New Concerns Raised About Flock's 'Mass Surveillance'

Our Take

Credit to Texas Scorecard for putting a camera on what a lot of Texans are already muttering about at city council meetings: Flock Safety's ALPR network is expanding fast, and the public conversation about it is not keeping pace. When a channel that usually covers state and local government policy starts asking questions about 'mass surveillance,' that's a signal the unease has moved beyond privacy advocates and into the mainstream.

The pattern the video points to is familiar to anyone who's followed Flock's rollout nationwide: cameras get approved with minimal debate, framed purely as a tool against car theft or hit-and-runs, and then quietly become part of a searchable, retained database of everyone's daily movements — accessible not just to the city that installed them but potentially to other agencies through data-sharing agreements few residents ever hear about. Once that infrastructure exists, the original narrow use case rarely stays narrow.

We say the same thing every time this comes up: sunlight is the fix. Find out if these cameras are already watching your street on our map, and if you want to push back on a deployment near you, our take-action page has the tools to get started.