Behind the Blog: Activism and Evangelism

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss the phrase “activist reporter,” waiting in line for a Switch 2, and teledildonics.

JOSEPH: Recently our work on Flock, the automatic license plate reader (ALPR) company, produced some concrete impact. In mid-May I revealed that Flock was building a massive people search tool that would supplement its ALPR data with other information in order to “jump from LPR to person.” That is, identify the people associated with a vehicle and those associated with them. Flock planned to do this with public records like marriage licenses, and, most controversially, hacked data. This was according to leaked Slack chats, presentation slides, and audio we obtained. The leak specifically mentioned a hack of the Park Mobile app as the sort of breached data Flock might use.

After internal pressure in the company and our reporting, Flock ultimately decided to not use hacked data in Nova. We covered the news last week here. We also got audio of the meeting discussing this change. Flock published its own disingenuous blog post entitled Correcting the Record: Flock Nova Will Not Supply Dark Web Data, which attempted to discredit our reporting but didn’t actually find any factual inaccuracies at all. It was a PR move, and the article and its impact obviously stand.