How to kick Flock out of your town

Ized, thanks for joining us.

It's great to be here.

Thank you.

All right, well, let's start right from the beginning.

Rudiments, basics, what is flock and what is a flock license plate reader?

Sure.

So Flock Safety is one of the many police surveillance companies selling automated license plate readers.

They're based in Atlanta.

They were founded in 2017.

They are a software as a service company, a SaaS company.

So like the rest of the companies in the ecosystem, Motorola Solutions, Ricotta, Genetech, Axon, Their business model is very much focused on mass data collection, mass data sharing.

And one of the products that they sell, among many, are these stationary ALPRs.

And what these cameras are, are cameras that are positioned on the sides of roads.

And they take photos of every car that passes by 24-7, 365.

That data is then shared.

It's entered into a database and essentially everything within the frame, within the photo is made searchable.

So the idea that these are license plate readers is a misnomer.

They have much more power and capabilities than simply scanning license plates and mapping drivers by the license plate number.

So anything within the photo can be searched.

The color of the car, the make of the car, the model of the car, if it has a dent, a bumper sticker, if it has a bike rack, so on and so forth.

And since, as I said, their business model is based upon mass data collection and mass data sharing, what Flock has enabled is mass data sharing of all of these photos.

So they have a few different sharing mechanisms within their software.

But the one that has sort of gotten the most attention over the last year or so is their national database where they previously, by default, essentially entered all of their customer data into a database that was then made searchable by and accessible to anyone else, any customer, right?

So there's a pretty good chance that if you're listening to this and you have a car and you've driven down, driven down the street, you know, or you've gone on a road trip somewhere along the line that your license plate, your car has been logged and information about, you know, where you're, you know, your, your car, your vehicle and where you're going has been logged into a database like this.

Very likely flock has 6,000, 7,000 customers across the country.