Data Centers Are Processing Your Flock Camera Data

Our Take

Credit to the Diabolical Bastards channel for pulling the lens back on Flock Safety's pitch. Local police departments love to frame these cameras as a neighborhood tool, but the footage doesn't stay local. It gets uploaded, stored, and processed somewhere else entirely — on servers owned by third parties most residents have never heard of and city councils rarely vet. That's the part of the surveillance pipeline that almost never makes it into a city council presentation.

This matters because every hop your plate data takes — from the camera on a pole to a cloud server to whatever law enforcement agency queries it next — is another point where it can be mishandled, breached, subpoenaed, or quietly repurposed. Flock's own audit logs have shown out-of-state and even out-of-scope searches happening already; adding opaque data-center processing into that chain doesn't exactly inspire confidence. Residents are told this is about solving car break-ins, not about building a searchable, centrally processed record of where everyone drives.

If your town has these cameras, find out who's actually storing and processing the footage, not just who installed it. Check our map to see what's already deployed near you, and if you want to push back, our take-action page has concrete steps for raising this at the next city council meeting.