Shopping centers and stores in all the United States will soon resort to drones to catch robbers and store thieves.
The controversial US Surveillance Surveillance company Flock Safety, which provides drones and other types of intrusive technologies to police departments, announced on Thursday that it will now make your drones available to private security companies.
“The safety responsible are pressured to protectwith less resources, in increasing areas, lower budgets and real personnel limitations, ”he said Rahul SidhuVice President of Flock Safety, Num.
According to the company, each drone station can cover a radius of about 5.5 kilometers, with Flights up to 45 minutesallowing quick responses to warehouses, railway parks, hospitals, ports, commercial spaces and business centers.
In the statement, Flock Safety directed the offer specifically to the retail sector, arguing that the organized crime connected to theft in stores It remains high.
The company, which cites a report from the sector that indicated a 93% increase in the theft incidents in 2024, argues that the rapid intervention of drones could help reduce costs over time.
However, the allegations of an “epidemic” of theft In stores they were widely – which did not prevent police departments from investing heavily in new technologies, note.
Keith KauffmanDirector of the Fluck Drone Program, explained to Review how the system works in practice: when the security team of a store detects thieves to abandon the siteactivates the drone, which is parked on the roof.
Equipped with Video Chambers and Thermal Sensorsthe drone can pursue the suspects, whether they are running away or in vehicles. The collected images are sent to the company’s security center and transmitted directly to the local police.
FLOCK TECHNOLOGY is already in use in several police departments. This week alone, their enrollment reading chambers were decisive in Capture of a suspect of murder in El Paso and in the location of a missing teenager in Boulder, Colorado.
However, not everyone is satisfied with the company’s technology. The city of Evanston, Illinois, ordered this week to Flock Safety a Removal of 18 readers of enrollment, after the Secretary of State Alexi Giannouias found that the company had given access to this data to a government agency.
In August, Congress opened an investigation to what a deputy described as the “role of the flack in encouraging invasive surveillance practices that threaten privacy, security and civil rights of womenimmigrants and other vulnerable groups. ”
Jay Stanleysenior policy analyst at American Civil Liberties Union, has warned in recent years that the expansion of drones use in public and private security requires strict privacy protection rulesincluding clear limits on When and where they can be used and about how video and sensor data are treated.
“We don’t want to end up in a nightmare scenario where drones are used for mass surveillance and where the experience of seeing police chambers flying over our heads becomes routine in people’s daily lives, ”Stanley wrote in a recent article on.
