Flock concedes privacy shouldn’t depend on ‘commercial incentives’ in letter to Sen. Hawley
The short version: Flock Safety told Sen. Hawley that privacy shouldn't hinge on 'commercial incentives'—a remarkable admission for a company whose entire business model is selling surveillance access to police.
Our Take
Credit to KMOV St. Louis for surfacing this letter, because it's a rare moment where the mass-surveillance industry says the quiet part almost out loud. Flock Safety telling a U.S. Senator that Americans' constitutional privacy shouldn't depend on 'commercial incentives' is the kind of line that sounds reasonable in isolation but is actually a confession. If privacy isn't supposed to bend to a company's bottom line, why has Flock spent years building a nationwide network of license plate cameras, cutting deals with thousands of police departments, and monetizing the data trail of everyday Americans driving to work, church, or a protest?
Letters to Congress are easy. Policy is hard. Flock can write all the polite concessions it wants in a letter to Sen. Hawley, but the cameras keep going up, the data keeps flowing to agencies with little oversight, and the company keeps cashing checks from a surveillance apparatus it now claims shouldn't be shaped by commercial interests. Words on paper don't un-ring that bell. If Flock actually believed what it told Hawley, it would be pushing for binding limits on data retention, sharing, and warrantless access — not just issuing a statement when a senator starts asking pointed questions.
This is exactly why independent tracking matters. Don't take a corporate PR letter at face value — see what's actually been installed near you on our camera map, and if you want to push back on unchecked ALPR deployment in your community, check out our take-action resources.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of KMOV St. Louis, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.