Hackers Stole Flock’s Camera Software, Revealing How the Company Tracks Cars and People
404 Media
Hackers Stole Flock’s Camera Software, Revealing How the Company Tracks Cars and People
While people around the U.S. are tearing down Flock cameras, one group of hackers went a step further: extracting the camera's software too.
So to the surprise of no-one, it can and does take and send photos of pedestrians and faces, just like Flock assured us it doesn’t. Sure the camera itself does not run facial recognition, but those images are still being sent back home which means they ARE processing them.
Also the amount of errors and instability they describe is fucking hilarious. Thse cameras are built like shit.
This stood out to me. Call me cynical, but I don’t think this is a mistake. I think they’re calling all of these “misidentified” license plates a “license plate” to simply establish plausible deniability for collecting this data. It would be pretty trivial for their backend system to interpret the images server side and build an identification profile for each vehicle. This way, even if you remove your plate, your vehicle can be identified.
I wonder how quickly they could build a profile on every vehicle in the US simply by having cameras up in every major city? When we defeat flock/axon, what’s stopping the next surveillance company from buying that data and using it?
They already are.
That’s what Nightshift/OS whatever the fuck they changed the name to, the law enforcement portal that makes use of the camera feeds and cross references with/across the various law enforcement databases, empowers.
The publication briefly mentioned it obliquely, but the article is about the camera software itself and they’re being remarkably restrained in their reporting. To avoid legal challenges perhaps.
1000% they are. Since bumper stickers, etc. commonly stay on a vehicle until the elements disintegrate them (vehicle or bumper sticker), and because they’re often uniquely placed, they’re basically unique car tattoos.
That’s likely. In the article you can see the flag being tagged as a plate with a confidence score way below most minimums. That means the detection model itself is pretty sure it’s not looking at a license plate but Flock is still keeping that patch tagged. Maybe there are legitimate real life reasons for accepting such low confidence scores, but I’m skeptical about that.
If they’re seeing the code on the camera end it is very likely that the low confidence detections are not sent. The reason that you’d run local segmentation and detection is to reduce the amount of data being sent back. If they wanted maximum data from these devices they’d simply send the video and archive/process it all on the server end.
Image segmentation/classification models give false positives, it’s unavoidable. It isn’t evidence of anything other than the fallibility of computer vision technology.
I’m not saying that they’re not collecting other information about vehicles. We know that they also collect bluetooth identifiers and tire pressure monitoring sensors and other visual data about the car.
Only that the information in the article only shows that they’re doing segmentation and classification on the camera end. They don’t need “plausible deniability” as the original comment implies, there is nothing illegal about what they’re doing or anything that would leave them open to liability. (Obviously it’s creepy, immoral, and eroding personal freedoms… but I was only speaking of things that the Justice system cares about.)
'hackers', freedom fighters....i see no difference
I believe the term is “hacktivist”.
many thanks, kind internet friend...
Their goals are their hacktivision
This is coming from the guy who said you are a terrorist for “spreading lies” that they are recording everything.
Odd that the people incharge of hunting down and tracking “criminals” would want to add you to that list too.
Also money comes from Israel and they employ people from unit 8200.
Modern heroes. Keep up the good work!
I mean, if you haven’t seen the Benn Jordan videos yet…
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ
www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY
www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1-uiUlHTo
www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3MQLlMbS-Y
Ya know…I always thought that when we started living life in a 1984 world, there would be a pendulum. I figured it would swing the other way after enough people got tired of their shit. I thought there would be riots, and calls for violence against CEOs and the elite.
Had that happened, that’s the dangerous part. Because then, I don’t think Flock would stop this bullshit. I just think they’d do it more quietly. Let the people think their activism won the day, and then in secret, keep building up databases, keep spying on people. Did you know your own wifi router, regardless of which one you own, can map out your house? Did you know it can keep a real time sonar watch on where your body presence is in your own house in real time? Did you know the spy doesn’t even need to be in your country to watch you?
