Flock Cameras, Meta Glasses and the Surveillance Backlash

It is on.

Jason, Safiya, and Victoria, thank you for coming on On.

Thanks so much for having me.

Thanks for having me.

Thanks for having me, too.

So many of us obviously willingly share personal data with technology every day, all the time, from smartphone apps, smartwatches, fitness rings, doorbell cameras.

Yet Flock Safety's automated license plate reader, which has been around a, a while, these cameras, have sparked remarkable public backlash.

Given how embedded data-collecting tech is in our lives, I'd love for you each to talk about why Flock has become the breaking point, and what's the fear or concern at the heart of it? Because everyone's been carrying around, since smartphones, surveillance devices for a long time.

Jason, you go first, then Safiya, and then Victoria.

Yeah, it's a great question, and it's one that I've thought about a lot recently.

I think that Flock has become this avatar for people to push back against surveillance that they know that they're subjected to.

I think that a lot of the things that you mentioned are consumer products where people are getting some sort of trade-off, like they feel like they can't necessarily opt out of having a smartphone or opt out of social media.

Uh, but here they have these, like, very public cameras that are showing up in their neighborhoods.

They're driving around and they're saying, "What is this?" And there's actually a place for them to push back against it, which is their local city council meetings.

I think it's very hard for an individual person or a small group of people to push back against Meta or Google or, you know, uh, these big tech giants, but you can show up at a city council and say- "What are these cameras? I don't want them," and yell at the mayor or yell at the city council.

Right.

A lot like data centers, the way they're articulating AI through data centers, their issues with AI, in a lot of ways, 'cause they're physical, right, standing in their communities.

Safiya?

Yeah, I think that's true.

Jason's got it right.

And also, we see them disproportionately installed around our cities.

So I think, you know, these are, again, very clear signals about who is the target of surveillance in a much more direct and visible way.

Um, the other thing is that, you know, this kind of promise of security and surveillance, which is the way they're sold, but of course, you know, these broken windows theories, these ideas that, you know, if we kind of put visible improvement into our communities, it will reduce crime.

Um, we actually see that these are used to ensnare and entrap people, and that is actually how people relate to them.

In some ways, it's like the over-policing, uh, that Black and brown communities and working class and poor communities have been used to, only now it's permanent, and it's actually difficult to evade.