FLOCK REP CONFESSES TO AI SURVEILLANCE

Our Take

Credit to the channel not SENTIENT yet for catching this on camera. According to the video, a Flock Safety representative let slip during a city council meeting that license plate data swept up by these cameras is being used to train the company's AI models. If accurate, that's a meaningful admission — because it means the data isn't just sitting in a database for police lookups, it's potentially being repurposed as training fuel for a commercial surveillance product, with little to no public input on that use.

This matters because most city councils approve these contracts believing the deal is narrow: catch stolen cars, help solve crimes, maybe assist an Amber Alert. Nobody votes to hand a private company a free, taxpayer-funded dataset to sharpen its AI. If plate reads are quietly becoming training data, residents deserve a straight answer about what "public safety tool" actually means once the cameras go up — and whether opting a city into Flock's network is really opting every driver into an AI development pipeline they never agreed to.

Watch the clip, then check whether your own city already has these cameras installed using our camera map, and if this raises red flags for you, our take-action page has steps for pushing back at the local level before the next contract renewal.