The perpetual license in Flock's contract that outlives your city

Our Take

Credit to Verified Privacy VPN (vp.net) for doing what most city councils never bother to do: actually reading the contract. Their video zeroes in on a single word — "perpetual" — buried in Flock's standard services agreement. It means that even after your city votes to rip out the cameras, Flock keeps a royalty-free license to use the "aggregated and de-identified" data those cameras generated, forever, for its own marketing, development, and diagnostics. Syracuse's own reporting confirmed this isn't hypothetical boilerplate; it's how the company actually operates after termination.

This matters because it exposes the lie at the heart of the "just vote it out" argument that Flock and its police-department champions love to lean on. Local control is supposed to mean that if a community decides mass ALPR surveillance isn't worth it, that's the end of the story. But if the underlying data — and, per the ACLU of Massachusetts's findings on the separate agency-data grant covering footage, hotlist monitoring, and investigative search — keeps circulating in Flock's systems long after the cameras come down, then "ending the contract" is mostly theater. The company keeps the asset. You keep the exposure.

The lesson for organizers is simple: don't just fight to cancel the contract, fight to read it first, and demand real data-destruction and no-further-use clauses before signing anything. Check our camera map to see what's already watching your neighborhood, and hit take action for tools to push back before your city signs away data rights that outlive the whole program.