are the safeguards in the law enforcement community to note these abuses and put a stop to them?

Flock is facing a PR nightmare right now. They’ve already announced they are limiting the time any collected data can be stored (and they never store names or personal data—only license plate numbers, which are public information). It behooves the company to come up with a system that uses their AI technology to look for patterns that might suggest abuse and flag these to customers sooner rather than later.

But for those who believe vandalizing these cameras will solve the lack of privacy problem, let me remind you of something you may find more disturbing:

There are currently 100,000 Flock cameras deployed in the US, but more than 300 million smart phones in use by over 90% of the American population today. We voluntarily use these devices to share much more data (including location, personal information, and financial data) on an ongoing basis—and much of that data is stored and used by third parties to target messages to users.

Are those upset by license plate readers looking at culling the wrong flock?

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