Banning One Camera Company Won't Save Us From the Rest

Bernie Sanders wants to introduce a bill banning Flock’s automatic licence plate readers in the US. It’s the kind of headline that makes you feel briefly good about the world, then makes you think for a bit longer and feel worse.

Flock is the company that’s quietly wired thousands of American towns up with cameras that read every passing numberplate, log it, timestamp it, and hand the whole database over to police departments and, as it turns out, occasionally to people who really shouldn’t have it. The pushback has been building for a while, and a US senator putting his name to a bill is a genuine milestone. Good on him.

But the most useful comment I saw on the thread wasn’t about Bernie at all. It was someone pointing out that a bunch of cities that ripped Flock out have simply replaced it with Axon, a different company doing more or less the same thing. Same cameras, same database logic, same “trust us, it’s for public safety” pitch, different logo on the box. Banning a brand isn’t banning a behaviour. It’s whack-a-mole with venture capital behind it.

That’s the bit that sticks with me, because it’s not really a story about Flock. It’s a story about how we regulate technology generally: we get outraged at the specific company that got caught, we win a symbolic victory against that one company, and the underlying capability, the thing that actually matters, sails on through under a new name. We did it with Cambridge Analytica. We’re doing it now with various AI companies where the public anger lands on whichever one made headlines this month, while the actual practice, scraping everything, selling inferences about you, keeps humming along industry-wide.

Melbourne’s not innocent here either. We’ve had licence plate recognition on toll roads and in mobile police units for years, sold to us the same way it’s sold everywhere: safety, efficiency, catching the bad guys. I don’t doubt it catches some bad guys. I also don’t love that a private company or a state agency can reconstruct a fairly detailed picture of where my car has been on any given Tuesday, and that the reconstruction happens by default, with no one asking whether that’s actually a trade I agreed to. Nobody votes on this stuff. It gets installed on a pole, and then it’s just part of the landscape, like the CCTV bubble above the servo.

I don’t think the answer is “ban all cameras” any more than I think the answer to social media harms was “ban all apps.” The honest answer, and it’s a boring one, is that we need rules about the capability itself, not the vendor. Retention limits. Warrant requirements before the data gets pulled. Real penalties when it leaks or gets sold sideways, which it always eventually does. A few commenters on that thread pointed out that a law can’t legally target one company by name anyway, a bill of attainder, apparently, which I didn’t know until today and which is a genuinely pleasing bit of trivia to have picked up before lunch. Any real legislation would have to be about automatic licence plate readers as a category. That’s harder to write and harder to sell in a headline, but it’s the only version that actually survives contact with the next company that pops up to fill the gap.

I get why the instinct is to go after the company with the worst headlines. It feels like justice, and sometimes it even is. I just think the comment about Axon quietly stepping into Flock’s shoes says more about how this actually plays out than the bill itself does. The technology doesn’t care what it’s called. It’ll wear whatever name lets it keep running.

I don’t have a tidy way to close this out, because I don’t think there is one yet. Regulating surveillance tech well would require the sort of patient, unglamorous legislative work that doesn’t generate a viral headline, and does require politicians who understand the tech well enough to write rules that don’t have Axon-shaped loopholes in them. That combination is rare. Bernie’s bill is a decent opening move. Whether anyone follows up on the boring part is the actual question, and nobody’s answered it yet.