Flock Literally Tracks People

Our Take

Flock Safety built its brand on a simple reassurance: these are just license plate cameras, not a tool for tracking people. Creator Oh Yah Ai's video digs into that talking point and asks the question a lot of us have been asking for a while — if a network of cameras logs every plate, every timestamp, every location, and stitches it into a searchable history of where a car (and by extension, a person) has been, in what universe is that not tracking?

This distinction matters because Flock's entire pitch to city councils and police departments hinges on the idea that it's a narrow tool for solving specific crimes, not a general-purpose surveillance net. Once you build a database that can reconstruct someone's daily movements — where they worship, who they visit, what protests they attend — you've built exactly the kind of mass surveillance infrastructure the company claims it isn't. Words like 'cannot track individuals' start doing a lot of marketing work that the technology itself doesn't back up.

Videos like this one are useful precisely because they force the gap between corporate messaging and technical reality out into the open. If you want to see how far this network has already spread in your own area, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back on a deployment near you, our take-action page has a place to start.