Full transcript
I’ve got a large Lemonade Refresher, and I suggest
you grab your caffeine delivery system of choice
too, because we need to have a serious talk
about the changes to the state of your privacy.
If you’ve driven pretty much anywhere in the last
couple of years, you might have noticed something
new. It’s not a new pothole, or a new Starbucks.
It’s a black, solar-powered camera mounted on
a simple metal pole. It looks a bit like an
Orwellian sunflower, turning its face toward
the road. It’s sleek, industrial, unassuming,
and it’s usually sitting right at the entrance
of a subdivision, quietly blinking away.
That, my friends, is a Flock Safety camera.
And if your Homeowners Association
(HOA) hasn’t proposed buying one yet,
give it a month. They will. The brochure is
probably already in your board president’s inbox.
The sales pitch is incredibly seductive. It goes
something like this: “We can eliminate crime. We
can stop the porch pirates. We can catch the guys
breaking into cars. We can protect the children.”
Who doesn’t want to protect
children? Who likes crime? Nobody.
But behind that slick marketing pitch is
a company building what privacy advocates,
civil rights lawyers, and even some nervous
lawmakers are calling a privately-owned,
nationwide mass surveillance dragnet that is
effectively bypassing the Fourth Amendment.
But it’s not just subdivisions, though… these
cameras are popping up in parks, roadways, parking
lots, shopping centers, and pretty much everywhere
else. It’s not just HOAs and landlords leasing
these things, either… it’s also law-enforcement.
Think this isn’t in your town? Go to deflock.org,
and see how many of these things
are near you. You’ll be shocked.
Today, we are doing a deep dive. We aren’t just
skimming the surface; we are looking under the
hood. We’re going to talk about who Flock Safety
is, how their technology actually works (it’s
not just a camera), the scandals they’ve already
been embroiled in, and why your daily commute is
being logged in a database that - spoiler alert
is accessible to people you definitely have no
business knowing where you are going.
If you care about privacy, safety,
or just want to know who you need to
cancel next - this video is for you.
Welcome back to Dad Ruins Everything. Today I ruin
Flock Safety’s mesh surveillance camera network.
________________________________________
Part 1: What is Flock Safety? (The
"Apple of Surveillance")
Let’s start with the basics. Who are these guys?
Flock Safety is a tech company founded in
2017. Their founder, Garrett Langley, is a tech
entrepreneur who saw an opportunity. The story
goes that he was frustrated by petty crime in his
neighborhood and realized that police couldn't
solve most of it because they lacked evidence.
His solution? Automated License
Plate Recognition - or ALPR.
Now, I can hear the tech-savvy viewers in the
comments already: “Dad, ALPR isn’t new. Police
cruisers have had those big, bulky cameras
on their fenders and trunks for decades.”
And you’re right. ALPR isn’t new.
But traditional ALPR was expensive,
ugly, and hard to maintain. It required hard-wired
power, servers infrastructure, and IT resources
to stand it up and maintain it. It was a tool for
the state, for big cities, and for highway patrol.
Then Flock did for license plate
readers what Ring did for doorbells.
They brought it down to the consumer level.
They built the Flock Falcon. Here it is, in all
its glory. It’s a proprietary camera that is:
1. Solar-Powered: It has its own panel and
battery, so you can stick it anywhere with
sunlight. No digging trenches for power lines.
2. Cellular Connected: It uses an LTE
cellular connection to upload data instantly
to the cloud. No running ethernet cables.
3. Cheap: This is the kicker. They lease them
for roughly $2,500 to $3,000 per camera, per year.
That may not sound cheap to you, as the actual
bill of material is way less than a hundred
dollars, but that price point is revolutionary in
the government contracting world. Usually, police
tech costs millions. But $2,500? That’s a rounding
error. That’s low enough that a small-town
police chief can sign off on it without a
city council vote. It’s cheap enough that a
modest HOA can buy three of them out of their
reserve fund without assessing the residents.
The “leasing” part is genius, because it creates a
revenue stream for Flock. As with everything else,
they are pushing people from one-time acquisition
costs, to recurring Security as a Service billing.
We’re going to see, though, how the lack of clear
ownership creates implementation, security, and
accountability problems that put everyone at risk.
The Mission Statement
This is a screenshot from Flock’s website
Flock has a very specific mission statement
that you need to hear. It is not "to reduce
crime." It is not "to help police."
It is: "To solve and eliminate crime."
