These Roadside Cameras Track Every Car That Passes

Our Take

Emmy Steuer's video hits on something we've been saying for a while: the biggest obstacle to holding Flock Safety accountable isn't secrecy, it's friction. The contracts, retention policies, and data-sharing agreements are often technically public, but buried in council meeting PDFs, obscure procurement portals, or agency backlogs that make FOIA requests feel like a part-time job. Using ChatGPT to draft targeted public-records requests and decode legalese is a smart, accessible workaround, and we're glad to see it credited alongside solid sourcing from EFF and the ACLU rather than vague hand-waving.

What matters here isn't the AI gimmick, it's the underlying push toward transparency literacy. Most people have no idea their police department has a live data-sharing pipeline with hundreds of other agencies, or that plate scans can sit in a database for months regardless of whether you've ever been suspected of a crime. The ACLU's 'Get the Flock Out' toolkit and EFF's research on ALPR errors both point to the same conclusion: these systems expand faster than the oversight meant to check them, and residents are usually the last to find out.

If this video motivates you to actually pull your city's Flock paperwork, good. Check our camera map first to see what's already been documented near you, and if you want to push back on a new contract or renewal, our take-action page has templates that don't require prompting an AI to write your outrage for you.