BY BRADEN CARTWRIGHT
Daily Post Staff Writer
Palo Alto City Council will consider taking down removing the city’s license plate-reading cameras because of distrust in Flock Safety, the company behind them.
“We are unlikely to retain Flock … That’s clearly where it seems to be leaning,” Mayor Vicki Veenker said tonight (Aug. 24).
Council asked the city’s police auditors and City Manager Ed Shikada to look into other vendors in the next 90 days.
Flock has been in the hot seat since the city of Mountain View revealed in February that out-of-state and federal agencies had accessed the company’s data, which records thousands of cars and their license plates every day.
Flock had turned on a “nationwide search” setting without local permission, and residents have urged the city to take the cameras down ever since.
“Flock can’t be trusted, and surveillance is a dangerous path to embrace,” resident Winter Dellenbach told council on June 1.
Mountain View, Stanford, Santa Cruz and Los Altos Hills have ended their contracts with Flock.
Despite the policy violations, police officers have said Flock’s cameras have been an effective crime-fighting tool.
Councilman Ed Lauing said he doesn’t trust Flock’s CEO Garrett Langley.
“Flock changed the capabilities of a surveillance system that the city entrusted to it, and the city didn’t know it was happening,” Councilwoman Julie Lythcott-Haims said. “I do not think it’s smart to continue operating that system.”
So, mass surveillance is fascism when the federal government does it… but when local government does it, they are just trying to keep us safe.
Flock and other mass surveillance has no business in our city! Turn the cameras off and then get rid of them. Do not replace them with some other form of mass surveillance. All of our privacy is at risk. We must protect our children!
Council members should protect the community, not the surveillance state.