East Greenbush flock camera debate: Who controls your data?

Our Take

Credit to WNYT NewsChannel 13 Albany for getting East Greenbush residents and officials on camera hashing out what so many towns try to skip past: the question of control. It's easy for a town board to approve a Flock contract in a quiet meeting with a slick sales pitch about 'solving crime.' It's harder when locals show up and ask who actually owns the plate-read data, who can query it, and how long it sits in a database waiting to be subpoenaed, sold, or breached.

That's the real fight here, and it's the same one playing out in hundreds of towns across the country. Flock Safety markets itself as a local tool, but the network effect is the whole business model — your town's cameras feed a searchable system that other agencies, and sometimes federal ones, can tap into without your town council ever voting on it again. 'Who controls your data' isn't a rhetorical question, it's the whole ballgame, and East Greenbush deserves credit for actually asking it out loud instead of rubber-stamping the purchase order.

If you want to see whether your own neighborhood already has these cameras watching your daily movements, check our camera map, and if you'd rather your town have this debate before the contract is signed instead of after, our take-action page has the tools to make that happen.