The Camera Company Even Cops Are Abusing #privacy
The short version: Stranger Than It Looks lays out how Flock's ALPR network scans up to 60 plates a second nationwide, and how officers have already weaponized it to stalk exes.
Our Take
Credit to Stranger Than It Looks for cutting through the marketing fog: Flock Safety isn't selling a doorbell camera, it's selling a searchable, months-deep log of where every car in thousands of towns has been. That distinction matters. A single camera on a pole is a privacy nuisance; a shared national database that any participating agency can query is a surveillance infrastructure, and infrastructure gets abused because it's built to be used, not questioned.
The vandalism headlines make for punchy B-roll, but the video is right to point past them. Someone shooting out a camera in Tennessee is a symptom, not the disease. The real scandal is what happens when the system works exactly as designed and an officer with access decides to run a plate for personal reasons — an ex-partner, a rival, a journalist. Flock's response is always the same after the fact: new policy language, promised audits, a stern memo. None of that changes the fact that the data existed to be misused in the first place, and that most residents have no idea the network even covers their block.
If this video got you looking twice at the pole on your corner, don't stop there. Check our camera map to see what's actually been deployed near you, and head to take action for concrete steps — public records requests, city council talking points, and ways to push back before your daily commute becomes someone else's permanent record.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Stranger Than It Looks, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.