Your Phone, Garmin, Fitbit, iPods Are Being Tracked Too? The Hidden Surveillance Behind Flock Safety

Our Take

Credit to Technocracy Dissident for pulling back the curtain on something we've been warning about: Flock Safety's cameras were never just about plates. If these poles are also grabbing Bluetooth beacons from your phone, smartwatch, or earbuds, that's a second, quieter surveillance layer riding shotgun with the one everyone already knows about. Two people can carpool, split up, and swap cars for months, and a system stitching together device signatures doesn't care — it's not tracking a vehicle anymore, it's tracking you.

This is the mission creep we keep pointing to. Sold as a tool for finding stolen cars and violent suspects, the same infrastructure quietly becomes a general-purpose dragnet capable of building a profile on anyone who walks or drives past a pole, whether they've ever been suspected of anything or not. There's no warrant requirement for driving down a public street, and there's no meaningful consent for your devices broadcasting in the background. That's the Fourth Amendment problem in a nutshell — the tech outruns the law, and by the time courts catch up, the network is already nationwide.

If you want to see how close this is to your own front door, check our camera map to find Flock installations near you, and hit up our take-action page for concrete steps — public records requests, city council talking points, and organizing tools — to push back before Bluetooth tracking becomes just another quiet default nobody voted for.