That Street Camera Just Leaked 1.6 Million Photos Of You
The short version: A hacker collective's physical teardown of a Flock ALPR allegedly exposed 1.6 million images, proving these poles are far less secure than the companies claim.
Our Take
Credit to The2views for digging into this one: a group calling itself stegan0gram reportedly pulled a Flock Safety camera right off its pole, cracked it open, and walked away with a trove of data — as many as 1.6 million photos, according to the video. Whether or not every detail of that number holds up under scrutiny, the core story is damning enough on its own. A piece of hardware that's supposed to be quietly logging your comings and goings for police departments turned out to be vulnerable to someone with a ladder and some patience.
This is the uncomfortable truth DeFlock has been pointing at for a while: these cameras aren't just a privacy problem because they exist, they're a privacy problem because of how carelessly they're deployed. A pole-mounted box storing months of plate scans, faces, and location patterns is a honeypot — not just for police fishing through databases without a warrant, but for anyone willing to unbolt it. Flock markets itself on trust and chain-of-custody promises to municipalities, but a physical breach like this undercuts the whole pitch. If the device itself isn't secure, the data was never really protected in the first place.
If you want to know whether one of these things is watching your street, check our map before you assume it's hypothetical. And if your city council hasn't had a public conversation about what happens when a camera like this gets popped off a pole, that's a conversation worth starting — our take-action page has a place to begin.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of The2views, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.