That is a bold, absolute claim. To
eliminate crime requires a level of
omniscience that should make anyone who has read
George Orwell’s 1984 slightly uncomfortable.
Because the cameras are so cheap and easy to
install, they aren’t just leased to police
departments. This is an important part of
their business model. They aggressively
market to private entities like:
• Homeowners Associations (HOAs)
• Apartment Complexes
• Shopping Malls
• Schools and Universities
• Construction Sites
• Individual Business Owners
They have effectively crowd-sourced the funding
for a police surveillance network. Instead of
the taxpayer funding the police department
to lease cameras, the police convince the HOA
to lease the cameras, and then the HOA
gives the data to the police for free.
It’s good business, I guess.
Flock safety is valued at $7.5
billion. But it’s a privacy nightmare.
________________________________________
Part 2: The Cameras
IP cameras aren’t anything new. In fact,
the hardware hasn’t changed much since video
compression moved to h.265 some years back. The
components have improved a little, with onboard
ARM or RISC-V processing getting a bit faster,
video quality getting a bit better, overall power
usage lowering, and general miniaturization.
Flock has capitalized upon
these improvements. While
cellular connectivity and solar+battery
power are not new to cameras in general,
Flock has combined these with edge-processing
to create cameras that can go anywhere,
and output more than just video.
AI video characterization has been
available for years, doing things like human
detection, ingress/egress differentiation,
and even face identification, but
Flock has taken this to the next level.
So, what happens when you
drive past one of these things?
Unlike a standard CCTV camera that records a fuzzy
video of a blob walking past your house at 2 AM,
Flock cameras use the video to extract and
create additional data in real-time. They
aren't just recording 24/7 video.
They are motion-triggered stalkers.
When a vehicle enters the frame, the camera wakes
up, snaps a series of high-resolution photos,
and the onboard processor goes to work.
The "Vehicle Fingerprint"
It doesn’t just read the numbers on your plate.
It uses a subset of AI, called Machine Learning,
to build what they call a "Vehicle Fingerprint."
The AI analyzes the image and extracts:
• The License Plate: State and
characters (even paper tags).
• The Make: Ford, Honda, Toyota.
• The Model: F-150, Civic, Camry.
• The Color: Red, Silver, Black.
• And any Distinguishing Features:
This is the scary part. It looks
for roof racks, bumper stickers,
aftermarket wheels, dents, and decal locations.
In addition to the AI extracted items,
it also records Context: The time of day, the
GPS coordinates, and the direction of travel.
Why does this matter?
Let’s say a crime happens.
A witness tells the police, "I saw a red
truck with a roof LED strip light leaving
the scene." They didn’t get the plate.
In the old days, that lead is dead. There
are thousands of red trucks.
If it’s a really bad crime,
maybe the police see if any cameras in the
possible areas of travel caught anything.
With Flock, the detective opens the search
bar and types: Vehicle: Truck + Color:
Red + Feature: roof LED strip light.
The system pulls up every red truck
with a roof mounted LED light that passed
a camera in that area within the last hour.
Boom. They have the plate. They
have the time. They have the ID.
This data is uploaded to the Amazon Web Services
(AWS) cloud. By default, it is stored for 30 days.
If the car is on a "Hot List"—which we will talk
about in a minute—the camera sends an alert to the
local police dispatch in roughly 15 to 30 seconds.
On paper? That sounds amazing. It definitely
seems like more crimes would be solved.
But we need to talk about the network.
________________________________________
Part 3: The Network
The magic of Flock isn’t the hardware.
I’ve already told you that the cameras
aren’t particularly special
It’s the software ecosystem.
When a police department signs up for Flock,
or when an HOA signs up, they get access to
the "Tal" operating system -named after
the sheer speed of the falcon. How cute.
Here is the critical part that your HOA board
probably doesn’t understand: Sharing settings.
Of course, Flock encourages a "network effect."
If I am the HOA President of "Wisteria Lane," and
I buy four cameras, I have a choice. I can keep
that data private, just for our security guard.
OR, I can check a box that says
"Share with Local Law Enforcement."
Flock’s sales reps push this hard. "Don't you
want the police to know immediately if a stolen
car enters the neighborhood?"
Why, yes.
So, almost everyone checks the box.
Now, let’s zoom out.
The local police department (let’s say,
the Fairview Police) has access to the HOA
cameras. But the Fairview Police also have
their own cameras. And they have a sharing
agreement with the County Sheriff. And the County
Sheriff shares with the State Police. And the
State Police shares with the neighboring states.
