Flock Cameras, Meta Glasses and the Surveillance Backlash

On with Kara Swisher

Kara Swisher hosts a panel discussion on the growing public backlash against Flock Safety's automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras, which

Key takeaways

Flock Safety's networked ALPR cameras represent a shift from localized surveillance to pervasive, AI-powered tracking with no warrant requirement.
Public opposition is fueled by distrust in tech companies, disproportionate targeting of marginalized communities, and fear of permanent digital profiling.

Main topics

Surveillance technology and civil liberties
Public backlash against Flock Safety ALPR cameras

Notable quotes

"You are a guinea pig to these companies who are only interested in shareholder value. They are not interested in you."

"These cameras are used to ensnare and entrap people... it's like the over-policing that Black and brown communities have been used to, only now it's permanent."

Conclusion

The episode underscores a pivotal moment in public awareness around surveillance, where once-accepted technologies

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) People want to protect their babies. They want to believe that they're giving their children the very best. Speaker 6 (0:04) Also, you cannot optimize naps. Sorry. You really can't. You can't. And also, babies aren't doing many crimes. Leave the babies out Speaker 1 (0:13) of Speaker 6 (0:13) it. No crime in babies. And if they are, we'll take care of that one baby. Very clever baby. Speaker 8 (0:30) Hi, everyone, from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. Vox Safety, the company that makes the automated license plate reader, or ALPR cameras, used by over 7,000 law enforcement agencies across the country, is on the receiving end of a public backlash against surveillance tech. According to the Washington Post, nearly half of Americans surveyed in an August poll said they opposed ALPRs. But the opposition is part of a long-simmering mistrust of big tech and concerns over privacy and data security. Today, we're talking with a panel of experts about how the backlash to flock and street surveillance cameras squares with the boom in wearable tech and AI-powered smart devices and what's at stake in the tradeoff between privacy and security. This is one of the most important topics of the day around tech is what these companies are collecting, what they're doing with it, and what you need to know to protect yourself. You are a guinea pig to these companies who are only interested in shareholder value. They are not interested in you. They're not interested in protecting you. They're interested in using you because they are, at heart, rapacious information thieves. This is a word Walt Mossberg used. decades ago, and it remains even more true in the age of AI where they need more information to serve their corporate purposes. Jason Kebler is the co-founder of 404 Media. He and his colleagues have been reporting on Flock for the past few years, along with a lot of other amazing reporting they do at 404 Media. Dr. Safiya Umoja-Noble is the David O. Sears Presidential Endowed Chair of Social Sciences and a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. She is the director of the Center on Resilience and Digital Justice and is the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant. She's also the author of Algorithms of Oppression. How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. Victoria Song is a senior reviewer for The Verge and the author of the Optimizer newsletter. She specializes in emerging technologies in wearables, health, fitness, and XR. Our expert question today comes from one of my favorite journalists, cybersecurity expert and author, Nicole Perlroth. So stick around. Speaker 3 (2:52) Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business takes everything you've got, and a lot of the tools out there that are supposed to make your life easier just aren't great at talking to each other, and that means you end up having to toggle between a dozen different apps and services just to keep the lights on. Enough of that. Now there's Odoo, the all-in-one, fully integrated platform that actually might help you get it all done. Thousands of businesses have made the switch, so why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. Hey, Speaker 1 (3:27) everybody. Cassidy Hubberth here. This week on And Mom, entrepreneur and licensed therapist Nina Westbrook reveals what surprised her about having girls, why she became a marriage and family therapist, and how she got the nickname Calm Queen. Check out the latest episode of And Mom wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 1 (3:47) I'm Mitch Purse, and this week on Confessions of an Elite Athlete, I'm sitting down with Matt Fries, goalkeeper for the U.S. men's national team and New York City FC. We discuss how to prepare for one of the biggest moments of your life. You can hear it all by listening to Confessions of an Elite Athlete on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 6 (4:16) Jason, Sophia, and Victoria, thank you for coming on on. Speaker 7 (4:20) Thanks so much for having me. Thanks Speaker 6 (4:21) for having me. Thanks for having me too. So many of us obviously willingly share personal data with technology every day, all the time, from smartphone apps, smartwatches, fitness rings, doorbell cameras, yet Phlox Safety's automated license plate reader, which has been around a while, these cameras, have sparked a remarkable public. backlash. Given how embedded data collecting tech is in our lives, I'd love for each to talk about why Flock has become the breaking point and what's the fear or concern at the heart of it, because everyone's been carrying around since smartphones, surveillance devices for a long time. Jason, you go first, then Sophia, and then Victoria. Speaker 7 (5:01) Yeah, it's a great question. And it's one that I've thought about a lot recently. I think that flock has become this avatar for people to push back against surveillance that they know that they're subjected to. I think that a lot of the things that you mentioned are consumer products where people are getting some sort of trade off, like they feel like they can't necessarily opt out of having a smartphone or opt out of social media. But here they have these like very public cameras that are showing up in their neighborhoods, they're driving around, they're saying, What is this? And there's actually a place for them to push