Flock Cameras Are Profiting from Invading Your Privacy

Our Take

Sick of this Show lays out something we've been hammering on for a while: Flock Safety isn't just a tool local police departments use to catch the occasional stolen car. It's a business model. Every camera bolted to a pole is a data collection point, and that data has value far beyond the city or county that paid for the installation. When a private company builds a nationwide surveillance network and then markets access to that network, the incentives stop being about public safety and start being about subscriptions, contracts, and growth.

The part worth sitting with is the claim that this data is quietly flowing to federal agencies. Local ALPR deployments are sold to communities as a narrow, local tool, but the architecture is built for sharing far beyond the jurisdiction that approved it. Once plate reads from thousands of cameras get pooled into a searchable national database, the question isn't whether it could be used to track someone's daily movements, associations, or travel patterns. It's who's already doing it, and whether anyone outside the company and its customers even knows.

Credit to Sick of this Show for pushing this into public view. This is exactly why we built our camera map — so people can see what's watching their own streets instead of taking it on faith that it's harmless. If you want to push back on a camera near you, our take-action page has concrete steps.