- Three-year contract will not be renewed, police officers say
- Data and privacy concerns have been cited.
- The flock cameras have faced backlash from a public concerned about privacy.
Los Angeles Police Department officials told the Los Angeles Times that its contract with surveillance camera company Flock will not be renewed due to “serious concerns” about privacy and the data they collect.
The cameras, which are owned by Flock and used by more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies across the United States, scan and track billions of vehicle license plates each month, and the resulting data is used by police departments to help make arrests and develop cases.
However, there has been widespread public backlash due to privacy concerns, and some residents have taken matters into their own hands. Recently, an Air Force engineer from Virginia has been accused of cutting 13 Flock cameras over a six-month period.
According to Military.com, privacy advocates across the country have donated more than $15,000 (around £11,220 / AU$21,660) to the defendant’s legal defense.
What’s more, developers have created a free online mapping tool that allows American drivers to plot routes that actively avoid areas with a dense population of Flock cameras.
LAPD Chief Information Officer Dean Gialamas told reporters that the contract would not be renewed due to “serious concerns around civil liberties and civil rights issues, particularly around privacy and the data that is collected from these cameras.”
Gialamas added that he hoped concerns about data, privacy, security and sharing would eventually be “resolved through a contractual relationship.” It is currently unknown whether Flock’s cameras will continue to record and distribute data in the meantime.
Analysis: The public fights back
Flock’s network of some 80,000 cameras in the US has been criticized by data privacy advocates, and companies like 404 Media have conducted numerous investigations that highlight how easy it is for this surveillance data to fall into the wrong hands.
According to TechCrunch, researchers have also identified an increase in the number of documented cases in which drivers have been stopped, detained, and even jailed due to false positives and errors with license plate readers.
We also recently reported that an investigation by the Electronic Frontier Foundation found that more than 50 federal, state, and local agencies conducted hundreds of searches across Flock’s national surveillance data network in connection with protest activity.
One motoring journalist in the US was even tracked for days and eventually “locked up” by police over a Flock-based mix-up with license plates attached to the press loaner vehicle he was driving.
As public distrust of Flock traffic cameras increases, we could see more agencies follow the LAPD’s lead in rejecting the technology.
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