Residents say they were unaware as Savannah HOA installs Flock cameras in neighborhood

Our Take

This is becoming a familiar story: a homeowners association, often a handful of board members, signs a contract with Flock Safety and suddenly every car entering or leaving the neighborhood is logged, timestamped, and searchable — without a single resident vote or public notice. WJCL's reporting out of Savannah shows how these decisions get made in board meetings most people never attend, for a surveillance system most people don't fully understand until the camera is already bolted to a pole.

HOAs occupy a strange legal gray zone. They're not the government, so the Fourth Amendment protections people assume apply to police surveillance often don't apply here. But the data collected — your plate, your location, your patterns of movement — frequently ends up accessible to local law enforcement anyway, sometimes through data-sharing agreements residents never approved and may never see. A private contract effectively creates a public surveillance dragnet, and the people living under it are often the last to know.

If you want to know whether your own street has already been quietly wired up, check our camera map. And if your HOA is considering a Flock contract — or already signed one behind closed doors — our take-action page has steps for pushing back, demanding transparency, and getting this on the agenda before it becomes permanent infrastructure nobody consented to.