You Can't Hide in a Smart City 🚗 Flock Safety Debate #surveillance

Our Take

Verified Privacy VPN's clip is a quick gut-punch: the promise of anonymity in public is basically gone once a city blankets its streets with Flock Safety cameras. It's a short, punchy format, so don't expect a deep technical breakdown — but the core point lands. Every time your plate rolls past one of these units, it's logged, timestamped, and stored, building a map of your movements that you never agreed to and can't opt out of.

What makes this worth sharing isn't new data, it's framing. Most people still picture ALPRs as a handful of cameras watching for stolen cars. The reality is a growing lattice of fixed and mobile readers feeding a shared database that police departments, and sometimes private entities, can query well beyond the original 'public safety' justification. A VPN can scramble your online footprint, but it does nothing for the physical trail your car leaves on a Flock-equipped street — that's a civic problem, not a browser setting.

Credit to the creator for putting Flock in front of a privacy-focused audience that might not otherwise think about license plate surveillance. If this clip got your attention, check our map to see how close the nearest camera is to your home, and visit take action for concrete steps to push back at the local level.