Flock Safety Tracks People, Not Just Cars, 404 Media Reports

In a new podcast episode, 404 Media reports that US police are increasingly using Flock Safety's road-camera system to search for specific people, not just to track vehicles by license plate. The same episode covers a company that buys paper books by the mountain to train AI, and a major breach of the music service Suno.

What has changed in how Flock is used

Flock Safety originally sold its cameras as a license plate recognition system. According to 404 Media, however, police now use its database to track the movements of specific people. The difference matters: looking up a stolen car by its plate is one thing, but reconstructing a person's route from where and when their vehicle was spotted is another.

Flock cameras are installed in thousands of municipalities and police departments across the country, including residential neighborhoods and private communities. It is the scale of the network that turns a narrow tool into a mechanism for monitoring the movements of the population.

• Flock Safety makes automatic license plate recognition cameras deployed at thousands of locations across the US
• According to 404 Media, police use them to find specific people, not just vehicles
• Another story in the episode: a company buying paper books by the mountain for AI companies
• One more topic: a major breach of the music-generation service Suno

"Flock tracks people, not just cars" — this is how 404

Media summed up the core of its investigation.

Why buy books for AI

Another story in the episode is about a company that buys physical books in bulk to supply them to AI developers. Training language models requires text, and part of the industry gets it by digitizing printed books at industrial scale.

Demand for "clean" training text has grown so much that buying and scanning books has become a business of its own. It continues the ongoing dispute over data sources: publishers and authors are asking more and more insistently where AI companies get their material and on what terms.

What is known about the Suno breach

The third story is a major breach of Suno, one of the most popular services for generating music from a text prompt. 404 Media examines the incident itself and what it says about the security of fast-growing AI startups.

Suno is riding the wave of interest in generative audio, and a leak at such a service signals that young AI companies are collecting sensitive data faster than they are building protections for it.

What this means

Together, the three stories from one episode form a broader picture: surveillance technology and generative AI are working their way into everyday life faster than society can agree on rules. Cameras installed for safety are being used to find people, and AI companies' race for data and audience is outrunning questions of privacy and protection.