The Doorbell With No Delete Button: Ring's Secret
The short version: Tech Exposed shows how FTC 'deletion' orders can't unbake facial data from AI models — a lesson that applies directly to Flock's ALPR network too.
Our Take
Tech Exposed lays out something we've been saying about Flock Safety for years, just from the doorbell-camera angle: a government order to stop collecting data isn't the same as making that data disappear. The FTC proved Ring broke the law and ordered Amazon to destroy what it illegally gathered, but once faces, voices, and behavioral patterns get baked into a trained model, 'deletion' becomes a legal fiction. The underlying math doesn't forget just because a settlement says it has to.
Swap 'facial recognition pipeline' for 'license plate recognition network' and you've basically described the Flock problem. Thousands of ALPR cameras are feeding plate reads, timestamps, and location patterns into databases shared across police departments and private networks, often with little transparency about retention, model training, or who ends up with copies downstream. If a court can't fully claw back what Ring built from doorbell footage, don't expect a tidy fix when it's your daily commute getting logged by a camera on a utility pole.
Credit to Tech Exposed for digging into the settlement documents instead of just repeating the headline. The real takeaway: oversight after the fact is weak medicine against infrastructure built to watch continuously. Go see what's already watching your street on our camera map, and if you want to push back locally, our take-action page has concrete steps.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Tech Exposed, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.