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Surveillance Meets the Gig Economy — A Company Wanted to Turn 350,000 Uber Drivers Into a License Plate Scanning Network

5h ago · 1 source

Flock, a surveillance technology company, reportedly explored a plan to equip approximately 350,000 Uber drivers with license plate-scanning cameras, effectively creating a massive, decentralized surveillance network across the United States. The proposal raises significant privacy and civil liberties concerns about the intersection of gig economy platforms and mass surveillance infrastructure.

WHY IT MATTERS

Imagine if every Uber car driving around your city was secretly scanning and recording every license plate it passed — building a massive database of where every car (and by extension, every person) goes throughout the day. That's essentially what was being proposed here. This matters to the crypto world because one of the core reasons people build and use blockchain technology is to protect against exactly this kind of mass data collection. Think of it like this: in the traditional system, a few big companies can quietly collect enormous amounts of data about you. Crypto and blockchain technologies aim to give individuals more control over their own data — like having a personal vault that only you hold the key to, rather than trusting a company not to peek inside.

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