Well, another company has risen above my threshold for egregious behavior, to the point that I will likely not do business with them any longer. I'm sad to say that that company is Lowe's. I love the way that Lowe's treats it's veterans as well as veterans shopping with them. But something I saw today has completely reversed that respect.
I stopped at Lowe's today after church, and noticed that they had a flock camera at each entrance/exit of their parking lot. I was irritated enough that when I went in and asked to talk to a manager. When I asked him about it, first, he said he didn't know anything about it, then he ended up falling back to "muh store security..." To which I pointed out that geofencing was a search under the 4th Amendment of the US Constitution, and that flock cameras use a very similar process.
Geofencing is when the authorities, investigating a crime, request a list of, for instance, every mobile phone that was within this distance of this location during this time period.
For those few of you who are unfamiliar, flock is a company that has created a network of automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras. However, they are backed by ai, and can also pick out other distinguishing features of your car, such as store them, and make them available. They also have cameras that track human movement and likely facial recognition. Now they have started deploying drones as well. In addition the CEO of flock has stated in interviews that he considers the site deflock.org, which is a map of all of the flock camera locations crowdsourced by the internet, to be "a bunch of terrorists." Which strikes me as a bit hypocritical, as he is running a company that performs mass surveillance on millions of Americans, but calls people who provide locations of cameras as terrorists? Finally, they have found flock's cameras pointing at places like gun store parking lots. What flock seems to be doing is setting up a surveillance network that George Orwell would have been proud of.
There are, at the time of this writing, 120,000 flock cameras. A license plate reading here or there is one thing. But the ability to track a specific vehicle from point A to point B to point C is not only creepy, but also likely an unwarranted search. I'm sure this will be litigated in the courts with a definitive ruling in the future. Especially when almost daily, you hear about law enforcement officers abusing the system, doing things like electro-stalking exes, or their significant others.
So back to Lowe's. They are perfectly within their rights to put flock cameras in the choke points to their parking lot. However, I am perfectly within my rights to not do business with them. So at this point, I will be doing exactly this.
I'm pretty sure Lowe's did not put it there themselves. But besides that, I knew a lady who regularly complained about her brother stealing from hardware stores. He also shoplifted from Best Buy. Neither of these places allowed employees to confront the thief for safety reasons so he got away with lots of stuff. Thousands of dollars worth of equipment.
He was unaware of flock cameras till the day the police placed one near one of those stores and now he sits in the county jail along with a few other like-minded individuals.
Do you still think it was a bad idea to install flock to catch criminals? Or do you still think it's a tool to track average citizens?
In the case of flock, I believe that it is, thanks to the quantity of cameras, and the number of products they market (ALPRs, human tracking/facial recognition cameras, drone-mounted cameras), they are doing the equivalent of panning for gold or mining platinum. They are grabbing licence plate or facial recognition or any number of what the government calls PII (personally identifiable information) from millions of random people, on the possibility of maybe catching a crime by the thousands and looking for that one individual gold nugget to close the investigation. And maybe they throw the other pieces back into the river, and maybe they don't. With the ever-increasing number of cameras, individual vehicles can be tracked. Guilty of a crime or not, it is conceivable that your vehicle can be picked up on enough cameras to be tracked from your home to your destination. What happens if that destination is, say a gun store in a jurisdiction that is anti-gun (or even has an anti-gun DA)? There are already a number of flock cameras pointed at gun stores and ranges. Or what happens if you just happen to be in the same place as a crime occurs? Or if they put cameras monitoring the entrances of churches or synagogues?
To put just a bit more perspective on it, when I was in the military, I wen to Germany. There were a number of assaults on base, and because of certain defining qualities of the attacker, I was called in to be investigated. The guy kept asking me all of these semi-hostile questions. He finally asked me "and where were you on such and such a date?" to which I responded "California." (my previous duty station). He said, "well, I guess it wasn't you." I said, "I guess not." and got up and walked away. But that left an impression on me.
In addition, there is a growing number of cases where individuals in law enforcement are using the flock infrastructure to stalk ex-boyfriend/girlfriends, their current girlfriend/boyfriends, or even their current significant other.
Aside from that, what happens when the political atmosphere changes? They have pre-emplaced cameras pointed at places that are fine now, but may become controversial under a new regime...Like the aforementioned gun stores. Not to become too political, one of the tenets of the DSA is to outlaw guns. So if they have a pre-built database of cars (legally) frequenting these businesses, then they implicitly have a good start on a database of places to go and grab guns.
So in answer to your questions, I think that since they have security in store, they could add cameras in the parking lot to their existing infrastructure rather than using flock to catch criminals. (Unless their internal systems are using flock facial recognition as well, which would be even more disturbing).
To your second question, I don't think they consider catching criminals and tracking average citizens as mutually exclusive exercises. To my mind, it is just a matter of using a larger net... Yes, having been falsely accused of a crime probably affects my perspective, but I also end up wondering what would have happened if I had been stationed in Germany for a while...