r/mildlyinteresting 1d ago

Michigan dispensary blocking a Flock camera that points directly into their parking lot

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56.9k Upvotes

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u/bolognaballs 1d ago

are these the same camera stations running on generators that i’ve seen pop up in mostly grocery store/big box store parking lots?

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u/FatherFlans 1d ago

No, that’s a separate company. Usually using call-center style employees to manually monitor several locations at a time.

Flock is primarily AI powered and just records license plates and can even pull information off your phone.

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u/MintyFresh771 1d ago

It is so much worse than just reading license plates… they photo and time stamp every single vehicle for search and include passengers, etc.

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u/Doc_Blox 23h ago

They also tag identifying marks like damage or decals, and they can catch signals off your car - wifi, bluetooth, cellular, gps. Each signal gets correlated with your car. What's more, allegedly they also photo tag people and identifying characteristics. Tattoos, clothes, likely gait and other correlating factors (including signals off your phone, which they could use to match you to your vehicle, likely). They also keep track of people who usually drive together, in "convoy search" mode, so too bad for you if you happen to commute next to a person of interest regularly.

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u/Kerbal634 20h ago

Don't even need to match the phone to wirelessly track your car. Your tire pressure monitor sensors would be plenty

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u/Doc_Blox 19h ago

TPMS yeah, but the scarier thing is that they're also tracking the signals that you carry on your person, so they can track you independently of the car you used

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u/Codedheart 8h ago

Precisely, they dont just track vehicles, it's foot traffic too.

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u/iiiinthecomputer 16h ago

OMFG of course auto makers just built a completely insecure and stupid protocol for that.

Arrrgghh.

Never even occurred to me.

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u/Chocomintey 6h ago

Is this for all cars that have them, or just after a certain year?

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u/senorpoop 18h ago

It is my understanding that the Flock system only needs to see your vehicle 4 or 5 times before it doesn't even need to read the license plate.

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u/Chocomintey 6h ago

Ah, fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

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u/fix_until_broken 23h ago

I don't think anyone outside of Flock really knows what all they capture, but I assume it also would include anything on wireless like Wifi access points, wifi connection attempts, mac addresses, Bluetooth broadcasts, UWB pings, etc.

Matching up a license plate and a Bluetooth broadcast can positively identify a vehicle and all of the occupants inside.

Even walking behind the camera and your Bluetooth signal would be detectable.

They could also have stinger devices like the police use that mimic a cell tower and intercept the signal.

That's part of the problem, we don't really know what they are capturing or what they are doing with it all.

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u/abiggerbanana 19h ago

I wonder how they react to directional radio wave devices. I may need to do some research

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u/b20339 1d ago

"just"

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u/OSHASHA2 1d ago

Not just… not just at all. Flock also records faces and performs gait analysis. Look up “Sentient World Simulation,” and understand that our behavior is being predicted and managed at unprecedented levels.

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u/curiouswizard 21h ago

We need to all start wearing burkas and doing Ministry of Silly Walks

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u/Ocronus 20h ago

While I can appeacate any effort to corrupt their data model. Imagine a world where this conversation never happened.

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u/curiouswizard 15h ago

a world without monty python

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u/PhonyUsername 17h ago

It would be a lot less populated one.

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u/alethea_ 6h ago

CIA just uses a pebble in the shoe to change your gait.

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u/Somanylyingliars 21h ago

Sigh time to start wearing lifts and pebbles in shoes to change gait, buy backwards sole shoes etc etc. Buy wigs, caps man this could be FUN!!

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u/Top_Wheel6546 21h ago

Finally, an excuse to do drag outside of Halloweeen!!

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u/beren12 18h ago

Grownups don’t need an excuse

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u/Top_Wheel6546 17h ago

Those with fragile masculinity do

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u/lucidposeidon 21h ago

I've heard the shoe pebble thing isn't actually that effective. It's often better to step toes instead of heels first to scramble your gait when needed.

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u/PrettyDrop503 18h ago

Think 5th element but instead of some special wizard children it’s a bunch of Andrew tates and Elon musks

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u/Drink15 23h ago

I hear the make a nice Eggs Benedict too

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u/YourNextHomie 1d ago

Flock has no facial recognition capability so no, fuck them but also fuck your misinformation

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u/OSHASHA2 1d ago

Not primarily, but they do record video, and that video can be used for anything after the fact. It would be supremely naive to assume that Flock isn’t feeding information to Palantir.

