| ▲ | jeremyberemy 17 hours ago |
| > Police use the technology to investigate crimes such as hit-and-runs and to locate missing persons.
> No suspects have been identified. Yeah, that tracks. > Camera data is owned by the police department and permanently deleted after 30 days. I assume this means that the police department deletes one local copy? |
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| ▲ | advisedwang 17 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > Camera data is owned by the police department and permanently deleted after 30 days There's so much going on in that sentence! What a thing of pure PR beauty. What does "owned" mean in this sentence? Probably fairly little. What data does it even refer to? Just the actual video footage? Does the statement include derived data like license plate reads or ML models? And surely if data is flagged as relevant to an investigation it is not deleted, so is there an implicit "*unless retained"? |
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| ▲ | devsda 17 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | What if "owning" here means the same as "owning" any movie online. If questioned, I can already imagine someone defending that sort of agreement as a standard consumer, contractual terms and practices of the time. | |
| ▲ | rconti 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You know, unless they get a national security letter, or change their TOS, or.... | | |
| ▲ | duped 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | Or their app was configured to let other LE agencies access it without their knowledge in violation of state law (1). Only linked one case but afaik it happened in a number of CA cities. (1) https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/privacy/2026/02/flock-came... | | |
| ▲ | toomuchtodo 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | https://www.ilsos.gov/news/2025/august-25-2025-giannoulias-a... > Giannoulias’ Audit Finds License Plate Reader Company in Violation of Illinois State Law > Flock Safety Shared Illinois Data with U.S. Customs and Border Protection Secretary, Orders Flock to Shut off Data Access https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/flock-safety-and-texas... > Last May, 404 Media obtained data revealing the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office conducted a nationwide search of more than 83,000 Flock ALPR cameras, giving the reason in the search log: “had an abortion, search for female.” Both the Sheriff's Office and Flock Safety have attempted to downplay the search as akin to a search for a missing person, claiming deputies were only looking for the woman to “check on her welfare” and that officers found a large amount of blood at the scene – a claim now contradicted by the responding investigator’s affidavit. Flock Safety went so far as to assert that journalists and advocates covering the story intentionally misrepresented the facts, describing it as "misreporting" and "clickbait-driven." > Earlier this month, there was purposefully misleading reporting that a Texas police officer with the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office used LPR “to target people seeking reproductive healthcare.” This organization is actively perpetuating narratives that have been proven false, even after the record has been corrected. According to the Sheriff in Johnson County himself, this claim is unequivocally false. That sheriff has since been arrested and indicted on felony counts in an unrelated sexual harassment and whistleblower retaliation case. He has also been charged with aggravated perjury for allegedly lying to a grand jury. EFF filed public records requests with Johnson County to obtain a more definitive account of events. |
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| ▲ | joe_the_user 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yes, the police own the videos they take of you? Like LLM companies own the models they digest from the texts they don't own? | | |
| ▲ | advisedwang 16 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | There's no such thing as legal ownership of data. There's IP rights, contracts and innumerable data regulation laws, but not actual ownership. "Ownership" here just provides a vague cover that sounds like something definite but is not. | |
| ▲ | ranger_danger 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I believe they're implying that Flock still has access to it even if the police technically retain legal ownership. |
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| ▲ | cyanydeez 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | most likely the videos are deleted because it'd be a ginormous expense to keep it around; everything else, yeah, it's not being deleted. | | |
| ▲ | dessimus 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | It might be deleted at the PD, does not mean it wasn't uploaded to Flock DCs for metadata analysis and retained there. | | |
| ▲ | cyanydeez 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | My point is theres no way theybregain the video as anything other than cost of holding terabytes. Of course they save the analysis and only thinkpeople care about the video. The journalists and police speak the same language of uncritical privacy violations. |
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| ▲ | roysting 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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| ▲ | GolfPopper 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Police used Flock's license plate network to stalk women in at least 50 cases https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/police-used-flocks-lice... |
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| ▲ | stackghost 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | Police officers are also statistically more likely to abuse their spouses. Don't let the women you care about get involved with cops. | | |
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| ▲ | Merad 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Flock data can be accessed by cops nationwide who have different (or no) restrictions on data retention or privacy compared to local police. |
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| ▲ | reactordev 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | Flock data can be accessed by anyone. Literally. anyone. at anytime. Go see for yourselves. https://measuredcollective.com/flocks-ai-surveillance-camera... | | |
| ▲ | criddell 17 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I think you are overselling it a bit. 60-some cameras were misconfigured for a relatively short period of time. | |
| ▲ | nomel 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This is false. They cannot be accessed by anyone. > For an unknown period, at least 60 AI-powered surveillance cameras manufactured by Flock Safety were accessible to anyone on the internet. Past tense. | | |
| ▲ | rconti 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | Glad someone trusts these clowns. Where I work, this wouldn't fly. > Flock Safety acknowledged the issue in March, stating some California agencies “had their camera networks inadvertently accessible to out-of-state law enforcement agencies for a period of time,” according to a company statement. The company said it was “impossible to determine a specific cause” for the data breach. |
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| ▲ | gruez 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That's a bit misleading given that it's a subset. 404media cites "at least 60". | | |
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| ▲ | whatisthiseven 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Flock has been known to lie and there isn't any reason to believe they are telling the truth. Why would they? There isn't some duty for them to tell the truth in an article. Trying to parse what that sentence means is useless. It isnt designed to mean anything. Their various mouth pieces have claimed every manner of excuse. Semantic games are for everyone else to play and lose. Corporations always win. |
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| ▲ | mapotofu 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > deletes one local copy. I think you’re being a little too generous here. |
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| ▲ | alwa 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > raise concerns about data being shared with third-party companies or federal agencies. What, you don’t like “sharing”? It would be selfish not to “share”! Truly the move from “send copies to” to “share” is one of the great linguistic dirty tricks the social-media-era firms have pulled. Especially here, where what’s being “shared” is, in a meaningful sense, operational control and enforcement prerogative. And don’t get me started on the minimizing formulation “third-party companies and federal agencies”… |
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| ▲ | ibejoeb 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That whole paragraph is like a paid placement. > Flock Safety cameras are automated license plate readers Like Ring is a door chime. |
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| ▲ | mlfreeman 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Eventually the copy in the officer's browser's cache expires...I figure that's what they mean. |
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| ▲ | culi 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > I assume this means that the police department deletes one local copy? Ben Jordan got ahold of one of them and proved that they even had footage from the f'n factory they were made in! Flock is lying to cities and/or cities are lying to us |
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| ▲ | gowld 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| No, Flock plays a semantic game where data on Flock's servers os "owned" by the client, so Flock is not responsible for the content or management of the data. |
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| ▲ | skybrian 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | Isn't that what you'd expect from a camera service provider? I'd certainly want any videos taken by my own cameras to be owned by me. | | |
| ▲ | eli 17 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm not familiar with North Dakota in particular, but at the federal level and in some states ALL works created by the government are exempt from copyright. The public paid for it, so the public owns it. | |
| ▲ | ButlerianJihad 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput... | | |
| ▲ | Terr_ 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | I don't see how that relates to any of this. If I record a video of a crowd in public, under US law I have copyright to that video. The crowd isn't creating the record, I am. The issue of which group (Flock/police/city) has the real copyright versus an expensive license is interesting to contemplate, but that list doesn't include monkey-agency either. |
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