The contract says 30 days, the license say perpetual

Our Take

Credit to Magnetic Norse for digging into the fine print most of us skip past. Flock's public pitch has always leaned on the 30-day retention window as the reassurance card: 'don't worry, we delete it.' But contracts and license terms are where the real policy lives, and if that language carves out perpetual rights to the data, metadata, or whatever Flock's algorithms derive from your plate scan, the 30-day line becomes more marketing than safeguard.

This distinction matters because retention policy is the entire ballgame for a dragnet system. A camera that deletes data in a month is a privacy inconvenience. A camera network whose vendor retains perpetual rights to analyze, aggregate, or resell derived data is something else entirely — a permanent record of your movements dressed up in a temporary-looking wrapper. Cities approve these contracts assuming the plain-language press release is the whole story, not the license addendum buried in procurement paperwork.

If your town has a Flock contract, pull it and read the retention and data-rights clauses yourself — don't take the vendor's FAQ page at face value. Check our camera map to see what's already deployed near you, and use our take-action guide to push your council for the actual contract language before the next renewal.