What are Flock cameras, and why do some people oppose them?

What are Flock cameras? What to know about surveillance cameras being vandalized across the country

Surveillance cameras owned by the company Flock Safety are being vandalized across the country, and it may lead you to ask, What are Flock cameras and what are they used for?

Related video above: Map reveals Flock cameras are spreading across Southwest Florida, raising privacy concerns

Here's what to know.

What are Flock cameras?

Flock Safety makes surveillance camera systems that record and analyze everything that passes them. The company sells its services as a crime-fighting tool, and some law enforcement agencies that have contracts with Flock use the cameras' automated license plate readers to track or reconstruct movements of vehicles in criminal investigations.

Flock says it has 120,000 automated license plate reader (ALPR) and pan, tilt, and zoom (PTZ) cameras throughout the U.S., which capture billions of data points each month. Flock's ALPRs automatically scan the license plates that pass them, while PTZs record live footage that can be reviewed and analyzed.

Because Flock cameras are all connected, it creates a nationwide latticework of recorded activity. Across the majority of states, a police officer in one state can be alerted if a car they’re looking for pops up in another and can inform the local authorities.

Why are people vandalizing Flock cameras?

Over the last few months, people have cut down Flock cameras with an electric saw in upstate New York, thrown paint on them in Oakland, California, and rammed a truck into them in Idaho. One man in Florida sits in a lawn chair holding up a piece of cardboard on a pole to block the camera’s view. City governments have joined in by deactivating the cameras or canceling contracts with Flock in Fort Collins, Colorado; Eugene, Oregon; Madison, Wisconsin; Knoxville, Tennessee; Syracuse, New York; and Walla Walla, Washington.

While some argue that Flock cameras help solve crimes, like this kidnapping in South Carolina, others say they're an invasion of privacy.

Flock CEO Garrett Langley recently responded to those stances in an interview with CNN, saying that "as a country, as a society, as a species, we have proven over and over and over again that we can have safety and privacy.”

Can Flock cameras really be used to track people?

Though Flock has denied that the cameras are used to track people on foot and that the company does not use facial recognition technology, 404 Media reported that a Flock capability called “FreeForm” allows users to search camera records based on what someone was wearing, their tattoos or even their race.

The site also reported that, despite Flock not sharing data with agencies like U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, police officers have been performing searches to aid in immigration sweeps. Flock said in a statement to 404 Media that FreeForm includes “guardrails” that alert system administrators when someone uses search terms that include “race, ethnicity, religion, nationality.”

Cameras are everywhere these days. What's so different about Flock?

The 21st century has already seen — literally — a long-running expansion of surveillance. Cameras are ubiquitous on American streets and in other public spaces; internet traffic leaves a trail of everything anyone has looked at on their devices; mobile advertising data companies have created startlingly precise maps of where everyone goes with their personal phones.

Is Flock any different?

Some of it has to do with something else Americans have a universal affinity for: their cars. “There’s the idea of the open road, the freedom to drive,” said Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights group. “A lot of people treat their cars like an extension of their homes.” The idea that a company constantly tracks what a car does, whether it was involved in a crime or not, manages to violate people’s expectations of privacy in their personal space and of freedom of movement simultaneously.

But Maass also said Americans are more aware now of exactly how these cameras operate than they used to be. In the past, people understood cameras mounted outside of a store or on a street corner as simple contraptions: a video gets recorded, is retained for a given period of time based on local jurisdiction policies, and then gets deleted. Flock’s default setting is to retain data from its cameras for 30 days, though local police departments can shorten or extend that time based on state and local rules. But the system’s nationwide searchability also makes it different from previous generations of surveillance systems. “Once people start learning about the massive scale of the data that’s being collected and who it’s being accessed by, it starts to freak them out,” Maass said.

The cameras are also not foolproof in their authorized uses. On June 28, Joel Feder, a journalist and car reviewer at The Drive, said he was in Plymouth, Minnesota, behind the wheel of a Range Rover he was test-driving, when the vehicle was suddenly swarmed by four police cars. The officers told him the plates had been reported stolen.

“The car was owned by Land Rover North America, it was impossible for it to be stolen,” Feder said.

After a protracted conversation, Feder said he found out that a license plate with a similar number had been reported missing in Los Angeles several weeks prior. An incomplete version of the number was apparently entered into the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), a national database maintained by the FBI that Flock pulls data from.

Flock’s technology seemed to overlook the mix of large and small numbers on the Land Rover’s New Jersey dealer tags. “The Flock camera saw my entire plate, but it still flagged it as a match,” said Feder, who reviewed the photos the Flock camera had taken of his vehicle during his conversation with law enforcement.

Maass is quick to note that for all of the anti-Flock activism, it is not the only security company deploying connected security cameras. Vigilant Solutions and Motorola also operate ALPR cameras, and there are signs that Axon, a major provider of body cameras to police departments, is starting to take over public contracts from cities that have worked with Flock in the past.

CNN contributed to this story.