Georgia students create petition seeking to get rid of Flock cameras in schools

Our Take

Credit to WQAD News 8 for covering this one, because it's a story that deserves more attention: high schoolers in Alpharetta, Georgia are circulating a petition to get Flock Safety cameras removed from their own school entrance. When teenagers start organizing against surveillance infrastructure before they can even vote, that's a signal worth paying attention to. These aren't abstract privacy advocates — they're the kids who get photographed and logged every single day just for walking into class.

Schools have become one of the quieter frontiers for ALPR expansion. Districts get pitched these systems as a safety upgrade, often with little public debate, and suddenly every car dropping off a kid or every student driver gets their plate run and stored. There's rarely a clear answer about who has access to that data, how long it's kept, or whether it ever gets shared with ICE, local police, or other agencies through Flock's national network. A petition from students is a sign that even the people these systems are supposedly protecting are asking: protecting us from what, exactly, and at what cost?

This is exactly the kind of local pushback we want to see spread. If there's a Flock camera near your kid's school or anywhere else in your town, check our camera map to see what's already been documented, and head to our take-action page if you want to organize the way these Georgia students are.