Are Flock Cameras Spying on You? Flock Safety Executive Answers Privacy & Surveillance Concerns
The short version: Ryan Girdusky lets a Flock Safety executive field softball-adjacent privacy questions, and predictably the company grades its own homework.
Our Take
Credit where it's due: Ryan Girdusky's "It's a Numbers Game" at least puts a Flock Safety executive on record about retention windows, employee access, and whether plate data gets sold off to brokers. That's more transparency than most of these conversations get. But let's be clear about what this is — a company spokesperson answering questions about their own product, on friendly terms, with no independent audit, no outside privacy researcher, and no cop who's actually been caught misusing the system sitting across the table.
Every answer in these interviews boils down to "trust our policy." Policies are not code, and code is not oversight. Flock has already had documented cases of officers running plates for personal reasons, departments sharing data across state lines to skirt local law, and misreads flagging innocent people as suspects. A company exec saying "that's not supposed to happen" doesn't undo the fact that it has happened, repeatedly, in agencies that swore their audit logs would catch it.
The real question Girdusky's episode can't answer is the one that matters most: once thousands of these cameras blanket a town, who actually watches the watchers? Not a PR team, not a sales rep — the public, if it bothers to look. Check our camera map to see what's already been installed near you, and if your city hasn't had a real public debate about this network, here's how to start one.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of It's a Numbers Game with Ryan Girdusky, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.