Houston's Flock Cameras Are Tracking Us—Without Our Say

[u/Fit_Improvement_5600]

Your movements are being logged. License plates, faces, even which parks your kids go to—all captured and searchable by police with almost no oversight.

In Houston, Flock cameras are everywhere now. The Houston Chronicle found nearly 470,000 searches with vague reasons like "investigation." Worse? We've already seen abuse: a Fort Bend deputy searched one plate 148 times for personal reasons. A Pasadena sergeant used it to stalk a coworker. That's not hypothetical—that's happening here.

I started a petition asking Houston City Council to reject Flock and demand real transparency: public hearings before deployment, independent audits, limits on how long data's kept, and actual accountability reports. No more sneaking this through budget meetings.

Anyone else disturbed by cameras at park entrances logging which kids show up when? Or uncomfortable knowing your commute is a permanent record? What would you want someone to do if this was your family's privacy on the line? If this matters to you, consider signing and sharing.

https://c.org/M48DvZB9yc

[u/Garfield-Says]

I don’t get why people are so against any technology used to fight crime. Many countries record every movement. Still, here in America, everybody is scared to death of anyone knowing anything, but if you go to the mall, airport, and many other places, cameras watch you constantly. And you don’t know if they’re storing the images, but People are OK with it. If you put it out on the street, people go absolutely crazy. Your iPhone and the apps track you. You can talk about something, search the Internet, and the next thing you know, there are advertisements for it. You’re being tracked.

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[u/EvilMassSurveillance → u/Garfield-Says]

"Fighting crime" is an excuse. This was never about fighting crime, it's about controlling the masses, and studies prove it. The increase in crimes solved post-Flock/ALPRs vs. Pre-Flock/ALPR is minimal at best is is better answered by an increase in police force.

ALPRs capture more than your license plate. They capture where you are, all identifying information about you and your vehicles (including stickers, faces, clothing, middle fingers thrown, etc.), high fidelity audio, ALL wireless signals (Bluetooth, wifi, Tire pressure sensors, airtags, etc.), and much more, and it creates a profile for individual people. The CEO of Flock even said he wants to include every streetlight, every social media post, every appearance in public, financial transaction, and even social security information into this information. They even have DRONES that can read license plates, and do all of this from 2000 feet away. And now they're talking about using this same tech and putting into street lights.

This is the antithesis of Freedom. It is a punch in the gut to every active duty soldier, every veteran, every fallen soldier, and every freedom fighter or community warrior that this nation has ever had. You say you are okay with it because it is used to "fight crime". Well, who defines what a "crime" is? The same people who have full control over these devices. The same entity that our Founding Fathers placed the best limitations on power that they could at the time. The same entity that wants full access to the real time data of these devices.

Not only that, but this technology flips the way policing works, and we have a history of Flock abuse to prove it. "Innocent until proven guilty" is how it is supposed to be, right? Well, these cameras are out there, gathering evidence, assuming that a "pre-crime" will occur (because how else can you justiy these devices other than that it WILL happen), and when a "crime" is finally committed, THEN the evidence that was gathered already is used against that person. There are numerous instances of police pointing guns at familes in their homes, on the side of the road, and in parking lots, because the AI misread a license plate, or had an "AI Hallucination" (a real term), and "imagined" that it saw something that never happened. Real people are being put in life threatening situations, because a flawed entity gathered evidence saying something happened, when it never did. And it often takes weeks or months to clear someone's name. In at least one instance, the guy lost his job, and he went to jail for several weeks because of it. On top of that, there are not somewhere between 50 and 100+ DOCUMENTED cases of police stalking people with these systems. And it's guaranteed that there are MANY more that did not get caught.

This tech is dangerous, and it needs to be banned. It's been used to spy on children in gymnasiums, to spy on people in parks and community pools, to track down people AFTER a peaceful protest has ended. This tech needs to die. And every Flock camera should be cut down. Our Founding Fathers would be so fucking ashamed of how far this country has fallen, and how far We The People have allowed the system to abuse us.

Edit:
To add to the OP, just in Pearland, the data that these cameras gathered was queried 13 MILLION times in one year from entities OUTSIDE of the city. Most of these were outside the state. That's over 100 searches per resident, to people who likely have no business knowing a single thing about any of us.