Concerned citizen speaking out about Flock Surveillance or as they call it “safety”.
The short version: A machine learning engineer's insider perspective on Flock Safety adds technical credibility to growing public pushback against ALPR mass surveillance branded as safety.
Our Take
Credit to Jacob Petrosky for speaking up from an angle we don't hear enough: someone who actually works in machine learning weighing in on how this technology gets deployed and marketed. When engineers who understand the guts of these systems start raising red flags, it carries a different weight than the usual civil liberties framing. The "safety" branding on these camera networks has always been doing a lot of heavy lifting to distract from what's actually happening — a private company building a searchable, retroactive database of everyone's movements.
The gap between what Flock sells to city councils and what the technology is actually capable of is exactly the kind of thing that gets glossed over in glossy sales pitches and local news puff pieces. It takes someone with technical fluency to cut through that and point out the obvious: this is mass surveillance infrastructure, full stop, regardless of the language wrapped around it.
If your town has quietly installed these cameras without much public debate, you're not alone, and you're not powerless. Check our map to see what's already been deployed near you, and hit take action for concrete steps to push back at the local level.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Jacob Petrosky, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.