Flock OS Investigate and the Civil-Liberties Risks of AI Vehicle Tracking

Flock AI's Investigate software, initially marketed for crime prevention, has been revealed to track individuals based on their movements without any crime needing to be reported. This behavior monitoring system, which spans over 6,000 communities, incorporates a vast network of cameras and utilizes pre-written prompts to generate actionable intelligence from collected data.

Concerns have been raised about the lack of planning and direction in the collection of citizens' information and behaviors, as no legitimate crime is required to initiate the process. The software's ability to profile individuals, associate them with one another, and even discover their names and locations based on license plate data has been described as "completely insane" by a former police officer.

The potential for abuse is further heightened by documented instances of Flock's cameras generating false positives, leading to innocent individuals being mistakenly flagged as suspects. This erosion of trust in both law enforcement and the technology itself is compounded by the system's capacity to build profiles from seemingly innocuous prompts, such as "Do you see any criminal patterns?"