I don't think this would surprise anyone here, but maybe it is a good thing that the Normies find it still worth an article?

Drawing on a network of cameras that logs the movements of drivers in more than 6,000 communities, the tool can pick out potential witnesses by how often their cars pass through a neighborhood, or surface a driver’s “associates” from the cameras they pass together. Because the system also reaches police case files, 911 dispatch logs, and commercial identity records, those plates can be turned into names, home addresses, and relatives. It can search for people in an area drawn on a map based on nothing more than a physical description.

The software, originally called Nightshift and more recently renamed OS Investigate, ships with 69 prewritten prompts that officers can select, review, or edit, and then submit to the AI. Officers can also input prompts of their own.

The suggested prompts sit in a cache of more than 450 files that WIRED found on Flock’s own website, served by its login pages to anyone who loaded them. The code describes 45 tools at the AI’s disposal, giving it access to plate scans and camera metadata, arrest records, case files, dispatch logs, ballistics results, and commercial databases that contain Social Security numbers, dates of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, relatives and associates.

As many people (especially stackers) have pointed out, when multiple databases are utilized, anonymity sets get very small very quickly. Flock would be stupid not to be correlating their camera data with every other dataset they can get their hands on, so I'm sure they do.

19 of the prompts describe hunting for patterns rather than looking up a record. 14 call for no plate, no name, and no description. The officer simply supplies a location, a window of time, and a behavior.

One group of requests asks for vehicles that visited three or more retail locations in a city in three days, or multiple banks in a week, or multiple gas stations between midnight and 5 am. None of the five names a target or an incident.

The tool behind those searches carries a filter that strips out buses, semi trucks, work vans, and trailers, so a delivery driver visiting five shops would come off the list, while an ordinary driver making the same rounds remains.

The same type of search also applies to travel between cities: vehicles that left one city for another and returned within a week, made repeat roundtrips over 14 days, or passed through three areas in sequence.

So, Flock is a private company. We know they sell services to the law enforcement -- and that's already ripe for abuse -- but I don't see why they wouldn't also sell data to other customers (perhaps with superficial claims to anonymozation).

The same type of search also applies to travel between cities: vehicles that left one city for another and returned within a week, made repeat roundtrips over 14 days, or passed through three areas in sequence.

One example, for instance, takes a single plate and asks the system to plot the journeys of that car and its “top three associates.” The code describes explicitly how the ranking works: It counts how often other plates appear at the same cameras within a two-minute window of the target by default, and reports back any car that shows up next to it three or more times within a “confidence threshold” defaulting to 0.75. An officer supplies one vehicle and the software finds up to 20.

It is very easy to slip into the "if you have nothing to hide, you don't need to worry" kind of thinking about this. And pretty much all of Flock's advertising is like this: "Look at the car theft we solved! Look at the murderer we helped catch! Look at how easy it is to find the bad guys!" But then there is this:

Flock has been building the AI system while under scrutiny for how police have abused the cameras it already runs. A Texas officer searched more than 83,000 cameras across the country last year while looking for a woman who had a self-administered abortion, according to search logs first obtained by 404 Media.

Whether you believe abortion is murder or not, the fact that there are 83000 cameras available at the click of an app is unnerving. If you have any illusions that you can hide from the state, it may be time to seriously reevaluate them.