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Flock Cameras Can Surveil Cars Without License Plates

This is from a 2024 company presentation:

Officers can also tap into data showing a car’s decals, bumper stickers, back and top racksβ€”along with temporary and unique state tags.

Flock calls it a β€œVehicle Fingerprint” and it’s touted as a way for law enforcement officials to get more information β€œeven when you don’t have full plate information,” the company’s presentation shows.

The company gives police officers the ability to search that data as well, to β€œbuild stronger cases with less information upfront.” That includes being able to locate multiple vehicles law enforcement officials believe are moving together and what Flock calls a β€œmulti geo search.”

This kind of thing is older than AI; I wrote about it in my 2014 book Beyond Fear. Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA was using cell phone location data to track phones that were habitually near each other.

As bad as Flock is, remember that anyone with broad access to cell phone location data can do the same thing.

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