Have you been Flocked? This website lets you find out
People aren’t exactly thrilled about Flock’s growing surveillance network.
Communities are canceling contracts, protesters are taking down cameras in increasingly creative ways, and activists have built a crowdsourced map showing where the devices are hiding in plain sight.
Even Flock has announced new privacy restrictions as the backlash grows.
Now, drivers can search some of those records for themselves.
A website called Have I Been Flocked? lets you enter your license plate number and check whether it appears in publicly released records of searches conducted through Flock Safety’s system.
As of Aug.
17, the website had compiled nearly 242 million searches involving more than 4.6 million plates.
The need for that kind of transparency isn’t hypothetical.
A recent Washington Post investigation found that at least 50 law enforcement officers had been charged with or accused of misusing license plate readers, including to stalk women without their knowledge or consent.
The concerns extend beyond individual officers.
Public records reviewed by 404 Media documented more than 4,000 Flock searches conducted by local and state police at the request of federal officials, as informal favors, or for potentially immigration-related purposes.
Flock says ICE cannot directly access its system, but the records show how local agencies can search the network on the federal government’s behalf.
Have I Been Flocked? won’t reveal everything Flock knows about your car, and finding a match doesn’t necessarily mean you were investigated.
Nevertheless, here's how to run a search — and understand what the results actually mean.
5News aggregated this summary from the outlet’s public feed. The full article, with all the context, is on mashable.com — the content belongs to Mashable.