The University of Wisconsin-Madison Police Department’s Chief of Police Brent Plisch spoke with University Committee members Monday about the presence of eight Flock Safety cameras on campus, addressing their privacy concerns.
Plisch said the Flock cameras are only used for vehicle data and not tracking individuals.
“There is no expectation of privacy for a vehicle, specifically people’s license plates, when it’s being operated on a public property,” Plisch said.
Anyone can see that information, and it's not protected information, he said. “If the vehicle was parked in a garage, there would be an expectation of privacy.”
UWPD operates eight Flock cameras around campus. “We were seeing a lot of talk about Flock being utilized for facial recognition technology,” Plisch said. “The cameras just don’t do that.”
The Flock cameras are set to capture photos of the rear of vehicles because there’s more information from the rear, Plisch said. “There’s just no way to obtain facial recognition out front. It’s not a high enough quality image to do that.”
Plisch said UWPD is constantly evaluating risks. “We believe we weighed the benefits of the risks and put in the appropriate safeguards.”
One of those safeguards is no agency outside the state of Wisconsin can utilize the data. “The things that we’ve done to limit exposure to our community is restricting to in-state agencies only. We have an audit trail to follow for every search that’s run utilizing our camera system,” Plisch said.
Plisch mentioned how there are risks with any organization.
“We put requests in with Flock. Could Flock violate that contract? Absolutely they could. But so could Workday. Workday could sell all employee information,” Plisch said. Workday is another widely used organization at UW-Madison.
Plisch said UWPD limits access to data obtained from the cameras to nine members of the department. “There’s a process where our officers, if they’re investigating a case, have to submit a request to [use] Flock that’s reviewed by a supervisor before that search is ever done,” he said.
Police officers in cities across the country, including Wisconsin cities like Appleton and Milwaukee, have been investigated for using Flock camera data to track and harass ex-partners.
Plisch added that those searches are then audited, creating audit paths for every piece of data that’s run. “We have an audit path for every piece of data run. We can see everybody who runs data and comes through our system,” he said.
