Source: Ars Technica
Flock Safety's license plate readers, deployed across thousands of US neighborhoods as a "public safety" tool, accumulate months of movement records on every vehicle that passes, creating a de facto surveillance database accessible to local police without traditional warrant requirements. The physical vulnerability of these devices and the unencrypted data they contain expose a gap between consumer assumptions about surveillance (limited, purposeful) and the reality: continuous, indiscriminate tracking infrastructure that treats movement as a permanent record. Demand for surveillance transparency laws is likely to increase, and consumer skepticism toward "smart city" hardware marketed as crime-fighting will likely harden as the monitoring capabilities become clearer.