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THEY STOLE A FLOCK CAMERA… TOOK IT HOME… AND FOUND 1.6 MILLION IMAGES ON IT. Now THIS is exactly why people keep asking questions about these license-plate cameras popping up everywhere. According to reports,hackers physically removed a Flock Safety license-plate camera from a pole, took it home and started reverse-engineering the device. What they reportedly found was crazy. The camera contained logs covering about 21 days of activity, including roughly: * 1.6 MILLION images * 50,200 vehicles * 27,000 short video clips And apparently they were also able to recover an encryption key stored on the camera that allowed them to unlock additional information. Now before everybody runs with the headline, there’s an IMPORTANT distinction here: According to former Secret Service cybercrime specialist Jason Brown, the hackers did NOT break into Flock’s entire cloud system. They had physical possession of ONE stolen camera and accessed information stored on that individual device. Flock’s broader cloud network reportedly was not compromised. But here’s where I think the conversation gets interesting… Even if the entire network wasn’t hacked, 1.6 MILLION images sitting on one camera is still a LOT of information. Think about how many times your vehicle could potentially pass one of these things without you even thinking about it. Flock cameras photograph passing vehicles, read license plates and allow authorized law enforcement agencies to search that information. And we’ve already been having this conversation here in Texas about exactly how much surveillance is too much. There absolutely ARE legitimate uses for these cameras. Police have used license-plate readers to locate stolen vehicles, find suspects and help solve serious crimes. But at the same time… If somebody can literally take one off a pole, bring it home and pull this much information from it, people are going to have questions about security, privacy and exactly how much data is being collected on innocent people simply driving down public streets. That’s the part I want to hear y’all on. Does knowing these cameras can help solve crimes outweigh the privacy concerns for you? OR… Does finding 1.6 million images on ONE stolen camera make you look at Flock cameras completely different? Because remember… You don’t have to be suspected of a crime for your vehicle to pass one.