this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2026
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Police Unmask Millions of Surveillance Targets Because of Flock Redaction Error (www.404media.co)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by tonytins@pawb.social to c/technology@lemmy.world
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The Flock saga continues.

A handful of police departments that use Flock have unwittingly leaked details of millions of surveillance targets and a large number of active police investigations around the country because they have failed to redact license plates information in public records releases. Flock responded to this revelation by threatening a site that exposed it and by limiting the information the public can get via public records requests.

Completely unredacted Flock audit logs have been released to the public by numerous police departments and in some cases include details on millions Flock license plate searches made by thousands of police departments from around the country. The data has been turned into a searchable tool on a website called HaveIBeenFlocked.com, which says it has data on more than 2.3 million license plates and tens of millions of Flock searches.

The situation highlights one of the problems with taking a commercial surveillance product and turning it into a searchable, connected database of people’s movements and of the police activity of thousands of departments nationwide. It also highlights the risks associated with relying on each and every law enforcement customer to properly and fully redact identifiable information any time someone requests public records; in this case, single mistakes by individual police departments have exposed potentially sensitive information about surveillance targets and police investigations by other departments around the country.

Archive: http://archive.today/yXLPQ

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[–] InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

I have no problem calling flock or facebooks tech stack bad because the intentions behind the tech are immoral.

And did those assemble themselves to be evil? Or did someone make them that way?

To go back go my openCV example it is just tech. It does not become a lpr with a cop back end until flock configures it that way

The engineers who help make immoral things possible should think about that

Yes, exactly my point.