VIDIZMO 向警方推销为 Flock 摄像头数据加装人脸识别

A thing I’ve been saying over and over is that surveillance companies can’t be trusted to regulate themselves or to make privacy decisions themselves, because one company’s red line is another company’s business opportunity. Today we’re investigating a company that saw Flock was not offering facial recognition and saw a challenge.

Also: Some dudes are letting ChatGPT drive a car in a parking lot in San Francisco, a data center company promises to cut people big checks if their data center gets approved, and the Muse backlash has begun. Welcome back to our new experiment with daily newsletters. If you like this, subscribe here. -Jason

Surveillance Company Wants to Add Facial Recognition to Flock Cameras

As Flock continues to be the center of a nationwide conversation about automatic license plate reading cameras, the company has said that it doesn’t, and won’t, do facial recognition: “We will not add facial recognition to our devices,” Flock CEO Garrett Langley said in a recent video. But other, third-party companies are telling cops that they are willing to add facial recognition to data gathered by Flock cameras in order to “close that gap.” 

A company called VIDIZMO is advertising the capability to export footage from FlockOS to its own platforms that do facial recognition, behavior prediction, and racial and gender analysis on live camera feeds. VIDIZMO is a several decades-old video analysis and database company that has started offering facial recognition technology to cops within the last six months. In a May email to Johnson City, Tennessee, deputy police chief Michael Adams, a salesperson from VIDIZMO wrote that the company’s product could do facial recognition on both Flock and Axon data in “one searchable platform.”