Flock's AI Cameras Are Watching Cars All Over America. They're About To Get A Lot More Powerful.
Flock Safety, the $7.5 billion car surveillance company, has already built a sizable AI-powered camera network, with tens of thousands of smart license plate readers monitoring roads in 49 American states. Soon its cameras are going to capture a lot more.
In the fall this year, cops will be able to turn their Flock license plate readers into something more akin to traditional surveillance cameras. While Flock cameras today take photos of vehicles, flagging any car that's on a hotlist of suspected vehicles to cops or private industry customers like FedEx or mall provider Simon Property, those same customers will soon be able to request either live feeds or 15 second clips from around the time a vehicle passed through a camera's field of vision.
Garrett Langley, Flock CEO, told Forbes that the update should give cops more 'situational awareness.' Police will be able to pull up feeds from Flock cameras when a 911 call comes in, for instance, Langley said. 'We will just open up the five nearest cameras in real time and say, here's what's happening right now,' he said. There will also be the option to upgrade to a camera where the angle can be adjusted, for a wider purview.
'If it helps us get to our North Star of solving every single crime that happens in America, then it's a cost worth bearing.'
For years, civil liberties experts have worried about Flock's expansion. Last week, 404 Media reported that a Texas agency had used it to locate a woman who'd had a self-administered abortion across state lines. Jay Stanley, technology director at the ACLU, fretted that Flock 'is trying to build a nationwide authoritarian surveillance system.'
Langley, in response to those privacy concerns, said that Flock's tech was auditable and transparent. It was down to democratically-elected individuals and groups to decide if Flock was right for them and what they do with the data the cameras collect, he said.
Flock's expansion comes on the heels of Axon Enterprise announcing a rival product to Flock's license plate readers in April. Flock and Axon, a $59 billion market cap publicly traded cop contractor best known for making the Taser, had previously been partners, but in February, the two companies had a very public break up. Axon CEO Rick Smith said at the time that Flock was trying to lock customers into its products by making its software restrictive enough that it didn't work as effectively with other vendors' tools. Langley in response claimed it was Axon that had decided to be less collaborative, as evidenced by its decision to stop working with or recommending Flock.
Langley told Forbes in an interview last week that he was hoping to challenge Axon's 'monopoly' by building a competitor that the market had been lacking. He claimed agencies he spoke with had become 'frustrated with the monopolistic behavior that Axon has exhibited over the years and continues to exhibit, and I think that the beauty of capitalism is that it enables competition when properly enforced.'
In response, Axon spokesperson Alex Engel said that Axon was a collaborative business with over 60 technology partners and integrations, which 'underscores our commitment to customer choice, interoperability, and transparency.'
'Axon's ecosystem is built on the belief that customers should always own and control their data,' Engel added, without mentioning Flock.
Flock has been broadening its product offering for police to include drones, gunshot detection and a new software suite called Nova, which draws in information from police databases to make connections between suspects, properties or any other notable aspect of an investigation.
That latter tool was built on technology Flock Safety quietly acquired in a previously unreported deal with Lucidus Tech last year. Lucidus was cofounded by former senior staff at Peregrine Technologies, a $2.5 billion startup that offers similar tech to Nova. Langley said that cops can now take information they find from Flock license plate readers and feed it into Nova to ask, for instance, if a car owner has a criminal history or any mental health conditions.
For Flock, which raised $275 million earlier this year in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz, expansion also means far higher overheads. The latest update to add surveillance camera functionality could increase costs substantially when it comes to storing the video on its Amazon Web Services servers. 'If it's heavily, heavily used, it will be quite expensive for us,' Langley said. 'But we feel like if it helps us get to our North Star of solving every single crime that happens in America, then it's a cost worth bearing.'
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