What are flock cameras? #personalinjury #legalseries #flockcameras #stubborninjuryattorney

Our Take

Credit to Malnar Injury Law's "Stubborn Attorney" series for putting Flock cameras in front of an audience that mostly thinks about them in terms of car crashes, not civil liberties. It's a useful entry point: yes, ALPR footage can help identify a hit-and-run driver, and that's the pitch Flock Safety leans on hardest when selling city councils and HOAs on a network of cameras logging every plate that passes by.

But "useful after a hit-and-run" is doing a lot of work in that title. The same system that flags a fleeing driver is quietly building a searchable timeline of everywhere the rest of us drive, whether we're suspected of anything or not. Attorneys are right to flag the "bigger questions about privacy and location data" — the problem is those questions rarely get answered before the cameras go up. Data-sharing agreements between agencies, vague retention policies, and searches that don't require a warrant are the norm, not the exception.

If a lawyer's two-minute explainer has you wondering how many of these cameras are already watching your commute, check our camera map to see what's been documented near you, and if you want to push back at the local level, our take-action resources walk you through it.