Who Owns Government Surveillance Data?
The short version: A Michigan county won't say who controls Flock ALPR data collected on its own residents, and that opacity is the whole surveillance problem in miniature.
Our Take
Credit to the Mackinac Center for doing the unglamorous work of filing records requests and running into a wall. Genesee County's refusal to disclose basic terms about its Flock Safety contract — who owns the plate scans, who can query them, how long they're kept — isn't a paperwork snag. It's the default posture of this industry: deploy first, explain never. When a public agency can't or won't tell taxpayers who controls data gathered from public roads with public money, that's not a technicality, that's a governance failure.
This is the pattern we track across the country. Flock markets itself to small counties and city councils as a crime-fighting convenience, but the back-end questions — vendor access, data retention, interagency sharing, audit logs — rarely get answered until a reporter or watchdog forces the issue. Genesee County residents still don't know the basics about a system quietly logging their movements every time they drive past a camera. That should bother people regardless of politics.
If you want to see whether your own neighborhood has one of these cameras, check our map, and if you're ready to push your local officials for the same answers Mackinac Center couldn't get, start with our action guide.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Mackinac Center, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.