Today we (DWG) had a message from a US university claiming that OSM was incorrectly listing their ALPRs as “Flock” devices, and we were thus “misinforming the public regarding campus data privacy and security practices”. I checked, and found that the ALPRs on campus were all tagged as surveillance:type=ALPR but did not have a manufacturer tag and the operator tag pointed to the university, so everything seemed fine on our end. I explained this to them which I hope settles the matter.
I hope that anyone displaying Flock cameras will take care not to cartographically throw them in with the non-Flock ones. (Not that I believe the university’s own surveillance is necessarily better than the government’s, but this particular correspondent insisted that their system was “strictly controlled, heavily audited, and operated with zero external or third-party access”.)
Was the complaint specifically about DeFlock or some other application? DeFlock shows any surveillance camera. The map doesn’t necessarily depict them as Flock cameras, but maybe someone could get confused about that based on the name of the application.
We don’t know, only that “Your platform currently lists camera locations on campus grounds as Flock Safety devices”, when, as WP said, we have no mention of Flock on their cameras.
