You’re Being Tracked Every Time You Drive… Here’s How

Our Take

The Doubt & Devotion Podcast frames Flock Safety cameras as a freedom-versus-safety tradeoff, and that framing matters because it's exactly the pitch cities get before a single camera goes up. What rarely gets mentioned in those pitch meetings is that every plate, not just suspects' plates, gets logged, timestamped, and stored, building a map of where you go and when, searchable by police departments far outside the town that installed the camera.

That's the real debate hiding under the "safety" branding. A tool pitched for solving car thefts or finding abducted children becomes a permanent record of ordinary people's movements, with data-sharing agreements that let it travel well beyond local jurisdiction and little independent oversight on misuse or breaches. Podcasts like this one are useful precisely because they're pulling the conversation out of council chambers and police press releases and putting it in front of regular listeners who had no idea this was happening on their own streets.

Credit to the Doubt & Devotion crew for putting the question on the table. If this episode has you wondering what's watching your commute, check our map to see what's nearby, and visit take action for ways to push back in your own city.