This creates a federated, searchable database.
A police officer in Atlanta can potentially search
for a vehicle, and if the sharing settings are
enabled correctly, they can see if that vehicle
was spotted by a playground camera in Nashville,
a police camera in Memphis, and a
shopping mall camera in Little Rock.
It effectively deletes jurisdictional boundaries.
It creates a continuous, searchable history of
movement across the country.
The "Hot List" (NCIC)
Every Flock camera downloads a list
of "wanted" plates every few hours.
This usually comes from the NCIC (National
Crime Information Center) database.
This includes:
• Stolen vehicles.
• Amber Alerts (missing children).
• Silver Alerts (missing seniors).
• Felony warrants associated with a vehicle.
• Terrorist watch lists.
If a car on that list drives past your HOA’s
camera, the system screams. Police get a ping:
"Stolen Vehicle, 2018 Toyota Camry,
entering Wisteria Lane North Gate."
Again, for serious crimes, this is undeniably
effective. They recover stolen cars constantly.
They have found missing children. I am not
here to tell you the tech doesn't work.
But if you were under the impression
that this was just about license plate
reading on steroids, wait until I tell
you about some of the broader problems.
You see, the software can identify “associates”
by linking vehicle fingerprints that consistently
travel together, possibly mapping your
social network and associations. The
software can also automatically establish
your travel patterns and regular stops,
giving law enforcement predictive power on
your whereabouts. In well documented incidents,
it gives bad actors the same capabilities.
Ultimately, I think it’s difficult for many
people to care about license plate readers… even
sophisticated ones using AI and mesh networks.
Plenty of people don’t drive, and many that
do don’t necessarily care about being tracked.
Even those people should care about this thing.
It’s a Flock Condor. There are at least a few
models within this camera product line. It is
like the fixed Flock license plate reader cameras,
EXCEPT it zooms in on, and tracks,
people and other moving objects.
That same search capability I covered for
vehicles? Yes, they have it for people, too.
You may be ok with the system collecting
information on criminals, improving the
speed and solve rate on criminal investigations.
But what about the other 99.9% of the data, which
is being collected without a warrant, on people
who are not suspected of doing anything wrong.
You know, people driving to work, walking to their
doctor, biking to church, or attending a protest.
________________________________________
Part 4: The Legal Black Hole (The Mosaic Theory)
"But Dad," I hear you ask, "I
haven't done anything wrong! Why
should I care if they know I went to Kroger?"
Nothing to hide, nothing to fear is the most
common argument. It’s also incredibly naïve.
Let me explain why that is a dangerous fallacy,
using something called the Mosaic Theory.
In the United States, we have the Fourth
Amendment. It protects us from
unreasonable search and seizure.
In United States v. Jones, the Supreme Court has
ruled that the police need a warrant to slap a
GPS tracker on your car. Tracking your every
move is considered invasive enough to require
judicial oversight.
HOWEVER.
The courts have also ruled that you have
no reasonable expectation of privacy on
a public road. This is the Plain View
doctrine. If you drive down Main Street,
a cop can see you. A neighbor can see
you. Therefore, a camera can see you.
Flock exploits this loophole.
They argue that their cameras
are just taking pictures of public events.
But when you stitch millions of these "public"
pictures together, you create a Mosaic.
One tile (a picture of you at the grocery
store) is harmless.
But a thousand tiles
reveal the whole picture of your life:
• They know you leave for work at 7:15 AM.
• They know which Starbuck’s
you arrive at, at 7:35.
• They know you sleep at your
girlfriend’s house on Tuesdays.
• They know you get your hair cut every 4 weeks.
• They know you attend AA meetings
at the church on 5th street.
• They know you went to a sex shop,
a gun show, a political rally, or a dispensary.
By aggregating this data, Flock has created
a warrantless GPS tracker for
every vehicle in the network.
The police don't need a judge to sign
off on seeing where you’ve been for
the last 30 days. They just need to
log in and type your plate number.
A huge problem is that we’re relying on some
judges to interpret a document that’s hundreds
of years old. We don’t need that, we need modern
laws that protect people, their privacy, and place
limits on surveillance of law-abiding citizens.
1. Much like in Jones, In Carpenter v. United
States: The Supreme Court ruled that
police need a warrant to access historical
cell phone location data because it provides an
"all-encompassing record" of a person's movements.
