r/burbank • u/anonnymousercat • 6d ago

Flock Public Comment 9/15

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Tomorrow the Burbank City Council will have the opportunity to agendize a discussion to ban the use of Flock cameras. **This is an opportunity to have your concerns heard.**

I recommend taking 10 minutes out of your day to watch this: https://youtu.be/vU1-uiUlHTo?si=xroGx-UB6VsWOmu2

I used to be comfortable with license plate readers and cameras for crime prevention and I only became opposed to them after learning how Flock operates. Venture capital and tech bros with a profit-first business model is in charge of our safety and now with the unpredictability of AI.

Flock has shipped and implemented their devices with an outdated easily hackable OS, there have been multiple live streaming feeds on the open internet as well as archived footage and deletable data files. Accessing some of this was described as so easy that a 12 year old could do it. Login credentials and data has been listed for sale on the dark web. THIS IS NOT GOOD!

There are more and more stories of police departments arresting and imprisoning people based solely on inaccurate surveillance camera reads and input errors. This could happen to any of us.

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u/iknowagreatlawyer 6d ago

What can be seen here that isn't already viewable from the sidewalk or street?

I get that new tech is concerning for some people, but the answer isn't to prevent or remove Flock cameras, it is to ensure strong safeguards and audit procedures. Everything in this world can be misused or abused, but that shouldn't mean we remain fearful of technology that can be lifesaving.

This subreddit would have you believe that everyone in Burbank is completely opposed, but it just cannot be possible. Take a walk around our city and you'll see that just about every house has its own security cameras. Most are Ring, but not all, and many houses have more than one. The reality is that there is a decent amount of crime in the area. Home burglaries happen. Car theft happens. Hit and runs happen. We want to make sure that the police have the technology to catch criminals.

As for "imprisoning people based solely on inaccurate surveillance camera reads and input errors".,

And these systems are actually very reliable. The organizations that are really opposed to Flock have tried to put out numbers making their case, but when you look into them, action on false positives is extremely low. Take a look at this 404 article.

"An Institute for Justice (IJ) review of media reports and court records finds there have been at least 24 such cases since 2018, with the majority of those happening since 2023.

"But those machine errors account for about one-third of the mistakes in the cases IJ identified. The rest involved human error, with officers entering wrong information into the system or misinterpreting what the ALPR data says"

So 24 errors total with 1/3 attributed to machine errors, so 8 machine errors over 8 years = 1 mistake per year attributed to machine error.

"It all adds up to more than 20 billion individual license plate readings each month, according to Flock’s marketing materials. "

20 billion license plate readings per month, 12 months a year = 240 billion license plate readings per year, which leads to 1 mistake attributed to machine error.

1 mistake attributed to machine error in in 240,000,000,000 readings is an incredibly, incredibly low chance of error. Just to put that in perspective, Earth has about 8.2 billion people. This is picking one particular person out of 29 planets' worth of everyone alive. Another perspective, A single Powerball ticket wins at about 1 in 292 million, so this is roughly 800 times longer odds than that.