If Flock doesn't sell data then I guess car companies don't sell steering wheels. #GetTheFlockOut
The short version: Chad Marlow skewers Flock's "we don't sell data" defense, arguing the business model itself is the product being sold.
Our Take
Chad Marlow's steering wheel analogy lands because it exposes the sleight of hand at the heart of Flock Safety's favorite talking point. Sure, Flock doesn't auction off your plate scans to the highest bidder on some shadowy marketplace. But that's not the point, and it was never the point. The entire business is built on selling access — to a nationwide surveillance network, to cross-jurisdictional search tools, to a subscription model that only has value because of the data it hoovers up. Saying "we don't sell data" while selling the infrastructure that monetizes that data is a distinction without a difference.
This matters because the semantic game lets Flock, and the police departments that buy its cameras, dodge the harder questions about consent, retention, and who actually gets to peek into that database. Every car that rolls past a Flock camera gets logged, timestamped, and location-tagged — not because you're suspected of anything, but because you own a car and used a public road. That's the product. Marlow's point, credit where due, is that corporate language is doing a lot of work to make mass surveillance sound boring and routine.
If you want to see how close this infrastructure already is to your own neighborhood, check out our camera map, and if you're ready to push back against it locally, our take-action page has the tools to get started.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Chad Marlow, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.