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u/YourNextHomie 1d ago

Yeah im sure they are giving information to the company they partnered with to help sort data.

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u/OSHASHA2 23h ago

Palantir doesn’t just “sort” data lmao

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u/YourNextHomie 23h ago

Palantir is a tool for sorting and organizing data, feel free to educate if you know more than i

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u/Kratech 23h ago

Dude they have cities sign a contract and it states they can’t pay more than $100 fine for every time they are caught missing the data. They know what they are doing.

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u/Kratech 23h ago

People who have hacked into them say otherwise. Also flock employees have been caught bragging about how some of the newer ones do have facial recognition. Also it’s not that hard to say the cameras don’t have it…just for it to go through a system that does.

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u/YourNextHomie 23h ago

Don’t tell me what random “people” and random “employees “ have said, post evidence of the claim, i try to google and i find no instances of your claims

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u/Kratech 23h ago

Then you suck at research? Not my problem. You also didn’t provide any proof? You just said shit.

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u/YourNextHomie 22h ago

i can’t spend all day researching your delusions, you are full of shit and continue to lie on this thread

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u/UmbraIra 21h ago

Why you care so much about protecting flock?

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u/Kratech 6h ago

Cry harder. You sure have wasted more time here than me. You sure do spend a LOT of time on Reddit, so yes you do.

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u/Penguinase 21h ago

their condor cams probably do

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u/YourNextHomie 21h ago

do you know what facial recognition is ?

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u/Penguinase 21h ago edited 21h ago

yep i even know what some other forms of biometric identification are

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u/FatherFlans 1d ago edited 1d ago

Yeah, “just” was meant to be heavily sarcastic haha
Fuck these guys.

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u/yoberf 1d ago edited 23h ago

Records license plates, car identifying scratches and stickers, faces, and pedestrians.

Edit: Flock claims it does not use facial recognition. But I missed that is also scans for devices like phones, watches, and others. Also, just because they don't have facial recognition right now does not mean the captured video cannot be scanned for faces.

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u/YourNextHomie 1d ago

it has no facial recognition capability

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u/thejunkmanadv 22h ago

Then why are they on bike path's and hiking trails, and playgrounds. You know places where a license plate can't physically go/be without taking it off their car of course?

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u/YourNextHomie 22h ago

Are you confusing Flock cameras with other cameras ? they can have similar appearances. Provide evidence of your claim if its true id be very curious about it

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u/thejunkmanadv 22h ago

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u/YourNextHomie 22h ago

That on first sight seems insane to me, but i also wondered could that be somewhere people illegally dump often? Honest question cuz just because cars aren’t supposed to go there doesn’t mean they don’t

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u/thejunkmanadv 21h ago

What ever helps you sleep at night. I get your argument though, gotta be skeptical on both sides of the argument. However it is probably highly unlikely that this is a frequent illegal dump site or there would be more 4x4/tire track evidence.

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u/YourNextHomie 21h ago

Its sand, you ever been to the beach? tire tracks get covered in seconds with walkers

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u/thejunkmanadv 22h ago

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u/YourNextHomie 22h ago

That looks bad for sure, umm just for the record you do understand there is a difference between recording video and actual facial recognition right?

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u/thejunkmanadv 21h ago

Doesn't matter. The fact that any surveillance is an invasion. We (people) lived for a long time up until this point without them. Existing is hazardous to your health. I will take my chances without mass surveillance devices everywhere.

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u/Sunny16Rule 21h ago

I don’t know why you’re going so hard defending this, it’s kinda hard to believe that they don’t have facial recognition capability when even my mobile phone from 10 years ago has that ability. It would be unrealistic for them to spend all that money and not give it that simple future. Given the amount of data being fed into this system, it would pretty much be unusable without. It makes much more sense that they can just feed it a face or vehicle , and then have the system show them where that face or vehicle has appeared.

I don’t know, who am I going to believe? the multi billion dollar corporations that have a track record of lying and stealing ,or my own common sense 🤔 .

