Are Smart Cities Watching You? The Truth About Tech & Privacy (Documentary)
The short version: Kendu Global Files' smart-city documentary is a good primer on tech-driven surveillance, but the real test is the ALPR cameras already bolted to your street corner.
Our Take
Kendu Global Files' new documentary does what a lot of smart-city explainers skip: it asks who actually benefits when a city wires itself up with sensors, cameras, and 'efficiency' software. Credit to the creator for framing this as a trade-off question instead of a tech-demo reel. The problem is that most of these conversations stay abstract — "smart cities," "data collection," "AI infrastructure" — when the surveillance is usually something much more concrete sitting on a pole at the end of your block.
That's where Flock Safety and its network of automated license plate readers fit in. These aren't hypothetical smart-city sensors somewhere down the road; they're already logging every car that passes, building a searchable history of where you drive, when, and how often, and sharing that data across police departments and private networks with little public oversight. A documentary can talk about smart cities in the abstract, but the ALPR rollout happening right now in thousands of American towns is the smart city's surveillance layer already live.
If this video got you thinking about who's watching and what they're keeping, don't stop at the thought experiment. Check our camera map to see what's already deployed near you, and head to our take-action page if you want to push back on the systems your town signed up for without asking you first.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Kendu Global Files., published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.