Hate Flock? Meet Axon, and the other ALPR vendors...
The short version: "Dad, the engineer" makes a crucial point: ditching Flock doesn't end ALPR surveillance if cities just hand the same data pipeline to Axon or another vendor.
Our Take
Credit where it's due: this is the correction a lot of celebratory headlines needed. Fifty-plus canceled Flock contracts sounds like a win, and in some ways it is — public pressure clearly works. But as "Dad, the engineer" lays out, most of those cities aren't shutting down camera networks, they're rebranding them. Axon, the taser-and-bodycam giant already embedded in nearly every police department in the country, is scooping up a lot of that business, and the older ALPR players who were doing this before Flock ever existed haven't gone anywhere either.
This is exactly why we keep saying the fight against automated license plate readers can't be about one bad-actor logo. Flock became the face of the backlash because it made nationwide plate lookups a checkbox feature, but the underlying architecture — mass, warrantless tracking of every car that passes a fixed point — is vendor-agnostic. Swap the housing, swap the login screen, the surveillance function stays identical. If your city council thinks it solved a privacy problem by switching brands, it didn't; it just switched vendors on the same rap sheet.
That's why local vigilance matters more than brand-name outrage. Check our camera map to see what's actually deployed near you, regardless of who's selling it, and use our take-action resources to push your council toward real policy limits — retention caps, audit trails, warrant requirements — instead of a procurement reshuffle that just changes the invoice.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Dad, the engineer, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.