Flock wanted to tap dashcams in rideshare vehicles to add to surveillance data
Flock wanted to tap dashcams in rideshare vechicles to add to surveillance data
Surveillance company Flock drew up plans to partner with dashcam maker Nexar to collect license plate data from Uber and Lyft drivers, according to a presentation obtained by 404 Media. The proposal, presented to Georgia's Attorney General, would have added 350,000 devices to Flock's network, but the partnership was never executed. It's unclear if drivers or the rideshare companies were aware of the data collection.
Hundreds of Commercial Business and HOA [home owners associations] in GA [Georgia] are part of the network,” the presentation, written by Flock to present to the Georgia Office of the Attorney General last August, reads. “Plus Nexar partnership which includes 350k Uber/Lyft and other delivery service devices.
- driverdan
This is blogspam of https://www.404media.co/flock-wants-to-partner-with-consumer...
- tptacek
Part of the backstory here I think is that ALPR cameras are a commodity technology. They're not defensible by themselves medium term; the market will go to whoever ships the cheapest most reliable cameras with the best pre-sales team, which is a tough space to compete in. For Flock to defend a growth-stage startup valuation, it needs to come up with value-adds.
For a while it looked like that was going to take the form of single-pane-of-glass fusion products (think: Grafana for public safety orgs), but post-AI that seems pretty hard to defend too; Axon doesn't need deep roots in SFBA tech culture to compete on that anymore.
So I guess expect a lot of wacky ideas.
- nullorempty
Hm, two questions:
- Who is paying for surveillance?
- To whose benefit is it used?
- anymouse123456
Pretty sure this is the same person who made "your flowing data" many years ago. Assuming it is, that was a really cool project!
You could follow their twitter account and DM semi-structured messages at it. He would generate personalized charts and tables from the message you sent.
Looks like it's the same account, but that service seems down at the moment.
Really great demonstration that created value from semi-structured data streams.
- 0xbadcafebee
The CEO of Flock said his mission is to "completely eliminate and eradicate crime in America". I think I saw that movie, it was called Minority Report.