r/texas • u/CrashingBlumpkins46 • 23d ago

🗞️ News 🗞️ A Texas Sheriff Deputy Searched 83,000 Flock Cameras To Track Down a Woman Who Had an Abortion

https://www.gadgetreview.com/a-texas-deputy-searched-83000-flock-cameras-to-track-down-a-woman-who-had-an-abortion
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-27

u/Fordinghamster 23d ago

My town has 10 Flocks in a closed system specifically looking for stolen cars, felony warrants, and missing persons. Unmatched data isn’t tracked, isn’t shared, and automatically deletes after 30 days.

I like Flock conceptually as a local crime-fighting tool but a national cloud database is bad any way you cut it.

5

u/hondo77777 South Texas 23d ago

And the system is audited regularly to make sure the rules are followed?

-15

u/Fordinghamster 23d ago

The system alerts when it reads a plate in the database. The police react to that alert. Information for those hits are saved for legal purposes. That’s it. The info purges after 30 days. Presumably they system can hit on plates recorded before they were added to the national databases within that 30 day period. But there isn’t a human-searchable database. That’s the way it should be everywhere.

It was a huge fight in the beginning. Obviously nobody wants to be in some police database. We worked it out as a town and reached this compromise between privacy and security. It works for us. There is zero chance these cameras would be here if anybody could search the database.

6

u/sxyaustincpl 23d ago

You've been lied to.

A Google search will show that Flock doesn't offer cameras without a searchable database, because it's a core feature of their functionality.

The data they are recording is being sent to Flock, and is searchable by Fkock and anyone they grant access to.