It's not just flock. Companies like Lexis nexis are just as bad.

that the Audit Assistance can flag “what may look like an odd search history from a specific user,” helping customers understand how their users are operating the system.

A flag does not mean that it is definitely abuse — it only means it warrants further investigation.”

Helping the customer => entirely dependent on how the violating org handles these.

Even usefulness is entirely dependent on how effective the flags are in the first place. If false positives are too high, even good intended may call not worth it.

It may even be counter-productive if perpetrators cheer each other on when getting flags but no consequences.

Without transparency on 1. flag conditions 2. number of flags per org 3. results of org response/flag-flagging… who wants to trust this?

I suppose you could achieve this with a constantly illuminated red light.

That's because nobody can explain exactly how the 🌈 imagination ✨ works.

It’s just a list of their customers.

It identifies it so that it can be covered up.

Hope that clears it up.

Flock is bad but they aren't the only ones. All the camera providers work with the police and some don't even disclose it. I remember watching a John Oliver bit where they got their hands on the logs of the cameras the police accessed and for how long. One of them was in a local gym during the yoga class.

https://youtu.be/lnBPhelCdWE the whole episode is really worth watching.

"You won't even need to delete the video. We'll identify it and label that camera as 'malfunctioning' during that period for you."

• Flock's top salesman

I don’t know if this incident involved Flock or a competing product, but John Oliver recently described an incident on his show that demonstrates one of the major issues with this technology.

Apparently an ALPR reported a “hit” on the license plate of an SUV in a shopping center parking lot. The vehicle was reported stolen. So a half dozen or so police performed a felony arrest of the woman in the car along with a number of family members, including small children.

The problem was that while the letters & numbers on the license plate matched, the actual stolen vehicle was a motorcycle from a completely different state. So if any of those half-dozen cops had bothered to confirm even one additional detail about the stolen vehicle then this wouldn’t have happened.

How will Flock improve their technology so that police actually do more than the bare minimum when being told of an ALPR “hit”?

As I understand it, any and all "audits" and "guardrails" are all entirely internal to Flock and law enforcement themselves, and therefore, absolutely useless.

Like social media itself, it's going to be up to the judiciary and civil lawsuits to fix this shit. (Though the widespread vigilantism is heartening.) I don't think there will be any meaningful regulation until some cop somewhere deletes his entire family after using Flock to stalk and hunt them down. (And let's be honest, here in the US even that might not be enough.)

Dialog box: Have you committed an abuse? Yes / No

Flock Surveillance State says its new tool will help identify police abuse, but hasn’t explained how it works because it's bullshit

Let me guess, they will police themselves..

Hint: chat gippity.

I might give a little support if the cameras would help prevent police brutality, but pretty sure the cameras we need would suddenly malfunction at the worst times.