I Investigated Flock Cameras and Its Scary. (it scans your face)

Our Take

Credit to Nokhostin for doing what too few people bother to do: actually digging into Flock's own marketing copy and poking at the gap between what the company claims and what the cameras can really do. The video's focus on 'the many errors' lines up with what we've heard for years — these systems misread plates, misidentify vehicles, and still get treated as gospel by police departments running searches off bad hits.

The claim that Flock hardware can scan faces is the kind of thing that should make anyone pause. Flock has long marketed itself as a vehicle-detection company, not a facial recognition vendor, so if a camera is capable of more than plate and vehicle attributes, that's a meaningful expansion of what's being collected on ordinary people driving through their own neighborhoods — with zero public vote on it. Even if you take the video as one person's investigation rather than a verified audit, it's exactly the kind of independent pressure-testing these companies should be getting constantly, not occasionally.

This is why we keep pushing people to check what's actually watching their streets. Pull up our camera map and see what's logged near you, then head to take-action if you want to push back on your city council or police department before more cameras — and more capabilities — get bolted on without debate.