Quick Look: Ring, Ring: The Rise of Ubiquitous Consumer Surveillance Systems
The short version: An RSAC talk on Ring's networked doorbell cameras shows how privately owned devices quietly became a crowdsourced police surveillance grid — the same playbook Flock is running with license plates.
Our Take
This RSAC session from Jeffrey Blatt is a few years old, but it nailed something we're still grappling with today: once you network enough privately owned cameras and hand police a portal into them, you've built a surveillance system that no legislature ever approved and no court ever authorized. Ring did it with front-porch video. Flock is doing the same thing with license plates, except instead of asking homeowners to opt in one doorbell at a time, it's selling whole city governments on blanket ALPR coverage of every road in town.
The throughline Blatt identifies — that "crowd-sourced" or vendor-hosted data upends traditional privacy law — is exactly why Flock's network is so hard to challenge with old legal frameworks. Nobody individually consented to having their daily movements logged; a police department just signed a contract, and now your car's location history sits in a company's cloud, searchable across jurisdictions with none of the warrant requirements that would apply if a cop were physically tailing you. The lack of friction is the point, and it's also the danger.
Six years on, the warning in this talk reads less like speculation and more like a roadmap of what actually happened. If you want to see how far this has spread in your own area, check our camera map, and if you'd rather do something about it than just read about it, our take-action page has next steps.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of RSAC Cybersecurity, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.