HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (WAFF) – A cybersecurity expert said the looming question over Flock cameras is about how much privacy people are willing to trade for the safety benefits.
Marc Sachs, a cybersecurity expert, said Flock cameras are not a typical license plate reader.
“It’s generating what they call a vehicle fingerprint. So it treats a vehicle as though it’s a property. And so what it’s really doing is just property tracking. So it’s not looking for people. It’s not doing any facial recognition or anything like that. It just treats the vehicle as an object, a piece of property,” Sachs said.
Sachs said artificial intelligence can then identify the car in different places using its databases.
“So you can instantly flag a stolen car. You can possibly find missing children. You can easily track the daily habits of lots of innocent citizens. And there’s this problem, of course, of abuse, where rogue officers might stalk an individual or track a person crossing a state line. The good news is that Flock and other companies that run these cameras have introduced a lot of new safety features,” Sachs said.
Sachs said some of the safety features prevent data from being stored for more than seven days. Sachs said the systems also include features designed to catch misuse.
“There’s also some safety nets now built into where if an officer appears to be abusing it, they’re automatically locked out. The software will lock them out. And a supervisor then has to go in and review what the officer was doing and then unlock the account,” Sachs said.
Sachs said he believes the safety features will continue to improve.
“I think the safety features are absolutely fundamental. Probably something they should have engineered in from the start years ago when these cameras began to appear,” Sachs said.
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