Flock Safety: Your Car Is Already Being Tracked

Our Take

Insight360 did something a lot of local news segments won't: they followed the numbers instead of the sales pitch. Flock Safety loves to talk about "community safety," but the real story is in the audit logs, and this one is a doozy. A single nationwide search, pulled from a Texas county's own records, hit 83,345 cameras at once. That's not one agency looking for one stolen car. That's a query touching a network that spans thousands of communities that never agreed to share data with each other, let alone with whoever typed in that search.

The 20-billion-scans-a-month figure is the part that should stick with you. Every one of those scans is a car, a plate, a timestamp, and a location, hoovered up regardless of whether the driver has ever been suspected of anything. Flock's pitch has always been that this is just a tool for solving crimes after the fact, but a system that logs the movements of tens of millions of ordinary people every month isn't a narrow investigative tool anymore. It's a nationwide tracking grid that any of 4,800-plus agencies can tap into, with audit trails that are only as good as the agency bothering to check them.

This is exactly why we built the camera map, so you can see what's watching your own street instead of taking a company's numbers on faith. If an audit log in one county can casually reveal an 83,000-camera reach, imagine what's sitting in the ones nobody's asked to see yet. Head to take action if you want to push back on this in your own town.