• In Massachusetts v. McCarthy: The court ruled
that while limited use of license plate readers
is fine, a "widespread" network that tracks
the "whole of a person's public movements"
would constitute a search requiring
a warrant. They didn't define exactly
how many cameras constitute "widespread,"
leaving the door open for future lawsuits.
• In United States v. Yang (9th Circuit):
The court noted that if technology allows for
"comprehensive tracking" that is indistinguishable
from GPS monitoring, it may require a warrant.
While this caselaw is great, all it takes
is one case to undo this fragile dam.
The legal problem gets worse
with Retroactive Surveillance.
If the police put a GPS tracker on your car
today, they can only see where you go from now on.
But with Flock, if you become a "person of
interest" today, they can look backward in time.
They can see where you were three weeks ago.
They can see who visited your house last month.
They can run a "Convoy Analysis"
which I mentioned earlier to ask,
"Show me any cars that have been traveling
near this suspect’s car for the last two days."
Suddenly, your friend who was just following
you to a restaurant is flagged in a police
database as an associate of a suspect.
________________________________________
Part 5: The Scandals (The "I Told You So" Files)
I don’t think I’d be interested in this system
even if it were run by, and used by, the most
ethical people possible. But it’s run by humans,
and humans are prone to error, bias,
corruption, and political pressure.
And while it’s not fair to use too wide a
brush, it is completely fair and accurate to
say that our best efforts haven’t prevented
some law enforcement workers from basically
being criminals in uniform, driving around in a
taxpayer-funded car. Maybe if we fix that problem,
we can talk about the presumption of
ethical use of powerful surveillance tools.
We’re not talking about theoretical bad
apples. Let me elucidate a few examples:
1. The Kechi, Kansas Stalking Incident
In 2022, a police Lieutenant in Kechi,
Kansas, was arrested.
Why?
He was using the Flock Safety system - the
system paid for by taxpayers to protect them - to
stalk his ex-girlfriend and her new partner.
He was logging in, tracking their movements,
and showing up where they were. He was using the
ultimate stalker tool, provided by the state.
This highlights the Insider Threat. There
are thousands of officers with access to
this system. Domestic abuse is a statistically
significant issue within law enforcement families.
Giving abusers a tool to track their
victims without a warrant is catastrophic.
2. The "Missing Person" Abortion Case
This is where things get political and terrifying.
In a post-Roe America, traveling for
healthcare has become a legal minefield.
In 2024, it was revealed that a Sheriff’s office
used the Flock system to track a woman traveling
out of state. To bypass restrictions, they listed
her as a "Missing Person" in the NCIC database.
This triggered the cameras to ping her location.
She wasn't missing. She was allegedly
seeking reproductive healthcare.
The system was weaponized to enforce a moral/legal
code by manipulating the "safety" features.
This proves that once the infrastructure is
built, it will be used for whatever the
current political priority is. Today it’s
abortion. Tomorrow? Who knows. Maybe it’s
tracking people going to a protest. Maybe
it’s tracking people buying certain books.
3. More stalking, this time in Wisconsin
Cristian Morales, a 31-year-old officer with
the Menasha Police Department, improperly used
Flock’s system to stalk a victim and their family.
Seven improper searches. He was only caught after
the victim went to the police and complained.
Morales is facing up to 42 months in prison.
4.
In Braselton,
Georgia, police chief Michael Steffman was booked
and charged for using Flock cameras to stalk and
harass multiple people. He ran more than 2700
searches in about 100 days, on about 40 plates.
That’s over 60 searches per plate, assuming they
were evenly split – which I’m sure they weren’t.
6. The ICE Connection
Flock officially states they
do not work with ICE (Immigration and Customs
Enforcement) for deportation operations. They
say their terms of service prohibit it
However, independent investigations
by groups like the EFF (Electronic Frontier
Foundation) found that local police departments
were simply sharing their Flock data with
federal agencies via joint task forces.
So, your local liberal city council might
declare itself a "Sanctuary City." But if
the local PD shares data with the County Sheriff,
and the Sheriff works with ICE, the data flows up.
That camera your HOA installed to
stop teenagers from stealing pool
furniture? It might be feeding data
into a federal deportation dragnet.
These are just some of the well-documented cases
of abuse and criminality. I could go on, and on,
and on, but I don’t think you want me to beat
that dead horse (cheval). There appear to be
even worse safeguards in place, in many
jurisdictions anyway, than there are for
accessing the state license plate database.
