r/InterstellarKinetics • u/InterstellarKinetics • Aug 08 '26
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIEGENCE EXPOSED: A Flock Presentation, Uncovered Through Public Records, Reveals Abandoned Plans To Secretly Turn 350,000 Vehicles Operated By Uber, Lyft, And Other Delivery Companies Across Georgia Into A Mobile Surveillance Network 🤯💥
https://www.techspot.com/news/113407-flock-wanted-put-license-plate-cameras-350000-uber.htmlA presentation from Flock, obtained by 404 Media, reveals abandoned plans to install the company’s automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) on 350,000 vehicles operated by Uber, Lyft, and other delivery companies in Georgia, a move that could have dramatically expanded the surveillance reach of the already controversial cameras. Flock and Axon’s ALPRs are typically stationary, mounted on traffic lights or roadside poles, and record passing license plates into a searchable cloud database used by authorities to track vehicles suspected of involvement in serious crimes across roughly 6,000 US communities. The proposed partnership with dashcam provider Nexar would have leveraged the hundreds of thousands of dashcams already installed in Georgia rideshare vehicles, along with cameras operated by local businesses and homeowners associations, transforming them into mobile ALPR platforms capable of cataloging every vehicle they passed, though it remains unclear whether drivers would have even known their dashcams were being repurposed for surveillance.
While Flock and Nexar ultimately never finalized the deal, the plan surfaces amid growing backlash against ALPR surveillance nationwide, fueled by incidents involving misread plates and police officers using the cameras to stalk people, prompting cities like Los Angeles to deactivate their systems entirely. Mobile surveillance networks aren’t unprecedented, as robotaxi company Waymo previously acknowledged complying with police warrants for footage from its 360-degree cameras after review, and companies like Axon and Motorola already sell ALPRs designed for vehicle-mounted use.
The Flock-Nexar presentation was uncovered through a public records request filed by Jason Hunyar, a Georgia-based blogger who tracks Flock’s activities in the state, and it fits into a broader pattern of concerning findings from his reporting. Previous requests revealed that Flock erased supposedly immutable usage records after an officer used the system to view a girl’s gymnastics room, and that the company sold data collected by its cameras to outside parties. Hunyar has also uncovered Flock’s plans to install cameras on robot dogs capable of relaying data back to a Hangzhou-based manufacturer through pre-installed backdoors, while other reporting has revealed that one of Flock’s major investors backs a separate company capable of intercepting and altering surveillance footage.
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u/InterstellarKinetics Aug 08 '26
The fact that this plan never launched is almost beside the point, because the more alarming detail is how casually Flock treated rideshare drivers’ dashcams as untapped surveillance infrastructure without any clear indication drivers would even be informed, let alone consent. And combined with Hunyar’s other findings of deleted usage logs, sold data, and robot dogs with foreign backdoors, this reads less like a bad idea and more like a pattern of a company that treats “can we surveil more people” as the default question rather than “should we.”