You may have heard of Flock. It’s a company that makes cameras that read license plates. Most states have installed them (there are more than 120,000 across the U.S.); 7,000+ law enforcement agencies use them. The Atlanta-based startup, founded by alumni from the Georgia Institute of Technology, has a valuation of more than $8 billion.
But Flock’s success probably isn’t why you’ve heard of them. The company has faced a backlash all summer from privacy advocates, who say it’s helping to create a surveillance state. Flock is now a byword for surveillance. Volunteers are helping to map the cameras, lobbying cities to remove them. Some activists are even creating videos showing how to (illegally) take the pole/camera/solar panel down by force.
Such has been the outcry that the Senate has gotten involved. Last Wednesday, a Senate Judiciary subcommittee held the first congressional hearing on AI-powered camera makers, chaired by Josh Hawley. Four CEOs from different camera companies were invited, and all declined. Flock’s CEO maintains the cameras are designed to track vehicles not humans. But humans aren’t seeing it that way. They have complained about false positives and more than one episode where people have been arrested based on faulty Flock-derived information.
It’s perhaps the biggest privacy-themed uprising in living memory; outrage with real IRL consequences. Residents have been packing council meetings, dressing up as Darth Vader. Republicans and Democrats have united on this, like little else.
Here’s the thing: if people are so concerned about a few traffic cameras, why aren’t they more concerned by other - and actually more serious - infractions on their basic rights?
Flock is actually less bad from a privacy perspective than what we see on the internet every day. Flock holds a photo of the back of your Jeep, with a stamp of the location and the time. That’s it. Now consider what your phone knows about you. What Claude and ChatGPT know about you. What Google and Meta know about you. Flock might know your license plate and where you were last Friday. But the internet knows so much more.
And yet, there are few Flock-type protests about internet-type things. We just accept the online world is surveilled, even if we don’t like it.
Kashmir Hill, a superb reporter at the New York Times, offered one explanation on The Daily podcast. She said much of our privacy loss is invisible, but a camera is not invisible. It’s there staring at you at the traffic light. Outrage requires a physical object and most of the time online privacy advocates have lacked poles to gather around and proselytize about.
Naturally, those of us in the blockchain industry imagine that Web3 will be better. After all, Bitcoin was founded by privacy advocates. But the opposite may in fact be true. The transparency of public chains is great for self-policing: because everyone can see everyone else’s businesses, the community maintains order, as on Bitcoin. But traditional blockchains are terrible for real privacy: they record everything permanently for the world to see.
Flock's defenders at least point to a 30-day default and a sign-in page where officers promise not to run certain queries. A ledger keeps everything forever by design, and it offers no promises at all. Analytics firms cluster addresses, link them to identities at exchanges, and sell the resulting maps to the same agencies that buy Flock. Senators complained that private companies are handing law enforcement dragnets. But on-chain surveillance is far worse and much of the raw material is available for free.
Flock campaigners want to clamp down on camera operators with shorter retention periods and restrictions on sharing across agencies. Which may be good ideas. But these sorts of rules don’t really help us on the late-stage internet. There, we’ll need cryptographic systems that encrypt data so there’s never anything to leak, sell or share in the first place.
We know that Americans care about privacy. Flock proved it. The bigger question is whether privacy advocates can get people to care when the infrastructure isn’t visible.
Thanks for reading this edition of Privacy Dispatch. Please subscribe to receive this newsletter every Tuesday.
Till next time.