A thing I’ve been saying over and over is that surveillance companies can’t be trusted to regulate themselves or to make privacy decisions themselves, because one company’s red line is another company’s business opportunity. Today we’re investigating a company that saw Flock was not offering facial recognition and saw a challenge.
Also: Some dudes are letting ChatGPT drive a car in a parking lot in San Francisco, a data center company promises to cut people big checks if their data center gets approved, and the Muse backlash has begun. Welcome back to our new experiment with daily newsletters. If you like this, subscribe here. -Jason
Surveillance Company Wants to Add Facial Recognition to Flock Cameras
As Flock continues to be the center of a nationwide conversation about automatic license plate reading cameras, the company has said that it doesn’t, and won’t, do facial recognition: “We will not add facial recognition to our devices,” Flock CEO Garrett Langley said in a recent video. But other, third-party companies are telling cops that they are willing to add facial recognition to data gathered by Flock cameras in order to “close that gap.”
A company called VIDIZMO is advertising the capability to export footage from FlockOS to its own platforms that do facial recognition, behavior prediction, and racial and gender analysis on live camera feeds. VIDIZMO is a several decades-old video analysis and database company that has started offering facial recognition technology to cops within the last six months. In a May email to Johnson City, Tennessee, deputy police chief Michael Adams, a salesperson from VIDIZMO wrote that the company’s product could do facial recognition on both Flock and Axon data in “one searchable platform.”
“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,” the salesperson wrote. “VIDIZMO Intelligence Hub closes that gap. It brings Flock Safety data, Axon body worn camera footage, and any other evidence source into one searchable platform. Investigators search across all of it simultaneously — by face, vehicle, or object in seconds.” The email was obtained using a public records request by DeFlock Johnson City and was shared with 404 Media. The Johnson City PD told 404 Media in a statement that it did not take a call with the company.
VIDIZMO’s CEO, Nadeem Khan, told 404 Media on a video call that the company has not yet started running facial recognition tech on footage from Flock cameras, and that it has not actually built the specific tool that would export data from Flock’s system to its own platform (though the company advertises this capability online, and the company already sells other facial recognition products). But Khan said VIDIZMO “would love to do the integration,” and that he believes facial recognition “is the way the world is going, the way the world will have to be,” and that he thinks Flock should offer the capability itself in a way that “balances privacy, security, and the freedom that we enjoy in this country.”
Read the rest of this story here.
MORE FROM 404
“Your objective is to drive through the course:” Some tech workers at an AI math startup in San Francisco have, in their free time, asked ChatGPT to drive a Toyota Corolla through a parking lot obstacle course. In the experiment, DrivingBench hooked up GPT-6 Astra, Claude Fable 5.1, Grok 4.6, and GPT-5.6 Sol to a Toyota Corolla and gave the LLMs control over the car’s steering, accelerator, and brakes. Then they set up a small cone course in a public parking lot and prompted the chatbots to navigate the space.
The goal, they said, was to find out if untrained, off-the-shelf frontier AIs can drive a real car. The results were mixed. Grok, Sol, and Fable only drove a few meters and didn’t finish the course. GPT-6 Astra, however, did eventually learn to navigate the course and complete it. But not without a lot of troubleshooting. One of the main problems is lag, a thing you definitely want when driving a car. Still, kind of a “dudes rock” situation?
The hackers who hacked the FBI say they will not release the data: “Since the very beginning we had made our decision that we would never publish this data. We have never intended to nor have we ever planned to.” OK then!
FROM AROUND THE WEB
OpenAI will not release its next model because of safety concerns. Not sure what to say about this right now other than maybe OpenAI should try to get their bots to stop hacking stuff.
We’ve written a little about Muse, Meta’s AI agent and current AI thing people won’t stop talking about, but haven’t really dug our teeth into it. I’ve found the whole thing a bit inescapable and have been wanting to try it for reporting purposes but am feeling less thrilled about the idea after seeing that it, uhh, told a bunch of random people to show up at a man’s house after accepting lowball offers on Facebook Marketplace, then pissed those people off by telling them he was home (all without telling the guy running the agent). Muse also seems to be ignoring explicit instructions from users that ask it to not read their messages and upload them to the cloud. I also do buy into “squeeveillance,” the idea that people will let cute things surveil them. Sorta don’t think it’s gonna work for Meta, though.
On that note, Blue Cross Blue Shield says AI has already increased costs by more than $1 billion because insurer AI and hospital AI is fighting each other. Thrilling. And AI-generated and otherwise manipulative political content designed to manipulate AI chatbots are, indeed, manipulating AI chatbots. This is generative engine optimization, which we’ve written about and which I went on NPR’s On the Media to discuss.
An academic study that interviewed a bunch of Ring camera owners in the Netherlands found that people are super normal about them: “The findings reveal how the Amazon Ring reframes mundane interactions into mass surveillance opportunities, impacts the presumption of innocence, leads to different forms of perceived privacy, and provides a permanent sense of alertness by the owners.”
I was pretty into this exploration of public transit escalator speeds, as well as this article about why high speed metro is the next big thing in places that build such things as “trains.” Google is Weird Now, people are saying.
A data center company in Hazle Township, Pennsylvania is trying a thrilling new strategy to win over a town: It has promised to give $10,000 checks to 4,500 households if its data center is approved.
A very rare, long-thought-lost early mix of “Vampires Will Never Hurt You,” My Chemical Romance’s first single, has been found and uploaded to the Internet Archive. Lost media dorks are thrilled; Response from My Chemical Romance fans seems muted, which is surprising. Still, cool. Also, did you know Exxon made a typewriter with what appears to be a proprietary ink cartridge? If you know more about this please tell me?
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