What’s behind the Flock camera controversy?
Amid a backlash to Flock’s cameras, Northeastern experts say communities should place stricter guardrails on the policing technology.
When Kait Merritt-O’Toole, a resident of Framingham, Massachusetts, first learned that her city’s police department was actively using license plate reading (LPR) cameras from technology company Flock Safety she wasn’t immediately concerned.
It was just another tool for law enforcement to track down criminals and help officers do their jobs, she thought at the time.
But her perspective quickly changed, she said, when she started reading up on the company and was informed by others about the privacy and security concerns at the center of Flock Safety’s technology.
One of her biggest concerns is how the data the company collects – from licence plate information to a car’s make, model, and color – is used and stored.
“I went from, ‘Oh, the police are going to solve crime’ to ‘Oh, they don’t need this information,’” she said.
Based out of Atlanta, Georgia, Flock Safety describes itself as “a public safety technology” company that “helps agencies locate missing people, recover stolen vehicles and investigate crimes more quickly” through its thousands of LPR cameras and nation-wide network. The company says it has more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states and works with everyone from neighborhood groups and business partners to towns and cities.
But in recent weeks, Flock has faced a flurry of controversies, including — a Kentuky police officer allegedly misusing the technology to spy on an ex-romantic partner, and people being wrongly pulled over on charges that their vehicle was stolen, due to the high false positive rates of the cameras.
As a result of community backlash driven by local activists like Merritt-O’Toole, more than 200 cities and counties across the U.S. — Framingham included —- have so far terminated their contract with Flock, according to data complied by Secure Justice, a California based advocacy group focused on civil liberties and the abolishment of mass surveillance.
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“The biggest concern is privacy,” Merritt-O’Toole told Northeastern Global News, highlighting why residents are wary of the technology. “These cameras run 24/7, 365 days a year.”
While much of Flock’s technology is nothing new — license plate reading cameras have been around for more than a decade —- what sets the company apart is its nationwide network of cameras and data infrastructure, said Aajhan Ranganathan, a cybersecurity and privacy professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences.
That gives officers and other agencies a lot of data and the potential for abuse is high, he said. One of the biggest security risks with this model are “insider threats,” Ranagathan said. That’s when individuals within an organization misuse the systems to cause harm.
“This means people who have access to the infrastructure, and are considered to be within a trusted framework, actually are the malicious entity, ” he said. “This is an extremely hard problem to solve unless you invest in a bunch of technologies in how you store the technology.”
Flock declined a request for comment on its practices, instead referring Northeastern Global News to its FAQ page.
The company says that its cameras do not have the capability to identify individuals’ faces and does not “continuously track people or vehicles,” according to information published on its website. It further notes that customers own the data it collects and that it doesn’t sell that data to third parties.
In response to the backlash, in recent weeks Flock has also reduced the number of days it retains data logs from 30 to seven.
Eric Piza, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Northeastern University, said the backlash to Flock’s security cameras is similar to other crime controlling technology, namely ShotSpotter, a gun detection technology that allows police to detect gunshots within seconds after they occurred.
At the heart of this debate is how these technologies may be used to overpolice and abuse access to sensitive information, he said.
However, both Piza and Ranganathan pointed out that while many communities have left their contracts with Flock, they are entering deals with other providers that offer similar LPR service.
“So, that raises the question, ‘if the Flock system is an invasion of privacy why would another vendor who offers the same technology not have the same problem?” Piza said.
The solution, according to some experts and activists, has to come from communities establishing the guidelines and guardrails to keep these companies in check.
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That accountability could come in many forms — from individual town and city ordinances to data privacy laws passed at both the state and federal levels, the experts explained.
“We need to have a proper legal framework around personal privacy in public spaces,” Ranganathan said. “There is a lot of work to be done in this space.”
For Merritt-O’Toole the best solution is to outright ban the technology nationwide, she said.
“The success we had in Framingham helps me get up in the morning, knowing that public advocacy makes a difference if you take the time to talk to the right people and say ‘this is wrong,’ ”she said, her voice shaking as she admitted to holding back tears.
