Flock Safety says its network has never been hacked. Benn Jordan says otherwise.
The short version: Flock says its 120,000-camera network has never been 'hacked' — researcher Benn Jordan found dozens of exposed cameras with no password required, proving the semantics don't matter to your privacy.
Our Take
Credit to Benn Jordan and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for cutting through the corporate word games here. Flock Safety's defense boils down to a technicality: if a camera has no username, no password, and streams unencrypted footage to anyone who finds the URL, walking through that open door isn't "hacking" — it's just "unauthorized access." That distinction might matter in a legal brief. It means nothing to the person whose license plate, daily commute, and home address just got logged by a stranger on the internet.
This is the same story we keep telling: a surveillance network built and marketed on the promise of security, running on infrastructure that treats basic security hygiene as optional. Flock loves to cite its 120,000-camera figure as proof of scale and trust. Scale without accountability just means more exposure, more agencies plugged in, and more footage sitting on servers nobody bothered to lock down. When a hobbyist with a laptop can watch your movements without credentials, the marketing about "public safety" starts looking a lot more like public liability.
If you want to know whether one of these cameras is watching your street, check our camera map, and if you think your city shouldn't be feeding a database like this, head to take action and tell your local officials this isn't the tradeoff they signed up for.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Atlanta Journal-Constitution, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.