Privacy Advocates Should Learn From Vegans: Ruin Some Parties
The short version: A clip from TheHatedOne argues privacy advocates should be as socially relentless as vegans — and ALPR surveillance is exactly the kind of issue worth being 'annoying' about.
Our Take
There's something to this. Vegans didn't win hearts and minds by being polite at dinner parties — they won by being persistently, unapologetically present until the social cost of ignoring them got higher than the cost of listening. TheHatedOne's point, clipped here by Verified Privacy VPN, is that privacy advocates have mostly played nice, and nice hasn't moved the needle. Mass surveillance keeps expanding because it's frictionless to ignore. Nobody loses a friend group over defending Flock Safety.
That's worth sitting with when you think about ALPR networks specifically. These cameras aren't abstract policy — they're bolted to poles in your neighborhood, logging every car that passes, feeding a database your local police department didn't build transparency into and often can't fully explain. The reason Flock's footprint has grown so fast isn't that people love it. It's that almost nobody treats it as a party-ruining topic. City councils approve contracts in sparsely attended meetings. Neighbors don't know the pole on their corner is a camera until someone tells them.
Being "obnoxious" here doesn't mean conspiracy theorizing — it means actually naming the thing, showing up to council meetings, and making surveillance expansion socially uncomfortable to wave through. Start by checking our map to see what's already watching your block, then use our take-action page to figure out where the actual leverage points are in your city. Credit to TheHatedOne and Verified Privacy VPN for framing the problem this bluntly — sometimes that's exactly what the conversation needs.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Verified Privacy VPN (vp.net), published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.