Flock says its cameras don’t track people. Its own training videos say otherwise.

Our Take

Flock Safety has built its brand on a simple promise: these are license plate cameras, not people trackers. Atlanta News First's investigation punches a hole in that talking point by surfacing the company's own training videos, which apparently show officers doing exactly what Flock insists its system doesn't do — stitching together camera hits to follow a specific person's movements across a city. That's not a bug. That's the product working as designed, and the gap between the sales pitch and the training manual is the story.

This distinction matters because it's the legal and ethical hinge the whole surveillance network swings on. "We just read plates" is a defense against Fourth Amendment concerns, local privacy ordinances, and public pushback. "We built a tool that tracks individual movement patterns across thousands of cameras nationwide" is a very different admission — one that invites the scrutiny Flock has spent years trying to avoid. When a company's internal training contradicts its public messaging, the question isn't just what the cameras can do, it's why the company felt it needed to downplay it in the first place.

Credit to Atlanta News First for digging into primary source material instead of taking corporate talking points at face value — that's the kind of reporting this fight needs more of. If you want to see how dense this network already is in your own neighborhood, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back on a local deployment, our take-action page has concrete next steps.