Flock Off: This Panopticon-As-A-Service Sucks

All of my flock we rock it
Crows we flock in
You out of pocket
uh, uh

Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) are, fundamentally, a tool of authoritarianism; they exist to allow the deploying corporation and the State that buys the data to track and surveil the population en mass.

They really have no other purpose.

Sure, having access to that information can be useful in solving real crimes; and every time that happens the investigating police force will be absolutely certain to point that out.

Because that’s not most of what they’re used for.

Going on the various data leaks and FOIA reports, most of what they’re used for seems to be stalking and harassing women who don’t want to date police officers.

And selling their datasets to anyone who can pony up a few bucks, of course.

The design of the system tells you what it’s for.

A system designed to provide investigative support would have several important attributes:

owned and run by the State, with legal protections against data misuse
securely stored, with defined channels for authorizing and controlling access to its data
short-term storage, with established time limits on data retention

Whereas the systems run by Flock, Axon and other ALPR vendors are much more noxious:

owned and run by corporations, who rent access to their data to the State and anyone else who pays up
cheaply stored, because the increased cost of security would decrease profits
indefinite storage, since bigger data sets make more money and storage is cheap

A system’s function is what it does, and it’s goals are visible in its design.

And it’s not just ALPR systems.

The points above also apply to things like age-attestation systems, which are also more about surveillance than they are about protecting children. It’s only a matter of time before we see an ALPR leak on the scale of last week’s exposure of data from idscan.net.

They also apply to most “smart” products and the vast behavioral data sets they’re designed to generate, as was recently shown with LG TVs.

Look into pretty much any corporate- or State-mandated system these days, and you’ll find that it’s design is really most effective for mass surveillance, rather than for whatever it’s putative purpose is.