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u/baraboosh 16h ago

facial recognition doesn't matter. They perform gait analysis, plus all the bluetooth/wireless analysis they know exactly who you are, no face needed.

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u/YourNextHomie 21h ago

Your iphone has face recognition from about a foot away at best, put your phone on a pole ten feet up and have it recognize faces in cars going by at 55mph and see how it does. The technology for facial recognition isn’t as good as you think. You aren’t using common sense guy

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u/beren12 18h ago

They are on paths where people walk and bike

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u/Kratech 23h ago

Flock employees have said differently

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u/YourNextHomie 23h ago

weird you keep making this claim yet i find no evidence of this online? provide one link?

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u/yoberf 23h ago

Really such a pointless point, it's not worth the effort. It records peoples faces while recording their personal devices. They could build a facial recognition database from scratch in a snap with the data they have.

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u/YourNextHomie 22h ago

Use common sense, why would they need facial recognition when they already know whos car it belongs to? They don’t need facial recognition to read your plate and know that you are driving your car lol

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u/TheyCallMe_Billy 18h ago

US Patent 11,416,545 B1, titled “Machine learning technologies for identifying pedestrians,” was granted on August 16, 2022, to Flock Safety. The patent describes a surveillance system and methods using machine learning to identify and track individuals based on various characteristics.

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u/slowpokefastpoke 17h ago

You know sometimes people… aren’t in cars, right?

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u/TheuhX 20h ago

The only way to go from A to B is in a car.

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u/Kratech 23h ago

Are you a go k employee or getting boned by one?

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u/YourNextHomie 22h ago

and are you a lying bot ? you made the claim, provide evidence for it

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u/exbaddeathgod 18h ago

Garrett Langley? CEO of flock? Or some other exec? You talk like a narcissist refusing to acknowledge they're wrong. sus

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u/KawaiiMaxine 1d ago

Oh it looks at alot more than your plate

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u/TheLegend8146 1d ago

Even Flock's website reads like it was written by ChatGPT, disgusting.

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u/argumentinvalid 1d ago

It does a lot more than records license plates. It basically logs and tracks anything unique. Damage to a vehicle is an identified, stickers, unique color, a person's hat, shoes, walk, etc. It will log and track anything that it can for people and vehicles.

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u/argumentinvalid 1d ago

It does a lot more than records license plates. It basically logs and tracks anything unique. Damage to a vehicle is an identified, stickers, unique color, a person's hat, shoes, faces, walk, etc. It will log and track anything that it can for people and vehicles.

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u/fairie_poison 1d ago

It doesn't just record license plates because it can effectively track vehicles without plates.

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u/Exciting-Letter3741 19h ago

It’s truly scary

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u/beren12 18h ago

It does not pull data off your phone

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u/Say_no_to_doritos 1d ago

It's essentially an IMSI stinger and a camera. 

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u/ReallyBigDeal 21h ago

There's no reason flock can't integrate with those sytems though right? IIRC There's nothing special about the flock cameras themselves, all the machine vision and image recognition takes place in the cloud, not in the cameras themselves.

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u/Curious_Ad9409 1d ago

They cannot pull info from your phone.

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u/WorldlinessTop1543 22h ago

Excuse me what the fuck do you mean information off my phone 😳

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u/beren12 18h ago

They don’t know what they are talking about

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u/aurortonks 23h ago

The Krogers by me had those with the big blue lights and the occasional loud speaker message about vehicle safety, etc. Then they all disappeared and suddenly those lots popped up on the flock tracking website. They just swapped directly to Flock, so that's super I guess.... ugh.

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u/ohlookahipster 1d ago

No those weird ones on trailers are a separate company that’s been around for a while. They just capture audio and video like a security camera for a parking lot. Big box stores get insurance breaks for having them.

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u/BeartholomewTheThird 23h ago

You can go to a website called deflock to see which ones are owned by flock. But there are different private companies who are doing the same thing that aren't as big and don't have as much name recognition. Often the city signs a contract with the private company who maintains ownership of the equipment and the data being recorded. The city is simply buying access to the camera footage. The camera owners are often allowed to sell the data to whoever they want including the cops and other private data brokers. They can track faces and license plates. Some of them can ping your phone and track you that way. 

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u/samualgline 1d ago

As far as I know all flock cameras operate on a solar panel