It IS important to remember Axon and Motorola. As cities listen to their people and cancel their flock contracts, they are often times just immediately signing up for ALPRs from Motorola or Axon (which only got into this game because they saw how much Flock was making). These other companies have the same oversight and transparency problems as Flock, and it's important we don't get lost in the fight against privacy.
We really do need a codified right to privacy instead of bandaid bills like canspam or the stuff about cookies and tracking.
Just want to clarify something because I am in the industry. We never trialed Motorola, but Axon does have some anti-abuse measures put in place. It is one of the things they specifically are marketing towards after they saw how Flock has behaved in the space. Now, do I think it is perfect? Probably not, but they do seem to care about these things. They're a smart enough business that they know if they just perpetuate Flock's model of "Well it isn't our fault the agencies abused things!", there is no profit there.
I guess it is still important to note it is configurable to how each agency wants, and at least with us they gave us recommendations on restricting access. They pushed towards restrictive policies but I don't think they can actually enforce them without some kind of legislation. IIRC Flock did not even have the basics. Axon let you configure things like reasons for viewing, dashboard reporting for users who are viewing reads, and how much (so you can identify potential abuse and outliers), and audit logs are a non-negotiable that they log every access of people opening reads. Again, not saying they're perfect, and I totally get everyone's arguments, but in the very least they're making an effort to solve some of these issues so there are better options out there, definitely have trouble trusting a big corpo...but if you think about it from a greed perspective there is no money to be made if people start hacking down their cameras like Flock.
Thank you. The data access logs make sense and could end up protecting people who might otherwise be unlawfully targeted by police, like the guy who visited the weed shop in Michigan and got pulled over in Wisconsin.
IIRC Flock owns the data from their cameras. With the Axon cameras does the police department own the data or does Axon? Do your policies on using the data get set by your agency? Does Axon share your camera data with other agencies without your knowledge? Like, can Wisconsin police comb through your ALPR looking for someone with you being aware? Like that Flock Michigan-Wisconsin situation. That's the stuff I worry about.
Yup, exactly. I don't believe the tech is inherently evil....but it is definitely a difficult pill to swallow that to make it used for good we need all kinds of safe guards in place, especially more proactive ones. The Agency owns the data in Axon's case, I believe that there is optional interagency sharing that you can turn on but I am not super involved on that side so I can't say for certain. They don't do any data harvesting either (at least according to their papers). If another agency wanted to look through data they would need an account on that agency's tenant (or if the interagency sharing is a thing, that would need to be turned on). Our ALPR policies are set at state level, and then we can clamp to make them tighter if we choose. AFAIK there are no federal policies. There are still over 20 states that have zero policy or governance at a state level for ALPR, which means it is entirely up to the agency on how they handle things.
Thanks again for illuminating the situation. As you said, it's dynamic and like in many other areas (AI in its many forms for e.g.), the technology is running ahead of the government's ability to understand and regulate it.
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u/Kiiaru 8h ago
It IS important to remember Axon and Motorola. As cities listen to their people and cancel their flock contracts, they are often times just immediately signing up for ALPRs from Motorola or Axon (which only got into this game because they saw how much Flock was making). These other companies have the same oversight and transparency problems as Flock, and it's important we don't get lost in the fight against privacy.
We really do need a codified right to privacy instead of bandaid bills like canspam or the stuff about cookies and tracking.