AI surveillance company Flock Safety might be having a banner year as it aggressively expands its dragnet across the US, but ordinary people aren’t impressed.
For four hours on Tuesday, residents of Longmont, Colorado — where Flock has at least 23 AI-powered cameras and license plate readers — expressed their outrage at city counselors over the city’s contract with the company. According to local magazine Yellowscene, nearly every seat at the hearing was full, and 90 percent of attendees were there to express their transparency and privacy concerns over Flock.
“Longmont’s websites states the community’s safety cameras do not perform predictive analytics or facial recognition,” software engineer and Longmont resident Andrew Gentry told the council, per the outlet. “That same assurance is absent from the Flock page, leaving me to believe that this privacy standard may have been quietly discarded with Flock’s adoption.”…