And just so you know, those safeguards
are in place because of decades of abuse and
criminality by law enforcement with that system.
________________________________________
Part 6: The Bad Actor Threat
(Hacking the Watchtower)
We’ve talked about the
police. But what about the actual bad guys?
Flock Safety claims their data is encrypted
and secure. And to be fair, they have better
security than your average cheap webcam.
BUT.
Anything that lives on the internet can be hacked.
The thing, though, is that you don’t actually
HAVE to hack thousands upon thousands of these
cameras. They were never set up properly in the
first place. And who is responsible for this?
Flock Safety will tell you that it’s whomever
is leasing the camera. The people who leased
the cameras will just tell you that they’re not IT
people – although some of them are getting there,
since they’re following awesome
tutorials on setting up Pi-hole.
Right now, you and I can look at thousands of
unsecured Flock camera feeds. You can also see
historical video. At least 3 of the cameras in
my little town are unsecured, and that’s half of
the Flock cameras in my area that are on deflock.
For the cameras that aren’t completely wide open,
there are reports of credentials for
ALPR systems appearing on the Dark Web.
If a reasonably able computer user compromises
a police department’s IT system - which happens
with shocking frequency, by the way
they could potentially gain access to
the Flock portal. That’s not just the
cameras – that’s the search tools, too.
Imagine criminals having access to this.
• They could track high-value targets to
see when they live, and where they travel.
• They could track shipments of expensive goods.
• They could find people in witness protection.
It’s just a matter of time.
There are already technology communicators
that have combined the elements of open
Flock camera access, historical video
on the cameras, and open-source facial
recognition software to demonstrate how
normal people can stalk almost anyone.
At this point, it doesn’t matter if this
is an unintended consequence of poor Flock
camera implementations – there needs to be
meaningful protection of peoples’ privacy,
and real consequences for failing to
safeguard these installations, and their data.
________________________________________
Part 7: The Wider Implications
(The Death of Anonymity)
If all of this wasn’t enough, we need to zoom
out and look at the philosophical problem here.
Look at this thing… it’s a Panopticon.
It was never built in real life, but with this
prison design, the guard can see every prisoner,
but the prisoners can’t see the guard. Because
the prisoners never know if they are being
watched at that exact second, they have to
act as if they are always being watched.
Flock creates a digital
Panopticon anywhere it’s present.
The Hawthorne effect is a bit
more modern than panopticism,
but two are similar. Possible observation changes
our identity. Observation changes our behavior.
If you know your car is being tracked,
do you drive to that political rally?
Do you park at that mental health clinic?
Do you meet that whistleblower in a park?
Privacy isn't about hiding crimes. Privacy is
the right to make mistakes, to explore, and
to live without judgment. Anyone that talks about
freedom, but tries to tell you that privacy isn’t
a key component of that freedom, is an idiot.
When we hand over our movement data to a private
company, like Flock, which then hands it to
the government, we are bypassing the checks
and balances designed to keep us free.
We are crowdsourcing big brother.
The government can’t afford to put a
camera on every corner. But we can,
collectively. And we are doing it to ourselves,
paying $2500 a year for the privilege.
We’ve made it this far in the video, and I’ve
concealed the geometry of the problem. Flock
Safety has shipped between 100,000 and 200,000 of
their cameras. To put that in some perspective,
there are 3143 counties in the united states.
Alpranalysis.com you can see that these cameras
may be in 3128 counties, or 99.5% of all
counties in the US – in all 50 states,
and in the District of Columbia.
Here’s what my little county looks like:
That’s terrifying
because I live in the middle of nowhere.
________________________________________
Part 8: What Communities Are Doing
At this point, the inevitable question would be:
Is there any hope?
Actually, yes.
People are waking up, and we are seeing
a massive backlash against ALPRs.
1. This is coming in the form of HOA Rebellions
Across the country, residents are organizing.
They are showing up to HOA meetings
and voting DOWN Flock contracts.
The arguments that work are:
• Property Values: "I don't want to live
in a neighborhood that feels like a prison camp.
It lowers the appeal to privacy-conscious buyers."
• Liability: "If our HOA
shares data with the police,
and that data is used to hurt someone (like in
any of the cases I cited), is the HOA liable?"
• Cost: "Why are we paying $10,000 a year
for cameras when our roads need repaving?"
