ZDNET – What they track and how to check your city: “Flock Falcon cameras don’t detect speed. Instead, the cameras take roughly six to 12 still images each time a vehicle passes. Flock then uses automated license plate recognition software and machine learning to analyze those images. The cameras can capture a vehicle’s plate, make, model, color, body type, direction of travel, damage, aftermarket wheels, bumper stickers, and other details. “The software analyzes images of vehicles and extracts characteristics such as license plates . . . and other distinguishing features,” Trevor Horwitz, co-founder and chief information security officer of the cybersecurity firm TrustNet, told ZDNET in an interview. “Those become searchable, allowing investigators to look for a vehicle even if they don’t have a complete license plate number.” Those records aren’t stored inside the roadside cameras. According to Flock’s site, all images and related data are sent over a cellular network to its cloud system, where authorized users can search them through the Flock Safety dashboard. Police can also receive alerts when a camera detects a plate tied to a stolen vehicle, a missing person, an arrest warrant, or another database entry. So one Flock camera might help police identify a vehicle connected to a crime, but when many Flock cameras across different towns and states feed records into the same searchable network, they can be used to trace the movements of just about anyone.

A single plate hit reveals nothing more than what an ordinary person could see unaided, that a car is at a particular place at a particular time,” Catherine Crump, a clinical professor of technology law and director of the Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley, told ZDNET in an interview. “A network is different, particularly when it involves lots of cameras, because over time it will become a comprehensive record of someone’s movements…”