Flock Safety’s solar-powered cameras could make surveilliance more widespread | TechCrunch

The problem is that flock safety doesn’t have the best track record in terms of accuracy. In New Mexico, police mistakenly believed some drivers to be potentially violent criminal suspects and held them at gunpoint after the firm’s cameras misread license plates, According to KOAT Action News, A lawsuit was also reportedly filed against the company When an ohio The man was reportedly wrongly identified as a human trafficking suspect. And the company has generally investigated about Privacy risks with nationally shared databases,

a report The Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program at UMich concluded that “Even when ALPRs work as intended, the majority of images taken are not linked to any criminal activity,” and Herein lies the problem: filming everything all the time necessarily reveals something. Privacy challenges come with it.

‘Several tens of thousands’ of cameras

When you cover the country with cameras, it stands to reason that the frequency of sightings of an individual car increases. Supreme Court about a decade ago Decided that tracking the car using a GPS tracker for more than 28 days violates the Fourth Amendment rule against unreasonable search and seizure.,

At this point it becomes a philosophical question: how many data points of number plate recognition will you need before you have a networked array of cameras capable of tracking a vehicle with the same resolution as GPS? I asked that question to Bailey Quintrell, Chief Strategy Officer at Flock Safety.

“A GPS tracker essentially has your location live — every second or so, depending on how it’s set up,” Quintrell said in an interview with TechCrunch, adding that the company’s “several tens of thousands of Thousands of cameras are installed. Operation. “With our cameras, they are installed in public view, there clearly visible. Maybe it seems innumerable. But nationally, it’s actually not that high.”

This may be true nationally, but in some communities the density may be much higher. In Oakland, California, where I live, Governor Newsom recently announced a plan to cover the city with cameras.

“With the installation of this 480 high-tech camera network, we are equipping law enforcement with the tools they need to effectively combat criminal activity and hold criminals accountable,” Newsom said. in a statement In March this year.

Still, Quintrell claims that high-density camera coverage is also a big issue.

“So this is a very different level of information than a GPS tracker,” Quintres says, rebutting my suggestion that perhaps cameras are the equivalent of GPS if the density gets high enough. “I think that’s right.” [where we know where everyone is at all times] It is quite far. There are a lot of roads, a lot of intersections, a lot of parking lots, a lot of sidewalks. I don’t know the numbers there, but it’s much higher than the number of cameras we sold.

True, perhaps, but the company claims to be “trusted by over 5,000 communities across the country,” and ultimately, to the bated breath of its investors, the company is showing little inclination to slow down its implementation.

data retention

A major challenge with camera technology is how long cameras are storing footage and data. Flock suggests that it stores data for one month by default.

,[Data] It’s stored on the device for 30 days, and then it’s either viewed live, or you can download it from the device,” Quintrell confirms.

The data retention policy is one of the things the ACLU particularly has a problem with, arguing that a 72-hour policy should be enough for video footage, but the organization is insisting that the data should not be “flocked.” Be deleted and destroyed by “No more than three minutes after the photo or data is first captured.”

Ears and eyes of the police department

We live in a complex world where many police departments are struggling to staff the staff they need, and where video surveillance or AI-augmented policing could help fill some of this shortage. I asked Flock’s strategy boss what he’s most excited about.

“The most exciting thing? There are a lot of places where there is a lot of crime, and where there is no way to get objective evidence (…) Law enforcement is finding it difficult to hire people. So hiring is down, and retail crime continues to explode, costing us all. “It increases the cost of everything,” Quintrell says.

“If you’re in a police department, it’s very hard to hire people who are willing to wear the badge and work really hard. Let us help you get evidence to the places you need it, whether it’s the intersection or the park or your business customer: You’re just trying to keep your inventory from going out the door without getting paid. [Solar Condor] Turns a really complex, expensive construction project into something simple. All we need is a few hours of sunlight and a place to set up the pole, and we can help you solve this problem.

It’s hard to argue with the fact that it’s hard to police the police these days, and I have no doubt that with solar power, the logistical issue of ubiquitous camera coverage is made much easier. But with great (solar) energy also comes great responsibility – and the question arises whether a camera network run by a private, for-profit company has the right level of oversight and responsibility needed to make up the difference.