Flock Kept 5 Years of Data It Promised to Delete 🦊🚔 #Flock #Privacy
The short version: Sheboygan's Flock contract promised 30-day deletion, but a sales email revealed the company was quietly building a five-year 'anonymized' dataset — so the city dumped the contract.
Our Take
Credit to Sly Decodes for surfacing the kind of contract language that should make every city council member nervous. Sheboygan, Wisconsin thought it had a clean deal: Flock Safety cameras, 30-day retention, personal data gone after a month. Then a sales rep's own email let slip that the same cameras were quietly compiling up to five years of 'anonymous' traffic data — volumes, vehicle types, speeds, patterns — that Flock could turn around and sell back to the city. Nobody on the council had been told that second data stream existed.
This is the part of the surveillance debate that doesn't get enough attention: it's not just about whether plate reads get deleted on schedule, it's about what counts as 'personal' in the first place. Companies love the word 'anonymous' because it sounds harmless, but traffic patterns tied to a fixed set of cameras in a specific town are not abstract statistics — they're a profile of how an entire community moves, built from the exact same hardware reading the exact same plates. Sheboygan's council didn't buy the distinction, and voted unanimously to kill the contract. That's a rare win, and it only happened because someone read the fine print and a reporter followed up.
Most towns never get that scrutiny. If Flock or a similar vendor is running cameras near you, check our camera map to see what's already been deployed, and visit our take-action page for ways to push your own council to ask the questions Sheboygan almost missed.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Sly Decodes, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.