A video-analysis company called VIDIZMO has told police departments it can add facial recognition to footage collected by Flock Safety’s automatic license plate cameras, despite Flock’s public pledge never to offer the capability, according to a report by 404media.co.
Flock chief executive Garrett Langley has said in a video posted online, “We will not add facial recognition to our devices.” VIDIZMO, a video and database firm that 404media.co said has offered facial recognition tools to law enforcement for about six months, is marketing software that imports data exported from Flock’s “real time crime center” platform, FlockOS, into systems that run face matching, according to the outlet.
In a May email to Johnson City, Tennessee, deputy police chief Michael Adams, a VIDIZMO salesperson wrote that the company’s Intelligence Hub product could combine Flock plate-reader data with Axon body-camera footage in “one searchable platform,” 404media.co reported, citing an email obtained by the group DeFlock Johnson City through a public-records request.
“Flock Safety generates plate reads and clips continuously. Your investigators use that data on active cases. But that Flock data does not connect automatically to your Axon evidence system. VIDIZMO Intelligence Hub closes that gap.”
Johnson City’s police department said it “did not take a call with the company,” according to 404media.co, and there is no indication the department bought or deployed the software.
VIDIZMO chief executive Nadeem Khan told 404media.co the company has not yet run facial recognition on Flock footage and has not built the specific tool advertised to export data from Flock’s system, though VIDIZMO already sells other facial recognition products and markets the Flock integration online. Khan said the company would “love to do the integration.”
“I think Flock is trying to get out of the way rather than trying to implement the technology right by saying they will not do recognition. But this is the way the world is going, it is the way the world will have to be, but with the right sort of technologies where privacy and security are balanced.”
Khan said in an email to 404media.co that Flock “has not been involved in or informed of this,” and that any export would depend on an agency importing data it had already accessed under its own authorization.
VIDIZMO’s online marketing materials describe letting officers build a “watchlist” of enrolled faces that trigger automatic alerts when detected on live camera feeds, and let investigators filter search results by estimated age, gender and one of seven listed racial categories, according to the company’s website as cited by 404media.co. The firm also markets a “demographic analysis” tool that lets retailers track which age or racial groups spend the most time and money in stores.
Chris Gilliard, a privacy researcher and author of the forthcoming book Luxury Surveillance, called the racial and gender filtering “appalling.”
“I’m appalled at the willingness of VIDIZMO to tout their capabilities to filter along the lines of race, age, and gender. There’s decades of scholarship that show why this is not possible, and even more so not desirable, particularly in the case of race and gender, which are not static categories to be determined by a computer.”
Khan said VIDIZMO’s system could also be used to protect privacy, including by automatically redacting the faces of bystanders in footage. He said officers cannot use the platform without an assigned case number, that all actions are logged for audits and that VIDIZMO itself retains no data.
“Much of the harm your reporting has documented comes from implementation choices, not from the technology itself. Those choices include pooling data into a nationwide network, allowing searches without a case, keeping audit logs no one can meaningfully inspect, and treating an AI match as an answer.”
Khan described VIDIZMO as a small company operating without venture-capital funding that is “providing an alternative to the industry.” The company’s website lists agencies including Baltimore police and the Dallas County government among its customers, according to VIDIZMO’s own materials.
Flock’s cameras have drawn scrutiny from lawmakers and civil-liberties groups over how widely police departments share access to the network, an issue examined in an earlier rews report on the scale of the camera system. Gilliard told 404media.co that a single company’s refusal to build facial recognition does little to limit the technology once the underlying camera network exists, because other firms can build additional analysis tools on top of the data it collects.
Flock and Axon did not respond to requests for comment, according to 404media.co.