Surveillance Finds a Way

Flock has spent a lot of time saying the same thing: no facial recognition, not now and not later. CEO Garrett Langley recently said in a video, “We will not add facial recognition to our devices.” That line has not stopped other companies from treating Flock’s refusal as a sales opening.

One of them is VIDIZMO, which is now pitching police on a way to export footage from FlockOS into its own system and run facial recognition there. The company also says it can do behavior prediction, along with racial and gender analysis on live camera feeds. In other words, if Flock won’t cross that line itself, VIDIZMO is telling cops it can do it for them.

The pitch is not coming from a startup that just appeared yesterday. VIDIZMO is described as a several decades-old video analysis and database company, and it only started offering facial recognition to police within the last six months. That makes the timing pretty clear: this is not a new technical breakthrough so much as a business response to a company leaving a gap.

A May email to Johnson City, Tennessee, deputy police chief Michael Adams put the offer in plain terms. A VIDIZMO salesperson said the company could handle facial recognition on both Flock and Axon data in “one searchable platform.” That is the kind of language that makes the privacy debate look almost quaint. One company draws a line. Another company sees a market.