Flock Cameras Detect People, Not Just Vehicles

by Justin Erickson

A joint investigation by WIRED and 404 Media has provided a detailed look inside of Flock’s license plate readers after hackers physically removed a camera, copied its stored data, and recovered an encryption key from it. The recovered files showed that the camera’s on-device computer vision software not only detects license plates, but also people, vehicles, and bicycles. Researchers examining approximately 21 days of activity found that the camera had photographed about 50,200 vehicles and generated roughly 1.6 million images. Flock says they do not use facial recognition, but still – “When a person is matched to a vehicle, vehicle-based tracking can become person-based tracking in practice.” This statement from Malwarebytes summarizes it well: “Privacy cannot depend on authorized users always following rules, vendors configuring every setting correctly, or abuses being discovered the hard way. The first safeguard should be limiting the system’s ability to build a searchable record of ordinary people’s lives at all.”