Hackers Stole Flock’s Camera Software. It Shows How the Company Tracks Cars and People

Our Take

When outside researchers have to rip a camera off a pole just to see what it's actually doing, that tells you everything about how little transparency Flock has offered the public in the first place. Credit to 404 Media for digging into the guts of this hardware and showing, in granular technical detail, what we've been saying for years: these aren't simple traffic cameras, they're rolling databases of where you've been and who you were with.

The real story here isn't that hackers found something shocking buried deep in secret code. It's that the capability was there all along, running quietly on poles in thousands of towns, with almost no public oversight of what gets logged, how long it's kept, or who can query it. A leak shouldn't be the only way citizens learn how a surveillance network in their own neighborhood actually functions.

If there's a Flock camera reading plates near you, you deserve to know about it before a hacker has to prove it exists. Check our camera map to see what's already been documented in your area, and if you want to push back on these systems locally, our take-action page has concrete steps for getting involved.