Surveillance Company Tells Cops It Wants to Add Facial Recognition to Flock Cameras

Flock has been telling the public it won’t build facial recognition into its cameras. CEO Garrett Langley said as much in a recent video. But that hasn’t stopped other companies from trying to bolt it on after the fact.

The sharpest example is VIDIZMO, a video analysis and database firm that says it can pull footage from FlockOS into its own tools for facial recognition, behavior prediction, and even racial and gender analysis. In a May email to a Johnson City, Tennessee, deputy police chief, a VIDIZMO salesperson said the company could put Flock and Axon data into “one searchable platform” so investigators could search across it by face, vehicle, or object. Johnson City police told 404 Media they did not take a call with the company.

VIDIZMO’s CEO, Nadeem Khan, told 404 Media the company has not yet started running facial recognition on Flock footage and has not actually built the specific export tool it advertises online. Still, he said VIDIZMO would “love to do the integration” and argued that facial recognition is the direction the world is headed. He also said Flock should offer it itself, but in a way that balances privacy and security.

The company’s own documentation gets more specific. VIDIZMO says police can upload faces as “objects,” add them to a watchlist, and have the system start naming people as they appear on camera. It also says agencies can set a match threshold, search by attributes like age, gender, and race, and even use the same tools for “demographic analysis” in retail or city settings. The company says it can identify seven races, a claim privacy expert Chris Gilliard called appalling.

The broader point is uglier than one vendor’s sales pitch. Flock may be drawing a line around facial recognition, but its cameras and software are already part of a system other companies can extend. That is how surveillance grows: not with a single announcement, but with one more layer, then another.