Why Did Flock Do This?
The short version: A YouTuber pokes at Flock Safety's questionable hardware build quality, raising a bigger question: who's vetting the engineering behind nationwide ALPR surveillance contracts?
Our Take
Credit to OfficialPiggyPower for looking past the privacy debate for a second and asking a more mundane, more damning question: is this stuff even built well? When a private company is landing government contracts in city after city to blanket streets with automated license plate readers, "does the hardware look like it was slapped together" is a totally fair thing to ask out loud. Taxpayers are funding this infrastructure. They're allowed to demand it not look like an afterthought.
The bigger issue is that shoddy engineering critiques and privacy critiques aren't actually separate conversations. A camera network built cheap, deployed fast, and rubber-stamped by city councils with little technical review is exactly the kind of system that expands without real oversight. If nobody's checking the power design, how confident should we be that anyone's checking the data retention policy, the access logs, or who's pinging your plate history at 2am? Sloppy build quality is a symptom of a bigger pattern: move fast, sign the contract, ask questions never.
If you want to see just how much of this hardware has already gone up in your area, check our live camera map — it's genuinely wild how fast this network has spread. And if your city is considering a Flock contract, or already has one, our take-action resources can help you push for actual answers before the next batch of poles goes in.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of OfficialPiggyPower, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.