Are Students Concerned About Flock Cameras & Privacy?
The short version: A College Fix campus vox-pop on Flock cameras shows how little most students know about ALPR surveillance — and that knowledge gap is the real story.
Our Take
Credit to Brady Larkin and The College Fix for doing something most outlets skip: asking young people directly what they think about Flock Safety cameras. The results, unsurprising to anyone who's covered this beat, are a mix of shrugs, vague unease, and the familiar "I've got nothing to hide" line. That's not a knock on Slippery Rock students — it's a reflection of how successfully Flock and local police departments have kept these deployments low-profile. You can't have an informed opinion about a surveillance network you don't know exists.
That's exactly the problem. ALPR cameras are going up on campus perimeters, borough streets, and commuter routes with little public debate, feeding license plate data into regional and sometimes national networks that log where you drive, when, and how often — whether or not you're suspected of anything. College towns are a quietly perfect testing ground: transient populations, limited institutional memory, and students who are busy, broke, and not sticking around long enough to organize against it. Ask again in four years and the cameras will still be there; the students who might've pushed back will have graduated and moved on.
If this video does anything useful, it's proving that visibility is step one. Check our camera map to see what's already watching your campus or town, and if you want to do more than shrug, our take-action guide has concrete steps for pushing back at the local level.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of The College Fix, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.