So I thought the real danger was when the people thought they had defeated the fascists. I thought people would feel they had won, and now things can go back to “normal”. With everybody in a false sense of security, everybody goes about their lives without thinking they’re being tracked/followed. Meanwhile they’re still behind the scenes with new projects that the public doesn’t know about, and is all kept quiet. That’s where I thought the push for AI by the billionaires was coming from. They don’t need it to work. They need the public to be dumb enough to think it works. They only need it to be good enough to use a camera, identify people/objects, and send the data back to them without anyone knowing. Meanwhile everyone else thinks AI is just the way you do everything now. That’s their plan. To make people reliant on their AI.
I hadn’t considered the fact that today, most people know ring doorbells are 24/7 monitoring systems that feed back to HQ, where the company freely sells this data to police and other organizations without a warrant. Most people know flock cameras track you through the city, street by street. Most people know ICE exists, kills people, and is running concentration camps. These are things people know…and yet, I see no action. I see no riots. I see no backlash.
I hadn’t considered that there would be no pendulum at all. It’s just all one way, and the people just accepted it. THATS the part I wasn’t counting on. I didn’t for a second consider that there would be no cat and mouse game. I was SURE the people would fight back when everybody realized what’s happening here. They’re not. People see these stories where Target wants you to download their app, so that they can spy on you in their store…which has been going on long before all this tech came out. Cameras in the ceilings have existed since forever…but now with the app, they can identify you by name, by face, and then you take your tracking device into the real world OUTSIDE of their stores. Their app monitors your cell phones buying habits. If you buy something from Walmart from your cell phone, they know. They know who you are, what you buy in real time, and how much you were willing to spend. They also sell that data to anyone who wants to buy it.
In 2014, I told anyone who would listen that the battle for Net Neutrality was important. Nobody would listen.
I forget the name of the bill now, but in 2019 there was a bill that would allow anyone to sell anyone elses data without the individuals consent. I warned anybody who would listen that this is a dangerous bill. No one would listen.
So now, those two things combined have made it so that your ISP, who knows every single service, and website, and app that you use, is now allowed to sell all that info to whomever wants to buy it. And other companies like Netflix can make deals with your ISP to slow down the connection to Hulu or Youtube, or any other video service, while leaving their own service unrestricted. And since Netflix is going to pay for that service, they may as well get a bit of information about you. So now they’re buying the data logs of what you do online. Now they know you buy dog food every 2 weeks. They know the brand. They know the volume. They know the flavor. They know how much you normally pay. So now they can tell the dog food company "Hey, give us money, and we can run commercials for your product, advertised to people who we know already buy your product. Or we could run a competitors ads instead.
Now we’re living in that world. A world that everybody told me “Net Neutrality isn’t that important.” is now seeing how one thing can build upon another. If ONLY Net Neutrality was the only thing broken, no. They couldn’t do all this stuff together. But it’s not the only failure point. It’s just the easiest one to take. Because most people don’t understand it. And in the short term, it changes nothing. So even when changed, people still said “See? Nothing changed!”. I said “Just wait”.
Now we’re here. I feel both validated and frustrated. Validated because I saw ALL this shit coming 10+ years ago. Frustrated because even when we’ve arrived in the fascist times I was trying to warn against, people STILL won’t admit that this isn’t just trump. Trump could die tomorrow. None of the bullshit changes. Trump is not a leader. He is a puppet. Puppets don’t control the situation. They distract, and entertain. That’s it. He doesn’t even know (or care) about all the destruction he’s causing. That doesn’t mean it ends when he leaves. There WILL be a new sack of shit trying to instill fascism into your daily life. There always is. Whether that person is named Reagan, or Bush, or Trump, or some other asshole. There’s always another round of bullshit. We aren’t addressing the core issues of our country which have existed since it’s founding. We’re only addressing the symptoms.
Except, now, we’re not even doing that. Everybody is just shutting up, and fucking off to accept it all.
So yeah, I’m frustrated because as far as I can see, everybody has just accepted that the elite will rule over us. Instead of…you know…breaking out the guillotines.
Well, there have been a few men of action.
Good article. Wish it was in a place everyone could see it.
Long read but… yea.
Oof. Although also:
I was surprised by that for a moment, then realized that I somehow conflated ICE and Flock in my brain, being surprised to see Spanish like that (I suspect ICE would not have that in their software). But of course, my conflation was unfounded.