back against it, which is their local city council meetings. I think it's very hard for an individual person or a small group of people to push back against Meta or Google or, you know, these big tech giants. But you can show up at a city council and say, what are these cameras? I don't want them. And yell at the mayor, yell at the city council. Speaker 6 (5:51) Right. A lot like data centers, the way they're articulating AI through data centers. There are issues with AI in a lot of ways because they're physical. Right, standing in their communities. Sophia? Speaker 2 (6:01) Yeah, I think that's true. Jason's got it right. And also, we see them disproportionately installed around our cities. So I think, you know, these are, again, very clear signals about who is the target of surveillance in a much more direct and visible way. The other thing is that, you know, this kind of promise of security and surveillance, which is the way they're sold. But of course, you know, these broken windows theories, these ideas that, you know, if we kind of put visible improvement into our communities, it will produce crime. We actually see that these are used to ensnare and entrap people. And that is actually how people relate to them. In some ways, it's like the over-policing. that Black and brown communities and working class and poor communities have been used to, only now it's permanent and it's actually difficult to evade. Right. Victoria? Speaker 4 (7:00) Yeah, I think it's basically to what Jason's point was, like these consumer devices that you give up your privacy for, you're getting a personal benefit out of it. With a smartwatch, you are getting health data or, you know, these tech ads are always saying that the Apple Watch is going to save your life or something like that. With the meta glasses, you might get cute footage of a pet or your kids. With the flat camera, you know that there is no benefit to you. You're just being watched and it kind of makes you feel like a subject instead of the person in control. So I think that's a big aspect of it. And then another aspect is I think there's an increased amount of distrust for the person behind the other side of the camera. in previous years. Like we used to believe that tech was going to improve everything. And now with the backlash against AI, with the backlash against all of these devices that want to know an increasing amount about you, I just think people are just increasingly distrustful of those things. And those things are combining together. Speaker 6 (8:00) So, Jason, you and your team at 404 Media have been covering Flock since 2024, and your reporting prompted congressional inquiry of a company last year. 404 reporting shows that Flock Camera has been used to help ICE and surveil No Kings protests. Police say Flock Camera networks have enabled them to solve thousands of crimes, including car thefts, missing persons, and abducted children. Explain to people what Flock Cameras do, how long they've been around, and how they're connected to the network, and how the data is stored. Speaker 7 (8:27) Yeah, so Flock cameras are automatic license plate reader cameras, which is a technology that's been around for more than a decade now. But what Flock did was they essentially networked these together using artificial intelligence. That is the big differentiating factor of Flock from its competitors, where they put them at intersections or on the street. And when you drive by, it essentially takes a photo of your car and adds it to a database that can be queried by the police. at any point, and there's no warrant requirement for that. But basically, whereas in the past, if a police department had these ALPR cameras, they could only search the cameras in that individual town. Right now, flock is in 40 % of the United States, and in many cases, cops are able to search not just the 15 cameras or 20 cameras that are in their town, but thousands in their state or more than 100,000 across the entire country. And so... You know, it's a very diverse country where the local needs are different in different places. And I think what happened was cities were signing up for this thinking, oh, we're going to use this to find missing children or stolen cars. And they woke up one day and realized that it was being used by cops four states over to search for undocumented immigrants or to search for a woman who had an abortion or by cops to stalk exes, things like this. And I think that's part of the backlash is that I think a lot of. cities entered these agreements with Flock without sort of understanding. Understanding that they'd be part of a Speaker 6 (9:54) network, right? Exactly. And the data is stored how long? Speaker 7 (9:56) Well, it was 30 days. Flock has recently made some revisions where they're going to recommend that it's stored for seven days at a time. That is not mandatory, I believe, but that they're sort of pushing. cops to have a seven-day retention period. Speaker 6 (10:10) Right, but it doesn't mean people couldn't copy the material, correct? Speaker 7 (10:14) That, and then also, I mean, you could query it kind of over and over again over time, yeah. Speaker 6 (10:18) Yeah, absolutely. And the companies responded to the reports of abuse, and the guardrails, this is only a shorter data time frame? Well, Speaker 7 (10:25) they've done a few things, and I think that's the big thing, is that Flock built this network by sort of going... town to town, city to city saying, you know, buy our technology. A lot of these were pitched as pilot programs or were bought using police discretionary funds, meaning it didn't go through like a formal city council approval process. In some cases it did, but I think a lot of people woke up one day and said, what are these cameras? When did they get here? Like, how did this all occur? And there have been all of these cases of abuse and Flock has made some revisions. They've, you know, tried to reduce the length of time that the data is retained. They've tried to do like automatic auditing for anomalous searches, meaning if a cop is searching the same license plate over and over and over again, that might mean that they are stalking someone. But what happened was the company didn't anticipate these problems ahead of time. And so it's fixing it now. And now it's saying, what's the problem? Like, why are you mad at us? Speaker 6 (11:21) Right. Well, it reminds you of Facebook. Like, I didn't know people were going to do that. Amazon's Ring, one of the largest home