How a company behind home security cameras may be spying on you

Our Take

KMOV St. Louis is asking the question more local newsrooms need to ask: when a company sells you a camera for your porch, who else gets to watch through it? That's the exact blind spot that let Flock Safety blanket entire towns with ALPR cameras under the banner of "neighborhood safety" — quiet contracts, vague privacy policies, and a data pipeline most residents never agreed to.

Home security cameras and networked ALPR systems are converging on the same business model: capture everything, store it centrally, and let it be queried by police, corporations, or whoever else gets access — often with little transparency about retention, sharing, or oversight. Once that footage or plate data leaves your control, you're trusting a company's policies rather than your own judgment about who should see your comings and goings.

Credit to KMOV for digging into this instead of letting it slide as just another consumer gadget story. If you want to see how far this kind of camera surveillance has already spread near you, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back on it locally, our take-action page has concrete next steps.