LAPD suspending their contract gives me hope that this movement is strong enough.

Protesting, showing up to city council, and generally making officials’ lives uncomfortable is the bare minimum, because it works.

He’s so full of shit: “The technology is really simple,” he told ABC7. “A car drives by, we take a picture. It’s a static picture of a car, and then we read the license plate. That’s what the technology is – it’s actually not that complicated, it’s pretty simple.”

When in fact these use AI to build what the company calls a “Vehicle Fingerprint” to identify each car by make, model, color, body type, and distinguishing features like bumper stickers, roof racks, dents, decals, and even objects in truck beds. They can track and identify vehicles even when license plates are missing, obscured, or swapped for an 6-12 frame interaction. Moreover it is a database of metadata allowing them to characterize personality, trends, habits, and patterns across 80,000 cameras in 49 states. That’s just the plate readers.

They’ve grown to include ‘first responder’ drones, audio sensors, gunshot detection sensors, and full video surveillance in both the public and private sphere.

And worse is it’s real-time cross-jurisdictional alerting, which has seen multiple false reports.

So it’s damn well not just a static picture of a car, but surveillance capitalism.

I don’t care if the technology is simple and I don’t care if it only records license plates, it is inherently wrong.

“The technology is really simple,” he told ABC7. “A car drives by, we take a picture. It’s a static picture of a car, and then we read the license plate. That’s what the technology is – it’s actually not that complicated, it’s pretty simple.”

100% lying: https://www.404media.co/flocks-ceo-says-its-alprs-dont-do-video-after-repeatedly-announcing-they-can/

If it’s a tech product, they’re lying about it’s use. Everything is a façade on top of a darker and more sinister reason. Go Luddites!

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the concept of ANPRs (automatic number plate recognition) as these are called in the rest of the world. It’s more of an issue that there is a complete lack of laws surrounding how that data is to be used, and especially when it’s controlled by a private company. If there were strict laws limiting the situations where ANPRs could be used, such as requiring a warrant to begin searching for plate numbers and automatically discarding data from non-matching plates, I doubt people would complain as much about these.