Who Owns the Data Your Body Produces?

Your phone unlocked your face this morning. Google knows which coffee shop you stopped at. Your 23andMe data is sitting in a database that was just sold in bankruptcy proceedings. And now, in at least a dozen cities, a networked camera system is logging your license plate—and, according to its own marketing, can identify your specific car by its visual markers even if you've swapped plates.

This is the world my readers already live in. I just want us to be clear-eyed about the next layer being added.

On a recent episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, Marc Andreessen—co-founder of Netscape, author of the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, and general partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz—spent a good stretch of the conversation making the case for AI-powered surveillance technology in American cities. The hook was a real and genuinely alarming event: two teenagers, 15 and 17, allegedly went on a multi-location shooting spree in Austin, Texas, switching cars and targeting people across a dozen spots.

Andreessen's argument: Austin used to have Flock, a networked camera system that feeds municipal and traffic cameras into an AI capable of tracking vehicles in real time. The city turned it off over privacy concerns. The suspects evaded capture for days—until they drove into an adjacent town that still had Flock running, got tagged immediately, and were arrested.

"It's crazy to have the ability to solve crimes and stop crimes and not be able to use it," Andreessen told Rogan.

Here's the thing I can't get past: Flock Safety is an Andreessen Horowitz portfolio company. Andreessen said so himself, mid-pitch, almost as an aside. He has a direct financial interest in whether cities buy and keep this product. That's not disqualifying—investors talk about their portfolio companies constantly—but it's load-bearing context that Rogan's audience deserved to hear framed more clearly. You're not just getting a tech policy take. You're getting a sales argument from someone whose fund benefits when the sale closes.

I'm not saying his facts are wrong. I'm saying: notice the shape of the room.

Now, the tech itself. 🧬

Here's where my beat actually intersects with this story, and it's the thing that nobody in that conversation touched.

Flock's capability—as Andreessen described it—is that it can identify a specific vehicle in real time, even without a readable license plate, using visual markers on the car. That's AI-powered object recognition applied to physical movement through public space. It's the same category of technology as facial recognition, genomic phenotyping, and gait analysis. It's reading your body's data—or in this case, an extension of your body, the vehicle you move through the world in—and using it to construct a searchable identity profile.

I write about genomics. We have enormous, ongoing fights in my field about who owns the biological data your body produces: your genome, your microbiome, your health records. The answer is murky and contested and varies by jurisdiction. But at least there's a fight. At least we're asking the question.

The data your movement produces—where you drive, when, how often, which routes—is being collected right now, at scale, with almost no equivalent public conversation about ownership or consent. Your genome tells a story about who you might become. Your movement data tells a story about who you already are.

Rogan asked the obvious abuse scenario: what if a corrupt official used this to stalk a political opponent? Andreessen acknowledged it, noted that everything gets logged, and pivoted to: "are you really going to give up the entire thing?"

That pivot is doing a lot of work. It's the same argument the genomics industry made when researchers started asking questions about data brokers and biobank security. Think of the cures we could find. Which: yes! Also: that doesn't resolve the consent question.

The Shot Spotter section of the conversation is where things got genuinely complicated.

Shot Spotter is a different system—acoustic sensors on rooftops that triangulate gunshot locations in real time. Andreessen and Rogan both framed Chicago's decision to discontinue it as pure politics overriding obvious public safety benefit. Chicago's own Inspector General's office, in a 2021 report, found that approximately 89% of Shot Spotter alerts resulted in police finding no evidence of gun crime. Rogan and Andreessen addressed this stat on air and argued it doesn't mean the shots didn't happen—it means shots fired in Chicago frequently don't produce arrests, because witnesses don't talk and perpetrators flee. That's a real argument.

But the 2021 OIG report also raised concerns that Shot Spotter alerts led police to stops and searches that didn't produce evidence of anything. The question isn't just "did a shot happen?" It's "what does the system cause police to do in response to an alert?" Those are different questions with different civil liberties implications, and the conversation on JRE didn't go there.

The equity argument—that automated enforcement disproportionately impacts disadvantaged communities—got labeled "the woke argument" and then answered with a single counter: victims of gun violence are also disproportionately from those communities. Andreessen is right that this is a real tension. He's not right that naming the tension resolves it. The same communities most harmed by gun violence are also historically most harmed by over-policing. Those facts co-exist. You don't get to pick one and dismiss the other.

Here's what I actually think, since my editor told me to stop refereeing and say it:

I think cities probably should be able to use tools like Flock. I think the Austin story is genuinely disturbing—people got shot while a useful investigative tool sat turned off. I think the argument that eyewitness-dependent crime solving fails high-crime communities is correct and important.

And I think the debate we're having is about twenty years behind the technology. 📡

My generation—your generation, if you're reading this—has never lived without location surveillance. Our phones log our movements. Our cars have GPS. Our faces get scanned at airports. We are already the most documented humans in history. The question isn't really "surveillance or no surveillance." That ship sailed when the iPhone launched. The question is: who has access, under what legal authority, subject to what oversight, with what remedies when it gets abused?

Andreessen gestured at this—"what should be the controls, what should be the penalties"—and then immediately moved on. That's where the actual policy work lives, and a three-hour podcast with a friendly host isn't going to get there.

Flock claims its system creates detailed access logs; I'd want independent auditors reviewing those, not the company's own assurances. I'd want the capability claims—that it can identify vehicles without plates using visual markers—verified against independent technical documentation, not just a VC's pitch. I'd want sunset clauses, warrant requirements for historical data pulls, and explicit prohibitions on selling that movement data to third parties. (Because if your genomics taught us anything, it's that data collected for one purpose has a way of being monetized for seventeen others.)

The Austin crime spree was real and terrible. The technology that helped catch the suspects is real. Marc Andreessen's financial stake in that technology is real.

All three of those things are true at the same time, and the fact that a major podcast treated only the first two as worth discussing is exactly the kind of gap I'm here to fill. 🧬

By Mei Zhang, Biotech & Genetics Reporter