How Flock cameras track your car: What to know
The short version: FOX 5 DC's segment with privacy expert Harry Maugans puts a mainstream news spotlight on Flock's 12,000+ camera network and the surveillance risks it poses.
Our Take
When local news starts asking "how does this camera track your car," you know Flock Safety's network has gotten big enough to notice. FOX 5 Washington DC brought in cybersecurity and data privacy expert Harry Maugans to walk viewers through the basics, and the fact that this is now standard nightly-news material tells you how normalized mass license plate tracking has become in just a few years.
The number that should stop you cold isn't new to regular readers here, but it bears repeating every time it surfaces in mainstream coverage: over 12,000 of these cameras, quietly logging plates, timestamps, and locations, feeding a searchable database that thousands of police departments and, increasingly, private actors can query. No warrant, no notice, no real oversight in most jurisdictions. That's not a tool for solving one crime — it's an infrastructure for tracking everyone, all the time, just in case.
Segments like this matter because they push the conversation past the tech-industry talking points and into living rooms where people are realizing their daily commute is being cataloged. If you want to see how close this surveillance grid is to your own neighborhood, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back, our take-action page has concrete steps for getting these cameras out of your city.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of FOX 5 Washington DC, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.