Editor’s Note: This article by Matt Alley originally appeared in BlueCollarWriter Labor Media here.
“Once we create the ability to quietly turn hundreds of thousands of ordinary vehicles into moving surveillance platforms, we shouldn’t be asking only whether the technology works. We should be asking whether a free society should want it to.”
There is a phrase I keep coming back to when I read stories about the expansion of surveillance technology in America: just because we can build it doesn’t mean we should.
A new investigative report from 404 Media should make anyone who cares about privacy, civil liberties and the increasingly blurry line between public safety and mass surveillance stop and pay attention. I want to be careful here because there is an important distinction between reporting about a proposal and reporting about an operational surveillance program. I am not presenting every allegation in the story as established fact, nor am I suggesting that a proposal is the same thing as something that was actually implemented. According to 404 Media’s reporting, Flock Safety pitched a plan involving Nexar dashcams and approximately 350,000 Uber, Lyft and delivery vehicles that could have dramatically expanded the company’s automatic license plate reader network. Flock told 404 Media that the partnership with Nexar was never executed.
But that’s precisely why I think the story matters. If the reporting and the underlying presentation are accurate, we should be alarmed by the idea itself.
Think about what is being proposed here. Flock’s existing surveillance network relies heavily on stationary automatic license plate readers. A camera sits somewhere along a roadway and records passing vehicles, creating a searchable record containing information such as a license plate, vehicle characteristics, time and location. Now imagine taking that concept and putting cameras in hundreds of thousands of vehicles that are constantly moving through neighborhoods, cities, parking lots and residential streets. Your surveillance network is no longer limited to where somebody decided to put a pole. It moves, and it moves because ordinary people are moving.
That’s a fundamentally different proposition.
An Uber driver isn’t a police officer. A Lyft driver isn’t a government surveillance agent. A delivery driver isn’t somebody who necessarily volunteered to become part of a nationwide tracking infrastructure simply because they went to work that morning. Yet the proposed model, as described by 404 Media, raises an obvious question: what happens when the ordinary vehicles we depend upon for transportation and commerce become another layer of the surveillance infrastructure surrounding us?
And there is an even bigger question hiding underneath all of this: who controls the data?
That’s the part that should concern us regardless of our politics. This isn’t simply a Republican-versus-Democrat issue. It isn’t a left-versus-right issue. It isn’t even necessarily a police-versus-civilian issue. It is a question of whether we are comfortable creating systems capable of building increasingly detailed records of where people and their vehicles travel, who has access to those records, how long they are retained, who those records can be shared with, and what safeguards exist when the technology inevitably gets used in ways its original sales pitch never contemplated.
We have already watched the surveillance industry expand beyond the traditional concept of a camera. License plate readers can create location histories. Private cameras can feed information into public-safety investigations. Commercial databases can be combined with other sources of information. Artificial intelligence can make enormous quantities of collected data searchable and useful in ways that would have been practically impossible a generation ago.
Each individual technological step can be sold as reasonable. Find a stolen car. Investigate a hit-and-run. Locate a suspect. Find a missing person. Solve a violent crime. Nobody is arguing that those goals are inherently bad. The problem comes when we build the infrastructure first and have the civil-liberties conversation afterward.
Because once the infrastructure exists, there will always be another justification for using it. And another. And another.
That’s why this particular 404 Media report deserves attention even with the caveat that a proposal is not proof of implementation. The disturbing part isn’t simply whether 350,000 vehicles actually became roaming Flock cameras. The disturbing part is that someone apparently thought such a system was commercially viable enough to pitch. That tells us something about where this industry believes surveillance technology can go, and we should be asking questions before the technology gets there.
What notice would drivers receive? Would drivers even know their vehicle was collecting license plate data? Would passengers know? Would the people whose plates were captured know? Who owns the data? How long is it stored? Who can search it? Can police agencies access it without a warrant? Can other government agencies access it? Can private organizations access it? Can the information cross state lines? What happens when the database is wrong? And what happens when an innocent person’s movements are repeatedly captured and interpreted as suspicious?
Those aren’t paranoid questions. They’re the questions we should be asking whenever a private company proposes building a system capable of observing millions of ordinary Americans.
There is a tendency in America to think about surveillance only after it has become impossible to avoid. By then, the cameras are installed, the databases are populated, the contracts are signed, the software is integrated and the information is flowing. Suddenly we’re having a debate about how to put the toothpaste back in the tube.
I’d rather have the argument before the tube is squeezed.
If 404 Media’s reporting is accurate, this isn’t merely a story about Flock, Nexar, Uber or Lyft. It’s a warning about the direction of modern surveillance capitalism. The technology doesn’t have to be malicious to become dangerous. It doesn’t even require some grand conspiracy. All it requires is an endless appetite for more data, a business model built around collecting it, governments willing to purchase or access it, and a public that doesn’t realize how much of its everyday life is being recorded until someone finally pulls back the curtain.
That’s why this story should alarm us.
Not because we should automatically believe every allegation. Not because every camera is inherently evil. And certainly not because public safety doesn’t matter. It matters enormously.
But privacy matters too.
Once we create the ability to quietly turn hundreds of thousands of ordinary vehicles into moving surveillance platforms, we shouldn’t be asking only whether the technology works. We should be asking whether a free society should want it to.
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