"even when you don't have full plate information," a 2024 Flock presentation says, promising law enforcement more ways to identify and follow vehicles.
Flock’s "Vehicle Fingerprint" and what it records
The company presentation, dated 2024, describes a capability Flock calls "Vehicle Fingerprint." According to the slides, that fingerprint includes visual and physical cues beyond license plates: decals, bumper stickers, back and top racks, and "temporary and unique state tags." The presentation frames this collection as a way for officers to get "more information" about a vehicle when a full plate read is not available.
Search tools: building cases and the "multi geo search"
The presentation also details search features available to police. Officers are shown the ability to query that Vehicle Fingerprint data to "build stronger cases with less information upfront." Among the search capabilities the company highlights is a function it calls a "multi geo search," which is described as a way to find and track multiple vehicles law enforcement officials believe are moving together.
Precedent: co-location tracking predates modern machine learning
The presentation's technical promise is placed in historical context by the author of the original post, who notes that the technique of inferring association from shared location history is not new. He writes, "I wrote about it in my 2014 book Beyond Fear." The post further recalls a public disclosure by Edward Snowden that the National Security Agency had used cell phone location data to track phones that were habitually near each other — an example the author uses to show how co-location analysis has long been applied to infer relationships between mobile entities.
What this means for law enforcement, policymakers, and the public
- Law enforcement: The presentation positions these features as investigative multipliers — searchable non-plate attributes and multi-vehicle queries are explicitly presented as tools to "build stronger cases with less information upfront."
- Policymakers: The materials underline a technical point that legislative and oversight frameworks may need to address: identification and tracking can rely on visual cues and association patterns, not only on license-plate reads.
- The public: The author emphasizes that the functionality matters beyond the company itself, noting that "anyone with broad access to cell phone location data can do the same thing," framing the fingerprinting and co-location capabilities as part of a wider set of surveillance techniques available to multiple actors.
Implications and the narrow facts that remain
The 2024 presentation makes explicit claims about capabilities — the capture of decals, bumper stickers, racks and temporary tags; the naming of "Vehicle Fingerprint"; the availability of search tools designed to operate "even when you don't have full plate information;" and the promotion of a "multi geo search" for locating vehicles believed to be traveling together. The post that reported these slides links those claims to an older lineage of co-location analysis, citing the author’s prior treatment of the subject in a 2014 book and Edward Snowden's revelation about NSA use of cell-phone location data to infer habitual proximity among devices.
Those are the facts contained in the source material: a 2024 company presentation describing particular non-plate vehicle attributes and search features, an explicit set of marketing phrases used in that presentation, and the observation that similar analytic methods have been documented previously in public disclosures and earlier writing. The author’s final admonition is a reminder rooted in those facts: the capabilities shown in one vendor’s slides are functionally comparable to surveillance possible through broad access to other location datasets.
