Corporations or the government: which would you rather hide from?

Our Take

Verified Privacy VPN poses a fun thought experiment — corporations or government, pick your poison — but here at DeFlock we'd argue the premise is already outdated. Flock Safety is the living proof that the "two categories collapsing into one" isn't a five-to-ten-year prediction, it's current events. A private company builds the cameras, private company owns the database, and then local police departments across the country just... plug in. No warrant, no public vote in most towns, just a vendor contract and a dashboard full of your neighbors' plate reads, travel patterns, and location history.

That's exactly the trap the video's second contestant seems to sense when they answer "government, every time" without hesitation — because government can jail you, subpoena you, put a SWAT team on your doorstep based on a bad match. But the uncomfortable truth is that Flock's corporate ALPR network is the pipe connecting both fears at once: commercial infrastructure feeding law enforcement decision-making, with almost none of the oversight either side promised when they were supposedly separate threats.

So instead of treating this as a hypothetical game show question, treat it as a map. Go check our camera map to see how much of this merged public-private surveillance grid is already sitting on poles in your own city, and then hit up take-action if you want to do something about it instead of just picking a side in a thought experiment. Credit to Verified Privacy VPN for the format — it's a good conversation starter, even if reality has already answered the question for us.