Retail Shops Could Quickly Use Drones to Chase Thieves

As if we weren’t already tracked sufficient, malls and shops throughout the U.S. would possibly quickly deploy drones to catch shoplifters.

Controversial surveillance company Flock Safety, which provides drones and different invasive tech to police departments, introduced on Thursday that it’s now providing its drones to personal safety corporations.

Drone use in policing is on the rise, and this transfer makes it doubtless that personal corporations will quickly undertake the identical tech. However as drones grow to be normalized for private and non-private safety, privateness advocates warn they might push the U.S. nearer to a surveillance state.

“Safety leaders are being requested to guard extra with much less throughout greater footprints, tighter budgets, and actual staffing constraints,” Rahul Sidhu, Flock Security’s VP of Aviation, stated in a press release.

The corporate says every drone dock can cowl roughly a 3.5-mile radius with flight occasions as much as 45 minutes, offering speedy response for warehouses, rail yards, hospitals, ports, malls, and enterprise facilities.

In its press launch, Flock Security pitched its drones particularly to retail shops, arguing that organized retail crime stays excessive. It cited an business report displaying that retailers saw a 93% increase in shoplifting incidents in 2024, and stated the drones’ fast response may assist cut back associated prices over time. In fact, it’s value noting that retailers’ claims of a shoplifting epidemic have been largely debunked in 2024, however that didn’t cease police departments from happening a shopping spree for new toys.

Keith Kauffman, Flock’s drone program director, informed the MIT Technology Review how the drones may work in observe.

When a retailer’s safety workforce spots shoplifters leaving the scene, they’ll activate the drone, which is docked on the roof. Geared up with video and thermal cameras, the drone can observe thieves escaping on foot or in a automobile. Its video feed can then be despatched to the corporate’s safety workforce and transmitted on to native police.

Flock’s know-how is already in use in lots of police departments. Simply this week, its license plate cameras have been credited with catching a murder suspect in El Paso and finding a missing teen in Boulder, Colorado.

However not everyone seems to be thrilled with the corporate’s tech. The town of Evanston, Illinois, ordered Flock Security this week to uninstall 18 license plate readers after Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias found that Flock had given U.S. Customs and Border Safety entry to the readers’ knowledge. And in August, Congress launched an investigation into what one member called Flock’s “position in enabling invasive surveillance practices that threaten the privateness, security, and civil liberties of girls, immigrants, and different susceptible Individuals.”

ACLU Senior Policy Analyst Jay Stanley has warned lately that the increasing use of drones in policing and personal safety requires strict privateness guardrails, together with limits on when and the place drones can be utilized and the way video and different sensor knowledge are dealt with.

“We don’t need to find yourself in a nightmare state of affairs the place drones are used for mass surveillance and the expertise of getting police flying cameras buzzing overhead turns into routine in folks’s day by day lives,” Stanley wrote in a latest blog post.