Flock Exposes Its AI-Enabled Surveillance Cameras
404 Media has the story:
Unlike many of Flock’s cameras, which are designed to capture license plates as people drive by, Flock’s Condor cameras are pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras designed to record and track people, not vehicles. Condor cameras can be set to automatically zoom in on people’s faces as they walk through a parking lot, down a public street, or play on a playground, or they can be controlled manually, according to marketing material on Flock’s website. We watched Condor cameras zoom in on a woman walking her dog on a bike path in suburban Atlanta; a camera followed a man walking through a Macy’s parking lot in Bakersfield; surveil children swinging on a swingset at a playground; and film high-res video of people sitting at a stoplight in traffic. In one case, we were able to watch a man rollerblade down Brookhaven, Georgia’s Peachtree Creek Greenway bike path. The Flock camera zoomed in on him and tracked him as he rolled past. Minutes later, he showed up on another exposed camera livestream further down the bike path. The camera’s resolution was good enough that we were able to see that, when he stopped beneath one of the cameras, he was watching rollerblading videos on his phone.
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Clive Robinson • January 2, 2026 8:19 AM
@ Bruce,
Flock are basically the least secure of oh so many systems that really do not serve a community benefit in a lawful way. And the insecurity enables others to not just “look over the shoulder of the operator in real time, many of them store video for later replay that can be recallrd remotely…
Which means researchers and others can see what the operators are doing…
You’ve heard of “up-skirting” cameras… Well the PTZ cameras mounted up above head hight but not more than street sign hight are known by some in the industry as “down blouse” cameras or similar.
The fact is that type of abuse carried out by remote human controlled camera operators is quite shocking.