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FLOCK YOU!
A company called Flock has made its appearance in Lake Geneva. Flock is a company that installs cameras that read license plate numbers of passing or parked vehicles. That information is checked against a database of stolen vehicles and vehicles listed as wanted by police agencies. The plate data can also be used to discover the registered owner of the vehicle the plate is on. That data can then be used to get backgrounds on the registered owner, and is the primary reason that stores like Home Depot, the Fairfield Hotel, and Walgreens all use the system, which will one day allow for the barring of certain customers based on the backgrounds generated.
Currently, these cameras, all in Lake Geneva proper, are not yet bringing up registered owners’ backgrounds. The police also use six Flock cameras, all mounted to view Main Street north and south from Center Street to Wrigley Drive. Whether a person, as the registered owner of a vehicle, wants to have such a company and even law enforcement in this day and age have location and personal information, as well as location, acquired and maintained, is conjectural, no matter what the person’s background.
Flock is also adding facial recognition to its newer models. As far as registrations are concerned. Get your vehicles out of personal registration and form a corporation to re-register with that entity if you want privacy. Filing the articles of incorporation online is easy in Wisconsin, after which the federal government will issue an EIN (employer identification number) for free in minutes online. It will cost $100 to the state, postage, and, if opening a corporate account at a nearby bank, possibly a minor fee. This is worth the time and expense. Registering cars is also not that expensive. Appointing a corporate representative (which can be just about anybody) is also pretty cheap but time-consuming if more than one vehicle is being re-registered. However, the final additional advantage is that law enforcement cannot get your personal data from your license plate to make a car stop because you might appear suspicious.
Law enforcement would have to make the stop on probable cause, which is the way car stops are supposed to be made. Never forget that fully eighty percent of all police contact with citizens, or others, is because of the automobile, and hence why most departments are opposed to automatic driving. Know your rights and protect them. Be as private as possible today, as so many are now watching and using any data that can be found, and not usually for your benefit. The main argument to allow Flock to access personal and location information is always the same. If you have done nothing wrong, then why are you concerned?
When the publisher was a police officer for seven years in California, part of the training on car stops was aimed at searching vehicles by getting permission from the driver. The same argument was offered to the driver, and invariably the answer was to permit the search. Another part of the training was about how to remove a car’s back seat for inspection under it. The trainers knew that if someone was in the back seat of a car when a patrol vehicle pulled up next to it, they’d likely ditch their stash down into the fold near the bottom of the seat and then never get it out. Years later, the driver permits to search and guess what? The stash is found, and there is no other person to blame for its ownership, and the driver gets a drug charge that’s nearly impossible to beat in court.
The people who wrote the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution understood this concept of injustice even when there were no cars. Never give consent to a search based on the fact that you’ve done nothing wrong. And never support police or business arguments that they should be able to access any of your information.
