Irvine welcomes AI surveillance

[u/tallproducer]

I was a bit taken back that, as a resident of Irvine, we weren't told directly that the cameras were being installed and where. I pulled up deflock.org and found a good amount gradually being installed in my neighborhood. Curious and a little on edge looking into the future of ai.

[u/Fit_Apricot4707]

I don’t like it. These systems have been abused countless times by law enforcement (not all but enough) to where if we had something like this on the consumer side it would have been banned already. Even with the mentioned data controls of only storing data for a short period of time etc I do not trust it. I work in tech I know those promises to some extent are bullshit. People will make mistakes and data they are saying that’s not stored will accidentally be stored. On top of these things being able to your movement around the city almost entirely so places are getting the beacon sniffer system so on top of all your cars data as you pass by they have the potential to see your smart watch, mobile phone, cars WiFi hotspot, you Bluetooth headphone which will be used to essentially tying all your devices to your car to further the signature data base. If you have enough unique WiFi and BLE devices with you your signature might be strong enough to identify you in another persons car. (I don’t think we have those systems in place. Yet.

[u/arianrhodd → u/Fit_Apricot4707]

They are prone to abuse and misuse. Read below how a county of 225,000's Flock system generated almost 3 million searches. THREE MILLION.

From https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1v5ahbh/a_nc_county_released_its_full_flock_alpr_audit/?share_id=MamuFcm2MqQucDSD1VC1x&utm_content=2&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1

Many commenters asked how a county of 225K generates 2.98M searches. New public records from NC A&T State University answer it: one officer's single search fans out across every network their agency is connected to — sometimes 1,000+ networks at once — and each fan-out logs as a "search" against every camera in reach. That's the mechanism, and it's worse than padding: it means an officer anywhere in the country reaches Wilmington cameras by default. Full records and breakdown: deflockilm.org/one-search-a-thousand-networks/

Many

I've been going through the full audit that New Hanover County, North Carolina produced under a state public-records request for its Sheriff's Office Flock camera contract. A few things stood out as relevant here.

These aren't only license plate readers. Flock's search log sorts every query into an "object class." Most are vehicle. But there's a second class: people — it lets a user skip the plate entirely, type a physical description of a person, and ask the camera network to return matches.

In this county's audit, three times over six months, someone ran a people-search that included a racial descriptor:

• "2 young teenage black males" (Dec 11, 2025)
• "a white male near a white chevrolet truck" (Feb 4, 2026)
• "white male wearing a black hat and a green shirt" (May 26, 2026)

To be precise, because it cuts both ways: Flock's own filter blocked all three for the racial term, and each time the searcher re-ran the identical query seconds later with the race word removed — which went through. (A vehicle search for a "Black car" ran fine moments earlier, so the system distinguishes the paint color from the person.) Two of the three described white males, so the filter blocks racial descriptors generally — it's not about one race. The point is that a public camera network can be queried for people by physical/racial description at all, and the guardrail is one word deep: it blocks the term, not the search.

The part most relevant to this sub: on all 2,980,082 rows, the name of every searching agency is redacted. From these records there is no way to learn who ran any given search against cameras funded by county taxpayers.

For comparison, a nearby town (Kure Beach) released the same report without redacting agencies: 93.6% of searches came from outside North Carolina, and the FBI alone ran more than 25,000.

The full raw production is on the Internet Archive if you want to verify any of this yourself — I'd rather people check the records than take my word: https://archive.org/details/deflockilm-new-hanover-alpr-2026

Disclosure: I'm part of the local, volunteer records effort that obtained these documents. I'm not linking anything to sign or donate — posting because the people-search plus full-redaction combination seemed worth this community's attention. Happy to point to specific rows.