Why These Flock Cameras Are Worse Than You Thought

Our Take

Some More News does a solid job translating what we've been saying for a while: Flock Safety didn't win over American towns with a hard sell, it won by being cheap, quiet, and bureaucratically frictionless. No public referendum, no real debate about data retention or who gets to query your travel history — just a council vote buried in a consent agenda and suddenly every intersection has a camera logging your plate, your location, and your timestamp into a network that can be queried by agencies far outside your city limits.

The video's framing of 'worse than you thought' tracks with what we keep finding in our own reporting — this isn't a single camera watching a single road, it's a searchable, cross-jurisdictional database that was never put to voters and rarely gets meaningful oversight once installed. That's the part local officials tend to downplay: once your plate data is in Flock's system, you've lost control over who else can access it, for what purpose, and for how long.

Credit to Some More News for pushing this into a bigger audience than the usual surveillance-watchdog circles. If this is new to you, check our map to see how many of these cameras are already running in your area, and head to our take-action page if you want to actually push back at the local level.