And remember they were trying to partner with Amazon’s Ring doorbell cameras for AI facial recognition and vehicle tracking. And they don’t need to see the license plate as they were building profiles on vehicles and distinguishing features…
By Daniel Corvell
The next time you slide into the back seat of an Uber, consider what one of America’s fastest-growing surveillance companies had in mind for that dashcam on the windshield. According to a Flock presentation obtained through a Georgia public records request, the license plate reader giant planned to enlist roughly 350,000 Uber, Lyft, and delivery vehicles as roaming data collectors for its nationwide surveillance network.
Not police cruisers. Not government vehicles. Ordinary gig workers, almost certainly without their knowledge, and without the knowledge of the millions of Americans whose movements would have been swept into a private database.
The presentation, prepared by Flock for the Georgia Office of the Attorney General last August and first reported by 404 Media and highlighted by Breitbart News, spells out the plan in the company’s own words:
Plus Nexar partnership which includes 350k Uber/Lyft and other delivery service devices.
Nexar is a popular consumer dashcam company whose cameras already boast full HD license plate capture. Flock’s automatic license plate readers are normally bolted to poles, scanning the plate, color, make, and model of every car that passes. Marry the two, and every rideshare driver crisscrossing a city becomes a mobile scanning unit feeding a private company’s database.
Flock told 404 Media the partnership was never executed. Fine. But the company drew up the plan, put it in writing, and pitched it to a state attorney general’s office. Intent matters, and the intent here was to build a tracking apparatus that no legislature ever voted on and no citizen ever consented to.
The Consent That Nobody Asked For
Here is the detail that should stop every American cold. Neither Uber nor Lyft responded to requests for comment, and it remains unclear whether the companies or their drivers would even have known their vehicles were being used this way.
Think about what that means. A driver trying to make rent by shuttling passengers around Atlanta would have been converted into an unwitting informant for a corporate surveillance network. The passengers would not know. The drivers would not know. The people walking past on the sidewalk whose parked cars got scanned would not know. The only parties in the know would be Flock and its paying customers.
This is how the surveillance state actually arrives in America. Not through a dramatic act of Congress that patriots can rally against, but through vendor contracts, sales presentations, and quiet partnerships between companies you have never voted for and cannot vote out. The Fourth Amendment restrains the government. It says nothing about a private firm assembling a minute-by-minute map of where every vehicle in your town has been, then selling access to whoever pays.
A Company with a Pattern
If Flock had a spotless record, one shelved plan might be forgivable ambition. It does not. 404 Media previously revealed that Flock was building a people-lookup tool designed to use hacked data to jump from a license plate to a person, a scheme the company scrapped only after exposure and internal revolt.
Nexar, the would-be partner, was itself breached by a hacker who accessed terabytes of customer video, including footage recorded near sensitive Department of Defense sites. And Breitbart News recently reported that at least 50 law enforcement officers have been accused of abusing Flock’s existing camera network to stalk people, including a Georgia police chief who allegedly ran his ex-girlfriend’s plate some 600 times.
That is what happens with the stationary cameras. Now imagine the abuse potential when the cameras ride shotgun in a third of a million vehicles.
The pattern is unmistakable. Every guardrail this industry respects is one it was forced to respect by journalists, records requests, and public outrage. Jason Hunyar, the Dunwoody, Georgia resident whose public records request pried this presentation loose, did more to check the surveillance industry than any regulator has managed. That should embarrass the regulators, and it should instruct the rest of us.
Sunlight still works, but only when citizens bother to open the blinds.
Scripture reminds us who alone is entitled to know our every movement. “Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways” (Psalm 139:3).
That kind of knowledge belongs to a holy God who loves us, not to a venture-funded camera company that answers to sales targets. When men seize for themselves an omniscience reserved for the Almighty, they do not wield it with His righteousness.
Flock says this partnership never happened. Believe that if you like. The document proves they wanted it to, and in the surveillance business, plans that die in one sales deck have a way of resurrecting in the next one. The question for Americans is not whether Flock executed this particular scheme. It is whether we intend to keep finding out about these schemes only after some citizen in Georgia files the right paperwork.