Flock Camera's Encryption Key Was on the Camera

Our Take

Flock Safety has spent years selling cities on the idea that its cameras are a secure, tightly controlled surveillance tool — not the kind of thing a curious person with a ladder and a screwdriver could casually crack open. According to this video from Verified Privacy VPN, that pitch doesn't hold up. If the encryption key for a device's footage is sitting in a plaintext folder on the camera itself, you don't have encryption, you have a formality. Over 27,000 clips of license plates, vehicles, and presumably ordinary people's daily movements were reportedly sitting behind a lock with the key taped to the door.

This matters because the entire justification for blanket ALPR surveillance rests on a promise of careful stewardship: only authorized law enforcement will touch this data, it's encrypted, it's audited, trust us. Every time that promise turns out to be more marketing than engineering, it's worth remembering that these cameras aren't bolted to poles in a vacuum — they're sitting on public streets, exposed to anyone with the motivation to pull one down, and apparently to anyone with basic file-browsing skills once they do. A vendor that can't secure its own hardware against physical tampering has no business holding years of location data on millions of drivers who never consented to any of it.

Credit to Verified Privacy VPN for digging into the hardware instead of just taking Flock's word for it. If you want to see whether one of these cameras is watching your own neighborhood, check our camera map, and if you'd rather do something about it than just worry about it, our take-action page has steps for pushing back at the local level.