Podcast: Flock is Tracking People, Not Just Cars

Flock's pitch has always been about cars — license plate readers dotting highways and neighborhoods, quietly building a database of who drove where. But 404 Media's Joseph found something messier happening underneath that story. Police departments are apparently querying Flock's system for descriptions of actual human beings, things like "male with tattoos," turning a car-tracking tool into something that looks a lot more like a person-tracking one.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. A system built to log plates operates under one set of assumptions about scope and consent. A system that can also be searched by physical description of a person is doing something else entirely, and it raises the kind of surveillance questions that don't usually get debated before the cameras go up.

Elsewhere in the episode, Emanuel dug into a company quietly selling large quantities of books to AI companies, marketing the deal partly on the promise that old books are free of AI-generated slop, and doing it all under confidentiality. It's a small but telling window into how AI firms are hunting for clean training data now that the internet itself is increasingly polluted with machine-written text.

And in the subscriber-only segment, Jason walked through the hack that hit Suno, the AI music generator, revealing the company had scraped platforms including YouTube, Deezer, and Genius. It's another entry in the growing pile of evidence that AI companies' data pipelines often run through scraping first and asking questions later.