Why you should be worried about Flock Safety cameras

Our Take

Credit to Signal Fire for digging into a concrete case instead of just theorizing about Flock Safety's risks. When a DeKalb County incident becomes the example, it stops being abstract — it's a reminder that every one of these cameras is a potential liability sitting on a telephone pole, waiting for someone with access and bad intentions, or just bad judgment, to misuse it.

This is the pattern we keep seeing nationwide: a system sold to city councils as a narrow tool for solving specific crimes ends up being queried for personal reasons, shared without oversight, or accessed by someone who shouldn't have had a login in the first place. Flock's own audit logs have exposed this kind of behavior before, and the company's response is usually some version of "the system worked, we caught it after the fact." That's cold comfort if you're the person whose movements got pulled up by an officer settling a personal score or browsing out of curiosity.

The deeper issue Signal Fire is circling is one we hammer on constantly: there's no federal law governing how long this data is kept, who can see it, or what counts as a legitimate reason to search it. Local police departments are left writing their own rules, and audits only catch misuse after someone's privacy has already been violated. If you want to see how many of these cameras are watching your own neighborhood, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back, our take-action page has steps for getting this issue in front of your local council before the next contract renewal.