Flock says cameras don't track people...

Our Take

Flock Safety has built its brand on a simple reassurance: these are license plate cameras, not people trackers. InvestigateTV's reporting blows a hole in that talking point by pulling from the company's own training videos, where police are shown using the system to follow suspects "from location to location to location." That's not incidental data collection — that's a tracking product being marketed as one, internally, while the public messaging says otherwise.

This gap between what Flock tells the press and what it tells cops matters because it's the whole ballgame. Departments buy this tech promising it's just for solving crimes after the fact, but if the underlying system is engineered to stitch together someone's movements across a city — and some camera models are literally designed to follow pedestrians — then the "we don't track people" line isn't a technical distinction, it's a PR strategy. Credit to InvestigateTV for digging up the training material that undercuts the sales pitch.

If a camera can follow you from block to block without a warrant, that's mass surveillance dressed up as public safety. Check our map to see what's watching your town, and hit up take action if you want to push back before your city council rubber-stamps the next contract.