This Company Wants Flock Cameras To Spy On You Even More. Adds Device Tracking

Know why they stopped making Black Mirror? Because we're living it, friends.

By: Janaki Jitchotvisut

Jun 24, at 7:33am ET

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If you believe in the concept of keeping your personal data private (well, as much as anyone who lives in the modern world can these days), then you may already have certain feelings about automated license plate readers (ALPRs), most notably the Flock camera network.

Police used to have to clock your speed and issue tickets on-scene. But surveillance tech can apparently turn into revenue-generating tech with incredible speed, and it's not just me or any other perceived Chicken Littles out here yelling about how the sky is falling to anyone who might listen.

Why? Because it's already happening, there's no need to get either hyperbolic or hypothetical about it.

Noted privacy advocacy organization the Electronic Frontier Foundation very succinctly referred to a reported incident in the state of Georgia as "License Plate Reader Mission Creep," and they're not wrong. The news story the EFF was commenting on, in case you're unaware of it, involved a motorcyclist who was apparently spotted by a Flock camera holding a cell phone in their left hand.

Some time well after the fact, the Georgia State Patrol issued a ticket to that motorcyclist based on the Flock camera's recording of that incident, even though a direct quote from the company's own marketing materials states that, “What it is not: Flock ALPR does not perform facial recognition, does not store biometrics, cannot be queried to find people, and is not used to enforce traffic violations” [emphasis mine].

Is it Opposite Day? Is that entire sentence just a list of things that Flock either already has been, or will eventually also be used for? If one part of that sentence describing what Flock is not meant to be used for falls, what does that imply about the reliability or believability of the other constituent parts of that sentence?

(And no, of course, that doesn't mean I advocate for using your phone while you're operating a vehicle. But that's really not the point here, and you know it.)

You think that's where it stops? In another fascinating bit of reporting, the excellent 404 Media analyzed and shared a piece of marketing material from a company called Leonardo, regarding a piece of tech that the company calls the ELSAG SignalTrace Intelligence System. To make you feel even better about personal data aggregation and how you are defined by your devices on a daily basis, the subheadline on this doc also states its intended purpose, so I'll just quote it here directly in bold so you can't miss it even if you're skimming and not reading.

Identify Suspects Through The Electronic Devices They Carry

To show you that the paragraph above isn't simply some kind of paranoid fever dream (believe me, I wish it was), here's a screenshot. This is really, truly what this system is meant to accomplish, and it doesn't mince words.

Leonardo ELSAG SignalTrace Intelligence System Brochure Screenshot 1

Photo by: RideApart.com

By the way, first person to tell me "oh, it's only going to be used on gang members, non gang-members don't have anything to worry about!" gets a special invite to the bridge I have to sell you. But truly, there are so many points in recent years where privacy advocates should probably already have been losing their minds, so what's one more to add to the pile?

Now, to reassure you of this system's benign intent, the marketing material adds that "SignalTrace captures only publicly broadcast device frequency activity. It does not decrypt or store any content from devices or communications. It functions like a license plate reader by capturing identifiers without accessing personal or message data."

Oh, so that's totally fine, guys! It's just capturing my fitness ring or watch data to say that I've been somewhere, when all I wanted to do was keep tabs on my sleep habits and my steps and see how different types of physical activity affect my physical and mental wellbeing, but it's keeping that data totally anonymous except oh wait, it wants to correlate that data with my license plate to let some fuzzy authoritative organization or other know where I am at all times!

Cool, nothing to see here! </sarcasm>

Or, even more nefariously, it wants to use the fact that you, a responsible pet owner, had your beloved furry friend microchipped in case they ever got loose, so you could hopefully locate them and bring them back home.

Think I'm kidding, or jumping to conclusions? Hate to inform you of this, but I'm not. Here's another screenshot.

Photo by: RideApart.com

How many of these devices do you carry around and use on a daily basis? More than one, I'd guess. It probably varies based on what time of day it is and where you're going; any of these feel like violations enough, of course. If I'm traveling, I usually have both a set of earbuds and over-the-ear noise-canceling headphones with me, in addition to all the other electronic gubbins that I simply can't live (or do my job) without.

What do you think?

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Comments

Still, it's the pet microchip one that really got me, though. I don't know about you, but I don't need the license plate cameras (which I'm already not a fan of) recording every instance of when I take Stinky out for his daily walk. Nor that we had to stop every 10 feet or so, because poor little Stinky ate something he shouldn't have, and so now both he and I are busy paying the very unfortunate, multi-poo-bag price.

Whose business should that be? Mine, Stinky's, and possibly whoever happens to be in the vicinity at that time and side-eyeing the poo parade as it goes down. Not a license plate reader's. Not Leonardo's. Not my local authorities (unless I do something illegal with all that dog poo, or perhaps Stinky and I are trespassing or something). We should have a reasonable expectation of personal privacy while we're out living our lives and going about our daily business.