Flock Camera Tracking PEOPLE Walking Found by Former Cop! #flock #FlockSafety #deflock

Our Take

Flock Safety has always sold itself as a license-plate reader company, a narrow tool for a narrow job. So when a former cop with a camera and a healthy suspicion of badge and business alike goes out and finds a Flock unit that appears to be tracking people on foot, that's not a minor technical footnote — it's the whole ballgame. The pitch to city councils has always been "we just read plates." If these systems are also logging pedestrians, that pitch was either incomplete or untrue.

Credit to James Madison Audits for doing the boots-on-the-ground work that most of us never see: walking up to the hardware, filming it, and asking the questions nobody at the council meeting bothered to ask. This is exactly the kind of independent verification that keeps a surveillance company honest, because Flock's own marketing material and vague privacy policies aren't going to volunteer this stuff. Once a network built to track cars starts tracking human bodies, you've quietly graduated from a traffic-enforcement tool to a general-purpose movement-tracking system — with zero public debate about that leap.

This is why we keep hammering on the same point: know what's watching you, and know who approved it. Check our camera map to see what's already deployed near you, and if your city hasn't had an honest conversation about what these cameras actually capture, use our take-action resources to force one.