Flock Safety is secretively turning your car into a snitch with OS Investigate
Forget privacy, Flock Safety is building a digital panopticon that turns simple license plate scanners into an all-seeing AI detective. It’s the ultimate creepy upgrade for local law enforcement that promises to link your entire social circle to your commute.
The company behind those ubiquitous neighborhood cameras is quietly rolling out OS Investigate, a software package that acts as an aggressive personal dossier generator for police. By pulling data from 6,000+ camera networks and merging it with arrest records, 911 logs, and even commercial databases containing social security numbers and family phone contacts, the system does the legwork of a dozen detectives in seconds.
Officers simply select from 69 pre-made prompts or type their own to query the movement patterns of specific vehicles. OS Investigate then filters out commercial traffic like delivery vans to focus entirely on private citizens, cross-referencing their location history with personal connections to build an instant, intrusive profile of anyone in the system's crosshairs.
While some law enforcement veterans call the tool absolute madness, others are cheering for the increased efficiency in their pursuit of data-driven policing. Electronic Frontier Foundation has already sounded the alarm, arguing that private companies should not have the final say on the privacy standards of hundreds of millions of people. As the public experiments with adversarial patterns to trick the cameras, the reality remains that the surveillance business model is currently scaling faster than any legislative body can possibly keep up with.
Source: Wired
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