Flock Safety cameras don't want anything to do with law-abiding citizens

Our Take

The Free Press frames Flock Safety's cameras as a polite security guard that politely ignores you unless you're a kidnapper or a thief. That's a nice story, but it skips the part where these cameras scan and log every plate that passes, cataloging the movements of millions of law-abiding drivers into a searchable database — not just the handful of people who end up on a hot list. "Not interested in you" doesn't square with "records you anyway, indefinitely, and shares it with whoever has access."

The real issue isn't whether Flock catches bad guys sometimes — it's that mass, warrantless tracking of everyone's daily movements is the price being paid for it, with little transparency about who can query that data, how long it's kept, or who's watching the watchers. Framing surveillance infrastructure as harmless because you personally have nothing to hide is exactly the kind of narrative that lets these networks expand unchecked.

Check our camera map to see how much of this infrastructure has already gone up near you, and hit take action if you want to push back on it in your own community.