By Gabrielle Miller
NDG Special Contributor
The City of Carrollton, as well as other cities in the DFW area, has signed contracts with Flock Safety, a private company based on the manufacturing and operation of surveillance hardware and software. Many have remarked on seeing these new cameras popping up in various areas.
These are called Flock Automated License Plate Reader cameras (ALPR), and they are a part of a 49-state and thousands of jurisdictions surveillance network that watches millions of Americans without their knowledge. The City of Carrollton has given Flock Safety the permission to lease the AI-driven camera network all over the city. These cameras might sound like the perfect tool to help people and keep crime down, but when digging deeper, skeptics of this technology say problems begin to arise.
The primary goal for ALPR cameras is to use AI-enabled technology to surveil cities. With around 90 cameras already connected to Flock’s cloud-based platform, Flock creates “Vehicle Fingerprints” that helps the AI software identify key and unique parts of one’s vehicle more efficiently than a simple license plate recognition system might. These things may include bumper stickers, roof racks, custom wheels, and other ways one might decorate their vehicle.
However, the AI software is able to analyze much more than just a vehicle fingerprint. Feeds from Flock’s ALPR cameras have been combined with facial recognition software that is already in use by individual police departments, even though Flock states themselves that they have not added facial recognition into their software. And since Flock is the largest Fixed LPR Network, other organizations are able to access ALPR data from Carrollton and other cities as well, which critics say allows private information of Carrollton’s citizens in unwanted hands.
More than what most might think is being recorded through these cameras. Everything that makes a vehicle unique — a car’s make and model, the color of it, the plate number, and even dents in the sides – is being picked up by these cameras and uploaded into the AI cloud servers in real time. It documents drivers’ location history. It knows when they leave their homes, how long they are gone, and even where they went.
These cameras are placed at every major intersection and have made their way into neighborhoods as well, or “areas of traditional high crime” as stated by Carrollton Mayor Steve Babick. They create detailed maps of every bit of activity done the moment a motorist steps outside, and a warrant or active investigation is not even required for it.
Anyone with a login to Flock Safety can look up individuals and their vehicle, including the Carrollton Police Department, the Fort Worth Police Department and any other police departments in the country subscribed to it, and any and all federal, state, or local agencies that also subscribed. Smaller businesses and vendors that are subscribed only have access to their own images and not the wider database, but anything their cameras capture are also fed into the full database. Complaints say it’s incredibly easy for these subscribers to look up this information in the database.
People can buy these systems right off the shelf for under $1,000 that can perform keyword searches for people and vehicles. Flock can do the same thing, but is backed by private equities and has the funding in place to do even more than keyword searches. Critics say that even though the company says that they do not perform facial recognition, when combined with other software, as well as the constant live feed surveilling that it does, it can do just that; adding that they don’t just take pictures of license plates, but surveil everything around them in its entirety.
A group of Carrollton residents have organized an opposition movement to the use of Flock cameras. Through social media (and the website deflockCarrolltonTX.org), they are spreading the message that these cameras do more harm than good. A petition campaign linked through the website has garnered more than 1,000 signatures to compel city officials to drop the program.
“A private company should not be able to collect and store location data on millions of people with so little public oversight,” the petition reads. “Our tax dollars fund this program. Carrollton has committed to paying over $261,000/year for the Flock software and camera leases.
“Our privacy, our freedoms, and our trust in local government are at stake. We urge Carrollton City officials to stop using these ALPR cameras immediately.”
