Colonie group meets to discuss Flock cameras

Our Take

Credit to WTEN for covering this, and credit to the folks at Colonie Indivisible for doing the unglamorous work of community education. A living-room-style meeting walking neighbors through how Flock cameras actually work and where they're installed does more to build informed resistance than a dozen press releases from the company itself. This is how pushback starts: not with viral outrage, but with people in a room asking hard questions about a network quietly mapping their daily movements.

What usually gets lost in these conversations is scale. A single camera on a single road feels like a minor inconvenience. But Flock's pitch to towns like Colonie is never about one camera — it's about a networked system that logs plates across a whole county or region, searchable by police departments far beyond the one that installed it. That's the part residents need to understand before a town board quietly approves a renewal contract. If you want to see what's already been deployed near you, our camera map is a good place to start before your own town has its version of this meeting.

Groups like this are also proof that these systems aren't inevitable. Contracts get reviewed, councils get re-elected, and public pressure works when it's organized. If Colonie's meeting sparked questions you don't have answers to yet, our take-action page has concrete steps for pushing your own local government toward transparency instead of rubber-stamping surveillance.