Flock Cameras: HOAs, Privacy, and Amazon Ring Parallels #shorts

Our Take

Revenge Of The Cis nails a loophole we keep hammering on: banning ALPRs at the city council level doesn't actually ban ALPRs. If an HOA, a private security patrol, or a neighborhood Facebook group can buy a Flock camera and pipe footage straight to local police, then a city's "we don't do this" vote is mostly theater. The surveillance still exists — it just moves off the municipal budget line and out of public records requests.

The Ring comparison is the right one. Amazon spent years building a private camera network that functions as a de facto police partnership, minus the warrant, minus the council vote, minus the public comment period. Flock's private/HOA deployments do the same thing but for vehicle movement instead of doorbell footage — persistent, plate-level tracking of who comes and goes, stitched together across neighborhoods that never had a public debate about it. Nobody elected the HOA board to build a mini surveillance state, but that's effectively what happens once the footage-sharing agreement with police gets signed.

This is exactly why we track deployments beyond just the ones cities admit to — check the map to see what's actually out there near you, and hit up take action if you want to push back on private-to-police data pipelines in your own neighborhood.