Against Flock? What about Amazon? | Patrick Carr Live

Our Take

Patrick Carr's video takes on a common deflection we hear constantly in the ALPR debate: 'why worry about Flock cameras when Amazon already knows everything about you?' It's worth watching because this whataboutism is one of the most effective ways surveillance companies and their boosters shut down criticism before it even gets started.

Here's the distinction that gets lost: you can choose not to buy from Amazon, delete your account, pay cash, use a burner phone. You cannot choose to stop driving on public roads past a Flock camera that logs your plate, location, and time, then hands that data to police departments and sometimes federal agencies without a warrant. One is a company trying to sell you stuff. The other is a government-adjacent surveillance net that treats every driver like a suspect, retained and searchable long after the fact. Conflating the two lets the actual accountability questions — who can query this data, how long is it kept, what oversight exists — slide right past.

We appreciate Carr pushing back on lazy equivalence instead of letting it pass as a gotcha. If you want to see how far this infrastructure has spread in your own town, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back locally, our take-action page has concrete next steps.