Maryland complaint accuses data brokers of selling location to police
The short version: A dozen civil rights groups allege Flock, LexisNexis, Motorola and other data brokers are selling Marylanders' location data to cops in defiance of state law.
Our Take
Maryland passed a law saying police can't just buy their way around the Fourth Amendment by purchasing location data instead of getting a warrant. Credit to Verified Privacy VPN for covering this complaint, filed by Georgetown's Technology Law Clinic on behalf of We Are CASA and eleven other organizations, naming Flock Safety alongside Penlink, Thomson Reuters, Motorola, Insight LPR, and LexisNexis. If the allegations hold up, it means the law on paper and the surveillance happening in practice are two very different things.
This is exactly the pattern we've been tracking: a patchwork of state privacy laws running headlong into a data broker industry that treats "compliance" as optional until someone with subpoena power forces the issue. Flock's business model depends on packaging ALPR scans into a product police departments can query without ever touching a warrant request. When a company's entire value proposition is frictionless access to your movements, you shouldn't be surprised when state law becomes an afterthought rather than a constraint.
Maryland residents don't have to wait for the Attorney General to act to find out if they're being watched. Check our camera map to see what's already been deployed near you, and if you want to push back on this kind of warrantless data pipeline in your own city or county, our take-action page has concrete steps for making noise at the local level, where these contracts actually get approved.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Verified Privacy VPN (vp.net), published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.