security camera companies in the U.S., has been criticized in the past for its relationship with law enforcement, and the company ended its partnership with Flock earlier this year. Ring is now updating its technology, aiming to prevent third parties from viewing customers' home security footage without their consent. Victoria, is this latest move just a response to Flock-induced surveillance anxiety, or is something else happening? Speaker 4 (11:49) I think it's just a lot of different companies at the same time are kind of dealing with this. Like, I just saw the Apple event yesterday, and, you know, the first thing they did was they were talking about privacy and how that relates to the new Apple Watch audio intelligence features. And I really feel that a lot of that messaging was in response to the backlash, not only from Flock, but also from the Metaglasses that have been around. People calling those pervert glasses and everything. So I do think that by and large, because we're moving into AI, being pervasive in our lives, and AI only really works if it knows everything about you. And so these companies are hungry to learn more about us from all of our devices. It kind of creates this new tension that people are aware of. The AI is coming for my job. AI is also coming for my personal data. AI is coming for every aspect of my life. And so, you know, you have a pretty big public backlash against it. And the companies have this, you know, incentive to push that on you and to kind of lull you into a sense of like, no, no, no, well, we care about your privacy. But, you know, after decades of feeling like, no, you don't care about our privacy, it's Speaker 6 (13:01) a Speaker 4 (13:01) little too little too late. Speaker 6 (13:02) Absolutely. We'll get into metaglasses later, by the way. The technical term is creeper glasses, not pervert glasses. But Flock's mission, according to the company, is to, quote, eliminate crime with a principled framework that protects privacy and promotes objectivity. Sophia, given what you know about algorithmic bias, which we'll get more into in a moment, and the way these systems are built, what do you make of this statement? Speaker 2 (13:24) Yeah, I mean, I think that the underlying logics of so many of these systems is about using historical data to determine where hotspots are of concern. And of course, we know that communities of color, Black communities in particular, have been over-policed. In fact, the invention of policing is really about the monitoring of Black people in this country, all the way back to the kind of origin stories of the slave trade and the... practice of enslavement, the system of enslavement in the United States. And so when you think about the kind of historical data that is used, and this predates Flock and Ring with software like PredPol, we know that Using these kinds of systems to predict where crime might happen is really about trying to contain and control different kinds of people and communities. And that has been historically kind of around racial discrimination and redlining and containment. So, you know, I see these as kind of a newer generation. of these kinds of technologies. Again, you see them overrepresented and used to predict where crime might take place. And usually that's about particular types of crime as well. Speaker 6 (14:50) The past information should base your future choices in that, you know, more Black people are in jail, therefore they must be more criminal, which is not true. It's just they're more arrested. That's different. That's right. Which is a different thing. So Speaker 2 (15:03) if Speaker 6 (15:03) you have Speaker 2 (15:03) more arrests in certain communities, then you're going to have algorithms that are going to predict. to go there to do more policing and more watching. So Speaker 6 (15:12) Jason, 4FOR reports that while many flock cameras are designed to track license plates, the company's AI-enabled Condor cameras, these names they pick are just astonishing, track people. Where are these cameras deployed and how are they being used? Speaker 7 (15:24) Yeah, I mean, I think this is a really important thing because flock has spent a lot of the last month sort of saying, no, we just take static pictures of license plates. We're not tracking people, which of course, if you're tracking cars, you are inherently tracking people. But Flock also has this entire software layer called Flock OS that allows cops to pipe in footage from any of their surveillance cameras, whether that's a Flock-owned camera or another one. And so they have these Condor cameras, which are PTZ cameras, which is pan, tilt, zoom, meaning they're video cameras, high def, that can pan, tilt, and zoom in. They actually exposed some of these to the internet late last year. And so I went and walked in front of some of them in Bakersfield, California. And basically like these cameras, they zoomed in on me as I was walking my dog across the street because they detect people. They are on bike paths in suburban Atlanta. They're at street fairs. They are not just on... public roads, but also at pools, at community centers, on pedestrian walkways, things like this. And it all sort of pipes into this Flock OS system that cops can monitor in real time. It's all designed to kind of pair with their license plate. product and that sort of thing. Right. Speaker 6 (16:36) So it's not just that. They want to look at everything, essentially. They want constant surveillance, essentially. So I just spoke with, speaking of that, tech executive and investor Chris Larson, who I'm sure you all know. He funded a surveillance network in San Francisco that's been credited with lowering crime in the city. It was an actual problem. He says he understands concerns about surveillance. Here is a clip. Speaker 5 (16:56) I totally get it. I think this is going to be the issue of the day, though, because it's a trade-off, always public safety and privacy. And San Francisco is really good on this, right? So they're not just doing surveillance and looking everywhere and trying to see if somebody's doing something wrong. It's when you get a report of a smash-and-grab incident or a strong-arm robbery, then a drone is going to be sent over there. That's what they do, but I get it. You know, people are still uncomfortable because it could change. Speaker 6 (17:24) So at what point do you think the potential harms and abuses of surveillance tech outweigh the benefits? Victoria and then Sophia. I Speaker 4 (17:31) mean...