SF group maps Flock cameras amid privacy concerns

Our Take

Credit to Sergio Quintana and NBC Bay Area for putting a local lens on something we've been saying for a while: if a police department won't tell you where its cameras are, someone else will map them. San Francisco activists doing this work by hand — walking blocks, logging poles, cross-referencing with what SFPD will and won't disclose — is exactly the kind of citizen accountability that keeps a surveillance dragnet from becoming invisible infrastructure.

The "data access and misuse" angle in this report deserves more attention than a two-minute segment can give it. Flock's pitch is always about the isolated hit-and-run or the missing person, but the real story is the audit logs nobody outside the department ever sees, the out-of-state agencies pulling searches with zero local oversight, and the total absence of a warrant requirement before your plate gets logged, timestamped, and stored. Mapping the cameras is step one. Knowing who's querying them and why is the harder, more important fight.

We've been doing this same mapping work nationally — check our camera map to see what's been documented near you, and if San Francisco's model inspires you to start logging cameras in your own city, our take-action page has resources to get started.