These Cameras Can Remember Where Your Car Has Been

Our Take

Obsidian Archive's short cuts through the marketing fog in under a minute: a single ALPR ping is just a timestamp and a location, but Flock's whole business model depends on stacking those pings until they form a pattern — where you sleep, where you worship, who you visit at 2 a.m. That's the part the company's press releases tend to gloss over.

The video's nod to Flock's default 30-day rolling deletion is worth sitting with too. Retention policies are configurable, agencies can extend them, and 'default' isn't a legal guarantee — it's a setting. Thirty days is also plenty of time to reconstruct a lot of movement if someone with access decides to go looking, whether that's a cop, a hacker, or an employee misusing the system, all of which have already happened elsewhere.

We appreciate Obsidian Archive tracing this back further than most coverage bothers to — surveillance-by-plate isn't a 2020s invention, it's an old idea wearing a cloud-connected AI camera. That history matters because it shows these systems don't get rolled back on their own; people have to push. Check our camera map to see what's been installed near you, and hit take action if you want to do something about it.