@eff @maassive

It is not about whether a camera with an AI engine can be useful to catch known criminals. It's about who runs it. A private company or the LEO, the local city/county or is it a national database handed over to anyone with deep enough pockets for political gain? for monetary gain?

Arguably less easy to fight that sort of thing though, on a patrol car. It's automation for a patrol car, which the officer could in theory read a license plate his/herself.

And...patrol cars aren't everywhere, so you can't track the free movement of people so easily from source to destination from just that. The roving drone...too expensive and you'd need too many.

However, the true negative is that a private corporation is slurping up your location data, your cell phone, your passengers cell phones, movements ostensibly for law enforcement and they'll sell that data to anyone. It can and will be combined with other Axon data sources to create databases that will be analyzed by AI without warrants.

If all it was, was an officer searching for a stolen car with a camera that housed it's data and analytics inside that department's databases subject to all the normal judicial review on evidence gathering. There's a source DB for stolen cars already, LPR reader is easy, match system and hey that car is likely stolen. Easy to build a local DB of cars to look up and alarm an officer of it.

I don't think you'd have so much issue when it's part of a government system, which has to comply with the law.

Axon and Flock will readily sell your privacy out to anyone with enough cash to make it worth their time. There is no prohibition on what is their data sales. Cambridge Analytica anyone? Maybe I'm the only one who remembers that reference.