Technically true. Flock could present an unfounded argument that I might be brute-forcing my own security and privacy measures.

I think it'd sound pretty dumb.

If the security depends on the person it's supposed to be secure against not trying to break it...

What about doing it all client side? Or perhaps let the user type one or two characters then fetch that from the server for all matches and do the remaining matching client side. There are ways you could truly isolate yourself from the PII.

They don't actually allege anything. They add in the keywords without going so far as to say "this website is doing X." It's enough to trip the keyword filters at Cloudflare and other hosting providers and reverse the burden of proof.

Can't be less than what support has had to say up until now.

Whenever anyone does a search in Flock's database, Flock sends the metadata to the related customers.

I.e., if someone does a statewide lookup in Nebraska, all Nebraska-based Flock customers receive the search metadata. Ostensibly, to be able to track if "their" ALPR data has been queried. Those audit logs are public record.

This is also how IL discovered out-of-state agencies were using data from Illinois for immigration enforcement (after FOIA by a citizen, of course; apparently none of the IL law enforcement agencies audited their data for unlawful activity).

This automated already, and you don't need a face. Flock does it.

https://haveibeenflocked.com/news/reid

It does. But more like “the black male with the red hoodie is here”

They don’t say “hibf just walked into the 7-11” yet. The Feds probably have a system that can do that for car passengers traveling on “drug corridors” (ie. I95) today.

You assume those aren't logged and accessible by the government. They are.

Of course they are, that's how they track memberships, payment history, and that kind of stuff. Can't say I really care about a paid parking garage keeping a customer registry.

I trust the government a lot more than some random third party company ("flock"), though.

The point isn’t what is the company doing with the data but rather how secure are these IP cameras?

Some are for government spying while others are for government spying and other bad actors.

I’d love to gain access to said parking garage meter camera and scan plates too, only I’m looking for high value targets that just got to work and thus, left their home.

I’m looking at software used to capture, track, and pull data from all these sources in an attempt to build a dragnet like service where you can ask “where is license plate <bingo>”?

That seems contradictory. You don't care about a parking garage operator, but at the same time distrust "some random third party company"?

You're right that the dataset is incomplete, but it contains searches done by police, not plates read by Flock.

The search logs are public record even when alpr data is not; quite a few come from IL.

I have no doubt that local agencies are screwing up the law, which is very new, but in Illinois "ALPR information" means information gathered by an ALPR or created from the analysis of data generated by an ALPR (everything after the quotation marks is a straight excerpt of the statute), and is confidential.

Do not get me started on small public bodies screwing up FOIA.

I'll assume you're correctly citing the statute — someone entering a sequence of characters in a "Search" field doesn't mean that the search term was "gathered by" or "created from the analysis of" ALPR data.