- Flock Safety publicly vows its license plate cameras will never use facial recognition.
- Surveillance vendor VIDIZMO pitched Johnson City, Tennessee police on a tool that adds facial search to Flock and Axon data anyway.
- VIDIZMO's CEO admits the export tool isn't built yet but wants to add it, calling facial recognition inevitable.
- The company's software also sorts people by estimated race, age and gender, drawing sharp criticism from a privacy expert.
- The pitch lands as Flock and rival surveillance CEOs dodge a Senate hearing on AI camera oversight.
Flock Safety has promised its license plate cameras will never do facial recognition, but a lesser-known surveillance vendor is telling police it can add the capability anyway.
In a May sales email sent to a deputy police chief in Johnson City, Tennessee, video analysis company VIDIZMO pitched a platform that would merge Flock camera data with Axon body camera footage and let investigators search "by face, vehicle, or object in seconds." The email was obtained by the watchdog group DeFlock Johnson City through a public records request and first reported by 404 Media.
The pitch cuts against Flock's stated position. "We will not add facial recognition to our devices," Flock CEO Garrett Langley said in a recent video.
Sales email reveals push for face-matching capabilities
"Flock Safety generates plate reads and clips continuously," the salesperson wrote in the email promoting VIDIZMO's "Intelligence Hub" product. "Your investigators use that data on active cases. But that Flock data does not connect automatically to your Axon evidence system. VIDIZMO Intelligence Hub closes that gap."
Johnson City police told 404 Media they did not take a call with the company.
VIDIZMO Chief Executive Nadeem Khan acknowledged to 404 Media that the tool for exporting Flock data to his company's platform has not been built and that VIDIZMO has not run facial recognition on Flock footage. But he said the company would like to build the integration and called facial recognition "the way the world will have to be."
Company markets race, age, gender analysis tools
VIDIZMO's online materials say its software attempts to sort people by estimated age, gender and race, and lets officers filter searches by those traits. The company lists seven racial groups: White, Black, Indian, East Asian, Southeast Asian, Middle Eastern and Latino Hispanic.
"Detection tells you a person is in frame," VIDIZMO's materials state. "Face recognition tells you which person."
Departments can also enroll specific faces on a watchlist, and the system names those people when they pass a camera and can record a clip of each match.
Privacy expert Chris Gilliard, author of the forthcoming book Luxury Surveillance, singled out the demographic filtering.
"I'm appalled at the willingness of VIDIZMO to tout their capabilities to filter along the lines of race, age, and gender," Gilliard told 404 Media. "There's decades of scholarship that show why this is not possible, and even more so not desirable."
Exported Flock data can be run through outside tools
Flock's pledge covers only its own products. Nothing in it stops a police agency from exporting data its cameras collect and running it through another company's software.
Khan told 404 Media that agencies could import plate reads or clips they had exported under their own authorized access. "Flock has not been involved in or informed of this," he said.
Gilliard argued that building mass surveillance infrastructure invites more invasive uses.
"What Flock says about their capabilities is to some degree irrelevant because they have built the infrastructure for mass surveillance," he said. "Their entire existence provides the foundation for other perhaps even more invasive technologies to be built on top of it."
Flock and Axon did not respond to 404 Media's requests for comment.
Flock and rivals skip Senate hearing on AI cameras
The pitch surfaces as Washington's scrutiny of Flock intensifies. Langley and the heads of Axon, Motorola Solutions and Verkada declined to testify at a Sept. 23 Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing chaired by Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who raised concerns about privacy and the presumption of innocence.
Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., has introduced a bill to bar federal agencies from buying or operating systems that track people through license plate readers or facial recognition.
The VIDIZMO pitch shows why a CEO's promise is no substitute for law. Once the data exists, someone will sell a new use for it, and Americans' privacy shouldn't hinge on a vendor's goodwill.
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