All of these are compelling arguments
2. Next, we have City Bans and Moratoriums
Cities like Santa Cruz, California and several
others have frozen or canceled their contracts.
In many cases, audits revealed that the police
were sharing data with out-of-state agencies in
violation of city ordinances. The City
Councils got mad and pulled the plug.
Some states, like New Hampshire, have very
strict laws on ALPR use, effectively banning the
private-to-police pipeline in many scenarios.
3. The Lawsuits
The heavy hitters are getting involved. The
American Civil Liberties Union and the Institute
for Justice are fighting battles in court.
There is a major case in Norfolk, Virginia,
where they are arguing that this warrantless,
24/7 tracking is unconstitutional.
They are trying to get the Supreme Court
to update the Jones ruling to say: "Hey,
aggregating millions of license plate reads is
actually a search, and you need a warrant for it."
________________________________________
So what’s YOUR action
Plan (What YOU Can Do)
Because All that is great,
but what can you do? You’re just one person.
Well, here is your Dad-approved checklist
for dealing with Flock Safety.
Step 1: Audit Your Neighborhood
Drive around. Look at the entrances
to your subdivision. Look for the
black camera on the pole.
(I’ll put a picture of what
they look like in the video description).
If you see one, you need to find out who
owns it. Is it the city? Or is it your HOA?
Make sure that you put it on deflock.com
Step 2: Go to the Meeting
If it’s your HOA, go to the next board meeting.
Ask these specific questions (write these down):
1. "What is our Data Retention Policy?" (Default
is 30 days. Can we lower it to 3 days?)
2. "Who has access to the search portal?"
(Is it just the management company? The
Board President? Random volunteers?)
3. "Who are we sharing data with?" (Ask to see
the "Transparency Portal." Flock offers this,
but HOAs rarely publicize it. It shows exactly
which police departments are receiving your data).
4. "Can I Opt-Out?" (Flock has a "Safe
List" feature where residents can
theoretically opt-out of being flagged.
Most HOAs won't tell you this exists).
Step 3: Push for Policy, Not Just Bans
If you can’t get rid of the cameras,
push for Guardrails.
Demand that the HOA signs
a binding policy that says:
• "We will NOT share data
with out-of-state agencies."
• "We will NOT allow ICE access."
• "We will audit the search logs monthly to ensure
no board members are stalking their neighbors."
Step 4: Protect Yourself
On a personal level? There
isn't much you can do to be invisible to
ALPRs without breaking the law (don't cover
your plate with plastic, that’s illegal).
But you can support organizations like
the Electronic Frontier Foundation
and American Civil Liberties Union,
who are fighting this at the legislative level.
You can also go to Alpr.watch to try to see
when technology like Flock cameras is
going to be discussed in your area.
________________________________________
Conclusion: The Price of Fear
We live in a world that sells us fear 24/7.
The news tells you crime is rampant (even
when statistics show it's down in many areas).
Social media tells you your neighbors are enemies.
And companies like Flock Safety swoop in and say,
"For just $2,500, we can make the fear go away."
To loosely paraphrase Benjamin Franklin
those who would give up essential Liberty,
to purchase a little temporary Safety,
deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
And while that’s probably right, it doesn’t
change the fact that this is a problem where
a tiny number of people, relatively speaking,
are making decisions that affect us all.
Flock cameras are a technological marvel.
They are also a civil liberties disaster
that’s been happening for a half a decade.
They turn our neighborhoods into checkpoints.
They turn our neighbors into suspects. And
they build a database that no government
should possess without a warrant.
If you care about keeping the
"private" in "private property," it’s
time to start paying attention to the
little black camera at the end of your street.
Lest you think I am also dealing in fear, I’m
going to offer you a ray of hope. Recently, Amazon
ran Super Bowl commercials that touted a “Search
Party” feature that used AI and data from their
Ring cameras to locate lost pets. This was through
a collaboration between Amazon and…. Flock Safety.
Yeah, not good.
Well, enough people were educated on
the disaster potential of this union,
that there was some public outrage. It wasn’t
very widespread, but it was loud. The results
were this face-saving post: Ring and Flock
Cancel Partnership - The Ring Blog. Less
than a week after the Super Bowl,
the partnership was dissolved.
We did that, and we can do more – but
it starts with getting the word out.
Outro:
If you learned
something new, or you just realized what
that weird pole in your neighborhood is,
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Stay safe, stay private, and keep
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See you next time and have a surveillance-free
day, to the degree that’s possible.