What does the French philosopher Michel Foucault have in common with Flock cameras, those increasingly ubiquitous “automated license plate readers” that record license plates on American roads?
And don’t worry. Just because a computer system may know where your car was last Tuesday at 5 p.m., there’s absolutely nothing to worry about. Absolutely nothing to worry about your trip to the strip club, the Cannabis dispensary, to visit that lively friend from work while your partner was away on a business trip, or that the police and Flock cameras did not mistake your vehicle for one stolen by a criminal, or that police officers might access the database to use them to conduct surveillance on friends or family. Nothing to worry about.
Trust us.
There are plenty of videos arguing about whether Flock cameras are good or bad. I am not taking an opinion. I want to do something different. I want to look at Flock as a marketing problem.
Because Flock has a fascinating problem: the same feature that makes the product valuable is also the feature that creeps people out. It’s called the “Awareness Paradox.”
This is Marketing Philosophy. I’m Jason McDonald, and today we’re going to use a dead French philosopher to figure out how the hell you market the Panopticon.
WHAT IS FLOCK?
First, the basics.
Flock cameras are automated license plate readers. Cities and law enforcement agencies deploy cameras that capture information about vehicles and make that information searchable.
The value proposition is pretty straightforward.
Someone steals a car. Someone commits a robbery and drives away. Police have information – the real-time location of vehicles in your city – that may help them find the vehicle and catch the bad guy.
That’s useful.
And that’s exactly how you would market it, if you were the marketing manager at Flock Safety:
We help law enforcement catch criminals.
Who is against catching car thieves?
But there’s a problem.
The camera doesn’t magically know who the criminals are.
It has to observe everybody. It has to record everybody. It has to build a database of where everyone’s car has been over some period of time. It takes the fact that you do not have an expectation of privacy about your vehicle and its license plate, and uses AI and big data to make some very different than the old days.
And that’s where our dead French philosopher enters the picture.
FOUCAULT AND THE PANOPTICON
Michel Foucault wrote Discipline and Punish, which is precisely the kind of dense French philosophy you would expect from a book called Discipline and Punish.
Fortunately, we can simplify it.
Foucault discusses Jeremy Bentham’s idea of the Panopticon.
Imagine a prison built around a central observation tower. The prisoners can potentially be watched by the guards, but they don’t know exactly when they’re being watched.
And that’s the genius of the system.
Eventually, you don’t need somebody watching every prisoner every second.
People change their behavior because they know they might be watched.
For Foucault, this wasn’t just about prisons. Schools, hospitals, factories, bureaucracies and governments observe people, classify people and accumulate information about people.
And information creates knowledge.
Knowledge creates power.
And power creates, at least the potential, for abuse and shenanigans.
Welcome to Flock.
OBSERVABLE ISN’T THE SAME AS RECORDED
Now, there’s an obvious response to the privacy complaint.
You’re driving down a public street.
Your license plate is hanging on the back of your car.
Anybody can see you.
Fair enough.
But there’s a psychological difference between:
“Somebody could see my car.”
and:
“An institution is systematically recording vehicle sightings and making those observations searchable.”
I’m not making a Fourth Amendment argument here. We expect many things to be private, even if legally maybe they are not. I mow my lawn with my shirt off, and let’s face it, I am not Brad Pitt. But can someone come along and photograph me? Yep, they can. I do not have an expection of privacy in my front yard with my beer belly hanging out sweaty. Yuck!
Let’s focus on marketing.
Consumers don’t sit around reading constitutional case law before deciding something creeps them out. They have a gut-level expectation of privacy as consumers and as voters.
They discover that the same technology being used to find the stolen Kia may also record their trip to Hooters, a political rally, the cannabis dispensary, an addiction clinic, or wherever else they legally decided to go.
And their reaction is:
Yuck.
That’s the marketing problem.
THE PRODUCT FEATURE IS THE PRODUCT PROBLEM: THE AWARENESS PARADOX
Normally, marketers love talking about product features.
Our camera can see more!
Our database can search more!
Our software can find more!
Except the more powerful Flock becomes at finding the bad guys, the more consumers realize:
Wait a minute. You can find me too.
The benefit and the Yuck Factor come from exactly the same capability.
And then we get to an even nastier problem.
Trust.
Who gets access to all this information?
Because “the government” doesn’t actually type searches into databases.
People do.
Maybe it’s Officer Bob.
And Bob has a username and password.
And Bob’s girlfriend just dumped him.
There have been reported cases involving law-enforcement personnel allegedly misusing license-plate-reader systems for personal purposes. Don’t sue me. I’m not saying I know for a fact these have happened. But I can see how, knowing what we know about Officer Bobs, that it could happen. Enron, Watergate, Covid, the Moon Landing – not everyone trusts the authorities anymore, do they?
Suddenly the public isn’t merely being asked:
“Do you trust the technology?”
They’re being asked:
“Do you trust every human being who has access to the technology?”
“Do you have anything to hide? Anything you might be ashamed of?”
“Do you think that criminals and the average person driving a car should be treated the same?”
That’s a much harder product to sell.
THE AWARENESS PARADOX
And this brings us to what I call the Awareness Paradox.
Normally, marketers want greater awareness.
The more consumers understand your product, the better.
But some products have the opposite problem:
The better people understand how the product works, the less they may like it.
At low awareness:
“Cool. Cameras that catch car thieves.”
Then someone makes a YouTube video.
“Wait. They’re recording my car too?”
Another video.
“There’s a searchable database?”
Another:
“Who can search it?”
And then:
“Some police officer allegedly used this stuff to track WHO?”
That’s the Awareness Paradox.
Product education itself can become negative marketing.
And social media pours gasoline on it.
One weird abuse, one false identification, one disturbing story can become a TikTok, a YouTube video, a news story and eventually a political controversy.
The Internet transforms individual discomfort into collective awareness.
And awareness creates resistance.
CONGRATULATIONS: YOU’RE FLOCK’S MARKETING MANAGER
So what do you do if you’re running marketing or PR for Flock?
First, you emphasize the benefit.
Don’t sell surveillance.
Sell the criminal who gets caught.
Show the stolen car recovered. Show the crime solved. Show the victim who was helped.
Second, you have to address the Yuck Factor.
And eventually “trust us” isn’t good enough.
You have to sell the guardrails.
Who gets access? Are searches audited? What happens when someone abuses the system? How long is information retained? What transparency exists?
Because Flock ultimately isn’t merely marketing cameras.
It’s marketing trust.
It’s asking society to accept a powerful surveillance capability because that capability can also produce something society wants: catching criminals.
I don’t envy the marketing team at Flock. They’re having their Andy Warhol 15 minutes of fame, and it isn’t working out so good for them. Sorry not sorry. Seeing how the sausage is made may make people not really want the sausage. Welcome to the “awareness paradox.”
THE HAPPY ENDING
Fortunately, there is an obvious solution.
We keep the useful technology.
We establish sensible limits.
We create strong safeguards against abuse.
We demand transparency and accountability.
And our rational, thoughtful elected officials carefully balance public safety, individual liberty, corporate interests and government power.
So…
WE ARE SCREWED.
This has been “Marketing Philosophy.” I hope you have enjoyed watching. Now, I am going to go get in my 2025 RAV 4 with license plate DNT WTCH and drive to the Cannabis Dispensary before I go to the strip club. Thank you for watching (me)!
