Fact check: Do you have any privacy in public?

Our Take

Credit where it's due: ReasonTV is tackling the single most common deflection we hear whenever we report on Flock Safety's camera network — "you have no expectation of privacy in public." It's a line that sounds like settled law but isn't. Courts have long recognized a difference between a cop glancing at your car once and a networked system that logs your plate, location, and timestamp every time you leave the driveway, then stores it for law enforcement to query without a warrant. One is observation. The other is a permanent, searchable record of your movements.

That distinction is exactly why groups keep losing this fight in the court of public opinion — the "public space" argument is simple and intuitive, even when it's legally thin. Mosaic theory, the idea that aggregating enough "public" data points creates a privacy harm the sum of its parts doesn't, has already shown up in Supreme Court reasoning on GPS tracking and cell-site data. Flock's answer has always been that each individual scan is no big deal. The real question, which this video is pushing people to ask, is what happens when thousands of those individual scans get stitched into a map of your entire life.

If you want to see how close that network already is to your own street, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back on a local deployment, our take-action page has the tools to get started.