- This article at the Electronic Frontier Foundation about a vexatious "cease and desist" demand from Flock Safety; to
- DeFlock.me, the target of the demand; to
- A map showing no fewer than 20 Flock license plate readers clustered along Archer Road (a main drag in Gainesville, Florida) between Southwest 34th Street and Interstate 75, and around Clark Butler Plaza (Gainesville's biggest shopping complex, between those two end points).
From the EFF piece:
The technology not only tracks vehicles by their license plates, but also creates “fingerprints” of each vehicle, including the make, model, color and other distinguishing features. This is a mass surveillance technology that collects information on everyone, regardless of whether they are connected to a crime.
Every camera I clicked on listed the "operator" as "unspecified," but since they're all within city limits and at least some are in areas that don't correspond to federal/state/county roadways, the obvious guess is the Gainesville Police Department.
There are countermeasures available, of varying legality ... and varying visibility to enforcers.
But it would be better if the devices started getting manually disabled in ways that require expensive replacement. Just sayin'.
