They Want Cameras In Your Uber? 🤔

Our Take

If accurate, this is the logical — and alarming — next step for Flock Safety's business model. Fixed cameras bolted to utility poles already blanket thousands of neighborhoods, but a rideshare vehicle moves all day, every day, through places stationary cameras can't reach: parking garages, apartment complexes, rural roads. Strap ALPR tech to a fleet of Ubers and Lyfts and you've built a mobile dragnet that can map where people live, work, worship, and go on dates, all without a warrant or a vote from your city council.

Credit to Julian Dorey and whoever surfaced this for pushing the conversation into the open, because this is exactly the kind of expansion that happens quietly through private contracts long before the public ever gets a say. Rideshare drivers aren't law enforcement, and riders never consented to becoming rolling surveillance nodes for a company that already sells location data access to police departments nationwide. The pattern with Flock has always been: deploy first, normalize it, then explain later if anyone asks.

We don't know yet how far along this idea is, but the mere fact that it's being floated tells you where this industry wants to go. Check our camera map to see how much of this infrastructure is already near you, and visit our take-action page if you want to push back before mobile surveillance becomes the next default.