Surveillance Company Tells Cops It Wants to Add Facial Recognition to Flock Cameras

A surveillance company called VIDIZMO is advertising its capability to export footage from FlockOS to its own platforms that offer facial recognition, behavior prediction, and racial and gender analysis. VIDIZMO, a decades-old video analysis and database company, has started offering facial recognition technology to law enforcement within the last six months.

A salesperson from VIDIZMO reached out to Johnson City, Tennessee deputy police chief Michael Adams in a May email, stating that their product could perform facial recognition on both Flock and Axon data in a "searchable platform." This "VIDIZMO Intelligence Hub" would bring Flock Safety data, Axon body-worn camera footage, and other evidence sources into one searchable platform, according to the salesperson. Investigators could then search across all data simultaneously by face, vehicle, or object in seconds.

VIDIZMO's CEO, Nadeem Khan, told 404 Media that the company has not yet started running facial recognition technology on footage from Flock cameras and has not built the specific tool to export data from Flock's system to its own platform. However, Khan expressed his company's willingness to integrate with Flock and believed that facial recognition was the direction the world was headed. He thought Flock should offer the capability itself in a way that balanced privacy, security, and freedom in the country.

VIDIZMO's online documentation claims that it can ingest data from Flock's automatic license plate reader (ALPR) and livestream cameras into several of its products, which perform further AI analysis on the data. The company's "AI Live Insight" page describes facial recognition as a capability that identifies people as they appear on live camera feeds, matches them against enrolled individuals in the Object Library, and names them in the event feed and recording without an operator recognizing the face.

VIDIZMO allows police departments to upload individual faces as "objects" in the software's library, which can be added to a "watchlist" that automatically triggers tracking and recording when detected.