Sheboygan ends use of Flock cameras; what we know | FOX6 News Milwaukee

Our Take

If you ever wanted a clean example of why the ALPR business model deserves scrutiny, FOX6 News Milwaukee just handed you one. Sheboygan paid for Flock cameras, those cameras captured its residents' movements, and then — according to this report — Flock turned around and tried to sell traffic data derived from that same surveillance back to the city. That's not a hypothetical slippery slope critics warn about. That's the model working exactly as designed: the data doesn't belong to the town that hosted the cameras, it belongs to the company that owns the network, and local government is just another customer.

Credit to FOX6 for digging into what actually pushed Sheboygan to pull the plug, because most ALPR stories end with a city renewing its contract quietly and nobody asking what else is being done with the footage. Here we got a rare reversal, and it's worth asking why more municipalities don't scrutinize these deals before signing, not after getting an upsell pitch for information they thought was already theirs.

Every one of these systems is part of a bigger network that stretches across state lines, feeding a company database that outlives any single city council's oversight. Check our camera map to see what's logged near you, and if your town is debating a Flock contract, use our take-action resources to push back before the cameras go up, not after.