Flock camera staff spied on a kids' gym class over 1,000 times. Nobody was fired.
The short version: A YouTuber reports Flock staff allegedly accessed camera feeds to watch a children's gymnastics class over 1,000 times, with no firings — raising fresh doubts about internal oversight.
Our Take
Credit to Scientific Awareness for digging into this one, because it's exactly the kind of story that should terrify anyone who's been told ALPR networks are tightly audited and access is strictly limited to law enforcement investigations. If the reporting holds up, we're talking about employees at a surveillance company reportedly pulling up camera feeds to watch kids in a gym class — not once, but allegedly over a thousand times — and facing no real consequences. That's not a rogue individual slipping through the cracks. That's a culture problem.
Flock has built its entire pitch around trust: trust that the cameras are only reading plates, trust that access logs are reviewed, trust that misuse gets punished. Every story like this one chips away at that pitch. When the people running the system can allegedly browse live footage of children for personal reasons and keep their jobs, it tells you the internal guardrails are decorative, not functional. And if staff can watch a gym class without blowback, what's stopping similar behavior toward ex-partners, neighbors, journalists, or anyone else they take an interest in?
This is why we keep pushing people to find out whether these cameras are in their own neighborhoods before deciding they're harmless. Check our camera map to see what's nearby, and if you want to push back on unchecked surveillance infrastructure in your town, our take-action page has concrete steps to get started.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Scientific Awareness, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.