These days, it’s hard to say which technological “innovation” US citizens hate more: AI data centers or Flock surveillance poles.
The American revulsion with the former is well known. The latter, however, has seen an even more shocking rise in resistance, as the number of people hacking down, blinding, or otherwise sabotaging Flock cameras has reached a level best described as “countless.”
Those who cut down Flock surveillance devices are regarded as folk heroes, garnering huge defense campaigns aided by the rapid growth of the online anti-Flock community.
Amidst immense pressure from the public, the company is starting to back down on its quest to create a law enforcement-led surveillance state. On Friday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation announced that Flock was officially ending its “human distress detection” pilot program, an always-on audio surveillance tool that monitored public places for sounds of “screaming.”
“This feature was designed to help identify potential violent incidents in areas where other public safety tools were less effective,” Flock explained in a recent blog post. “The feature was only available to a small number of customers as part of a limited trial, and was never broadly released. After careful consideration and community consultation, we decided to remove the feature.”
On top of the obvious privacy concerns that come with a high-powered audio surveillance device, the feature raised major questions around civil liberties, given that law enforcement could use the program as a pretense to swarm any community on a whim.
Yet, as the EFF observes, the threat posed by Flock’s audio surveillance devices is far from over. The company still has thousands of audio devices installed in communities throughout the US, where they often appear without warning at the behest of local law enforcement.
Still, that such a scattered yet ferocious public pressure campaign can help force a company to abandon a pilot like this is noteworthy. The cancellation speaks to the power a collective can have when they focus their efforts on a single target.
According to the EFF, Flock’s decision demonstrates that “public pressure can sometimes work to influence both companies and lawmakers that control a city’s purse strings to discontinue or divest from harmful products.”
“Flock’s decision to end ‘distress detection’ for human voices is a win,” the group added.
**More on Flock: **AI Surveillance Startup Caught Using Sweatshop Workers to Monitor US Residents