Flock CEO Says Cameras Only Take Photos. They lied.

Our Take

This is the kind of discrepancy that should worry anyone who's been told ALPRs are a narrow, limited tool. When your CEO goes on television after a major customer like LAPD walks away citing civil liberties concerns, and he suddenly describes the product in the most modest terms possible — a static photo, a plate read, nothing more — while your own sales materials are telling police departments the opposite, that's not a misunderstanding. That's messaging control. Verified Privacy VPN did the legwork here, laying out the blog posts, the archived pages, and the internal texts side by side, and credit to them for making the timeline easy to follow.

The gap between what Flock tells the public and what it tells paying law enforcement customers isn't a technicality. Live video streaming from a network of cameras that already covers huge swaths of the country is a fundamentally different surveillance capability than a static plate capture, and the public deserves to know which version is actually being sold to their local police department. LAPD had enough information to walk away from a three-year contract. Most communities don't get that chance because most residents never see the sales pitch, only the press release.

If you want to know whether your city already has these cameras watching your daily movements, check our camera map, and if you want to push back on a contract before it's signed or renewed, our take-action page has the tools to start.