New trouble brewing for Flock cameras, officer says they could be putting people's info at risk
The short version: A YouTuber digs into Flock's own patent language, showing the system is engineered to link cameras into tracking networks despite the company's 'not live tracking' claims.
Our Take
Credit to RickieBobbieNO26 for doing something more reporters should do: reading the patent instead of the press release. Flock's public FAQ insists each camera capture is a "standalone vehicle event" and that the network isn't built for live tracking. But patents are legal documents meant to describe what a system actually does, not what a marketing team wants the public to believe. If the filing describes stitching together footage from unrelated cameras into a unified object-based query system, that's not a standalone anything — that's a tracking architecture, full stop.
This gap between what Flock says and what Flock built is exactly why patent documents, procurement contracts, and technical filings matter more than corporate talking points. Companies selling surveillance infrastructure to local governments have every incentive to downplay capability when they're facing city councils, but the engineering doesn't lie. If the system was designed from day one to connect cameras across jurisdictions and link vehicle events over time, then the privacy reassurances given to the public were never going to hold up once someone actually read the fine print.
Residents deserve to know whether the cameras near them are part of this kind of networked system, not just isolated plate readers. Check our map to see what's been deployed in your area, and if you want to push back on it locally, our take-action page has the tools to start that fight.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of RickieBobbieNO26, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.