 Where you drive is personal. So is what you click on and who you communicate with. Combine the two, and suddenly a revealing picture emerges of your political, romantic, financial, and religious beliefs and activities – in short, a comprehensive dossier of your private life. That appears to be what is happening with Flock, which is mashing up its camera surveillance of millions of drivers in 5,000 communities across the United States with digital information gathered on us by data brokers. According to 404 Media, the good news is that after internal deliberations, Flock told its employees in May it would not merge stolen dark web data with information from its network of license plate readers (LPRs). Joseph Cox of 404 Media reported that in a meeting, a Flock supervisor told employees that after a “policy review process,” the company’s new search tool Nova would not incorporate hacked data from the dark web. So far, so good. Dealing in stolen merchandise is never a good look for a company. Flock, however, announced that it will combine “public records data, Open Source intelligence, and license plate reader data” for law enforcement and other customers. This marks a policy shift. Flock has long insisted that its license plate readers do not collect personally identifiable information, claiming they merely provide law enforcement with a way to track cars tied to crimes. But Jay Stanley of ACLU reports that the company now plans to plug its systems into commercial data brokers offering “people lookup” services. ACLU’s Stanley writes: “In the 1970s, after some government agencies were found to be building dossiers on people who aren’t suspected of involvement in crime like the East German Stasi, Congress enacted the Privacy Act banning agencies from such recordkeeping. Yet the ethically shady and frequently inaccurate data broker industry does basically the same thing, and when law enforcement becomes a customer of those data brokers, it represents an end-run around the law. By tying its LPR data together with data brokers, Flock is effectively automating and scaling the end run around our checks and balances that law enforcement data broker purchases represent … “Imagine that a police officer stood on your street writing detailed notes about you every time you drove or walked by them. All the details about what your car looks like (make, model, color, distinguishing characteristics, bumper stickers, etc.), as well as details about visible occupants and pedestrians – how many, at what time, their activities, demographic data, what they are wearing, attributes they may have such as a beard, hat, tattoo, or T-shirt, and what that hat, T-shirt, or tattoo might say. Now imagine that there is an army of police officers doing this on every block.” Thus, algorithms can now seek patterns in vehicle movements to identify and alert law enforcement to drivers who are “suspect.” Stanley pinpoints why this approach clashes with both the letter and the spirit of the Fourth Amendment. He writes there is a big difference between “providing tools for officials to use in investigating suspicion to generating suspicion.” The fusion of your purchased data with your movements could do exactly that. One day, something as ordinary as making a right on red or casual U-turn could transform you from a routine driver into a suspect. Comments are closed.
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