AI-Camera Company Flock Changes Rules After Cops Caught Spying on Women

Flock Safety — the most widely known company offering AI-enabled police camera systems — says it is tightening its rules on data use and retention after reports of the system being abused by law enforcement officers.The announcement about the changes comes a week after the Washington Post reported that at least 50 police officers have been accused, charged, or convicted in connection with abusing AI cameras to spy on people. Many of the victims are the police officers’ wives, girlfriends, exes, and their exes’ new partners. Other victims are women the officers wanted to meet.The Alliance for Secure AI’s social media manager, Dylan Oliver says, in one case, a police chief in Kansas used cameras to track his ex-girlfriend on 164 occasions over a four-month period.In another case, a Georgia woman, Marci Bakely, said her ex-boyfriend, the police chief in a small town in the Atlanta suburbs, Michael Steffman, repeatedly texted her with questions when she left her home. The website Have I Been Flocked? documented about 600 searches Steffman made looking for Ms. Bakley and her daughter’s license plates.Steffman was eventually arrested but was found dead before his trial from what officials said was a suicide.Flock says it is now proactively monitoring its systems for abnormal activity. A new audit assistance feature flags system administrators about the activity for review.“In recent weeks, those reviews have been associated with arrests of several law enforcement officers who allegedly abused the system,” Flock said in a release. The company says about a third of its customers have voluntarily adopted the audit system but it will become mandatory for all customers by the end of the year.Flock says it will also institute proactive lockouts when a user’s activity is deemed abnormal. An administrator will have to review the usage and reauthorize the account. “The goal is to intervene before misuse becomes recurring or widespread,” Flock stated.The company also says an option to require case codes to be imputed before conducting searches will also be required by the end of the year. Police will be allowed to bypass the requirement in emergencies, but the searches will be flagged for administrator review.Flock is also reducing the default setting for how long camera data is stored, from 30 days to seven. It will also allow police departments more control over what data they share with other law enforcement agencies.Critics say the cameras remain a civil liberties threat despite the changes. “Several of the proposed changes Flock is touting are merely retreads of previous inadequate safety measures,” the American Civil Liberties Union’s senior policy counsel, Chad Marlow, wrote in a blog post.“While one proposed change to Flock’s operations might constitute a positive development, most of the other changes seem to be following Flock’s playbook of treating legitimate privacy concerns as mere public relations problems,” Mr. Marlow also wrote.The public interest law firm Institute For Justice is suing the city of Norfolk, Virginia in federal court over the cameras. It calls the changes “window dressing” because they require police departments to audit themselves. “These half measures will do nothing to protect innocent people from warrantless mass surveillance,” an institute attorney, Michael Soyfer, said in a statement.There are estimated to be more than 130 thousand AI-powered automated cameras that record license plates across the country. Police departments have been rapidly buying the surveillance technology, but critics say they are an invasion of privacy and ripe for abuse and there is a growing movement to force their removal. An anti-camera group called DeFlock says more than 100 cities have rejected or stopped using the cameras because of privacy concerns.“We’re looking at these AI-powered cameras that are able to not just scan license plates but they’re able to scan and track identifying features of vehicles, whether it be roof racks or even as simple as bumper stickers, to pinpoint and to track and follow people’s movements based on where they are going,” Mr. Oliver told the Sun. “We view that as a blatant act of government overreach and a violation of Fourth Amendment rights.”A Maine lawmaker has proposed a bill to ban the AI cameras statewide. Republican Assemblyman David Boyer says people are tired of being surveilled. “We’re one of the safest states in the country. How many more liberties and freedom should we give up to feel safer-ist,” Mr. Boyer told The New York Sun in June.The city council at South Portland, Maine voted in June to immediately stop using the automatic license plate reader cameras and terminate a contract with Flock. Citizens at Auburn, Maine also want them gone. There is a also a petition to put a measure on the November ballot to ban the cameras statewide.“This is like the ring of power in “Lord of the Rings.” It’s too attractive, no matter who is in control of it. We shouldn’t give anybody this much power,” Mr. Boyer said.The Los Angeles Police Department recently decided against renewing a contract with Flock. 404 Media reported that an internal police audit had found the department’s Flock cameras generated 161 false stolen-vehicle alerts in just two months. A department spokesman said the decision was made because of “serious concerns around civil liberties and civil rights issues.”

AI-Camera Company Flock Changes Rules After Cops Caught Spying on Women

AI-Camera Company Flock Changes Rules After Cops Caught Spying on Women

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