What Flock cameras do and why are they raising privacy concerns

Our Take

Credit to 13WHAM ABC News for putting a local lens on a national problem. When a mainstream TV station starts asking "what do these cameras actually do" and "why should we be worried," it's a sign the Flock Safety rollout has officially outpaced the public's understanding of it. That gap is exactly how mass surveillance infrastructure gets normalized — quietly, camera by camera, city council meeting by city council meeting, until it's everywhere and nobody remembers voting for it.

The privacy concerns aren't abstract. Every plate read is a timestamped, geotagged record of where a specific car was, stored and searchable, often shared across jurisdictions with little oversight on who looks at it or why. Local news segments like this one are useful because they reach people who've never heard the term ALPR but drive past one every day without knowing it. The real question station reports rarely have time to answer: how many of these cameras are actually in your town, and who approved them?

That's where we try to fill the gap. Check our camera map to see what's been documented near you, and if you want to push back on a system that was deployed with almost no public input, our take-action page has concrete steps for getting involved locally.