Flock Safety LIED... AGAIN! ACLU Reports on Flock's Pattern of Lying to Cities, PDs & the Public

Our Take

Verified Privacy VPN's rundown of the Oshkosh, Wisconsin episode is worth watching because it's such a clean case study: a Flock representative tells elected officials, on the record, that the system doesn't build a heat map of where a car has been. The ACLU digs in, the claim doesn't hold up, and the council pulls the contract almost immediately. That's not a paperwork glitch. That's a company's sales pitch failing basic scrutiny in front of the people who are supposed to be protecting their constituents from exactly this kind of tracking.

Why does the specific wording matter so much? Because "heat map of vehicle movement" is just a technical way of saying pattern-of-life surveillance — the ability to reconstruct where you go, when, and how often, without a warrant, without probable cause, and often without your city council even understanding what they approved. Selling ALPR as a narrow stolen-car tool while it quietly builds exactly that kind of dataset is the whole controversy in miniature, and Oshkosh isn't unique. The same pitch, the same contracts, and the same capabilities are running in something like 5,000 communities right now, which means most councils that approved Flock never got a hard cross-examination like this one did.

That's the real takeaway: oversight only works when someone bothers to check the claims. Most cities don't have an ACLU chapter parachuting in to fact-check a vendor demo. If you want to see whether these cameras are already watching your streets, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not wait for your own city council to get lied to before they act, our take-action page has concrete steps for pushing back now.