Surveillance Giant Flock Safety Demands Privacy and Tells Public to Stop Photographing Staff

Our Take

US Scope TV flags a detail that deserves way more attention than it's getting: a company whose entire business model is photographing your license plate, timestamping your location, and feeding it all into a nationwide database is reportedly asking the public to stop photographing its own staff. If that strikes you as rich, you're not alone. Privacy, it turns out, is a one-way street when you're the one selling the cameras.

This isn't just an awkward PR moment — it's a window into how these companies think about the public they're surveilling. Flock has built a business on the premise that there's no reasonable expectation of privacy in public space, that driving down a street means your movements are fair game for permanent, searchable records shared with police departments and sometimes ICE. But apparently that logic stops applying the second the camera points back at them. You don't get to argue that surveillance is normal and painless for everyone else, then clutch your pearls when someone points a phone at your own employees.

The contradiction matters because it exposes the asymmetry at the heart of the ALPR industry: massive, opaque infrastructure for watching the public, paired with thin skin about being watched themselves. If you want to see how much of this infrastructure has already landed in your town, check out our camera map, and if you're ready to push back on it, our take-action page has concrete next steps. Credit to US Scope TV for putting a spotlight on this one.