Is this surveillance company lying about their privacy tech?

Our Take

"End-to-end encryption" is one of those phrases that's supposed to make people stop asking questions. If Flock is telling cities and residents that their data is locked down tight while simultaneously admitting, in a legal filing no less, that they hold the keys to unlock it, that's not encryption in any meaningful sense — it's a marketing term stretched past its breaking point. Credit to Winnebago Watch for catching a local engineer doing the unglamorous work of actually reading the fine print instead of taking a sales pitch at face value.

This matters because the entire case for these camera networks rests on trust: trust that the company protects the data, trust that access is limited, trust that oversight exists. If a basic technical claim about data security turns out to be misleading, every other promise Flock makes to city councils deserves the same scrutiny. Encryption that the vendor can unlock on demand isn't a privacy safeguard — it's a single point of failure with a friendly name.

Local council meetings like this one are exactly where these systems get approved or rejected, often with little pushback because most residents never hear the technical details. If you want to know whether your community already has these cameras watching, check our map, and if you'd rather your city council hear pointed questions instead of a sales pitch, our take-action page has tools to help.