Wildcard Probe Data Shows Promise for Detecting Flock Cameras! #flockcameras #esp32

Our Take

Credit to deamonmist for doing the unglamorous work of poking at Flock Safety hardware with cheap ESP32 boards instead of just taking the company's PR at face value. If ALPR cameras are leaking identifiable wireless signatures through probe requests, that's a crack in the 'trust us, it's just a camera on a pole' narrative. Community-built detection tools are exactly how we've learned what we know about this industry — Flock and its peers don't publish technical specs for public scrutiny, so grassroots reverse engineering fills the gap.

We want to be careful here: early probe-data experiments are promising, not proof. Wildcard signal matches can produce false positives, and camera hardware changes across deployments and firmware versions. But the direction matters more than the current accuracy. If this approach matures into something reliable, it could eventually feed into crowdsourced mapping efforts, giving drivers a way to independently verify what's watching them rather than relying solely on government disclosures that are often incomplete or outdated.

This is the same spirit behind our own work. Check the map to see what's already been documented near you, and if you want to push back on unchecked ALPR expansion in your town, our take-action page has concrete next steps.