Flock Camera's LIED About Tracking YOU

Our Take

Kim Iversen is asking the question a lot of communities should have asked before signing their city council contracts: when Flock Safety says its cameras don't 'track' you, what does that actually mean in practice? The gap between corporate messaging and how license plate reader data actually gets stored, searched, and shared is exactly the kind of thing that deserves outside scrutiny, and we're glad to see creators outside the usual privacy-advocate circles picking it up.

We'll note that this video carries a sponsorship disclosure for an unrelated energy technology company, which is worth keeping in mind as you watch — sponsored content can still raise legitimate points, but it's fair to separate the messenger's business relationships from the substance of the claims. The core issue, whether a nationwide network of plate-reading cameras amounts to de facto movement tracking regardless of what any single company calls it, doesn't depend on who's paying for the video.

That's the bigger pattern we track here: marketing language about 'anonymized' or 'non-tracking' systems running up against the reality of databases that log every plate, every timestamp, every location, often shared across agencies and jurisdictions with little oversight. If you want to see whether this is happening in your own neighborhood, check our camera map, and if you'd rather do something about it than just read about it, our take-action page has steps for pushing back at the local level.