Let’s talk about Flock Safety cameras. No need for terms. Just plain talk about something that is watching you more than you probably know.
First, what is Flock?
Flock is a company. That is all. Just a company like any business. They make cameras.
These cameras are not like the ones you use. These are cameras that sit on poles on street corners near your neighborhood entrance outside stores like Home Depot and along roads. You have probably driven past one. Never even noticed it. It is small and black. Often has a little solar panel on top.
Here’s what it does: Every time a car drives past it, the Flock camera takes a picture of the license plate. Saves it. Not once but every time, every car, every day all day and all night.
So the Flock Safety cameras is just taking pictures of license plates?
Yes, that is what it does. Here’s the part that matters.
That picture does not just sit on the Flock camera. It gets sent up to the internet into a computer system that the Flock company runs. That system remembers this license plate at this Flock camera at this time.
Now imagine there are thousands of these Flock cameras, not the one near your house but ones near your kids’ school, near your church, near your doctor’s office, near your friend’s apartment, near the store you go to every week.
Every time you drive past a Flock Safety cameras, it gets logged. Your car, your license plate, that location that time. Now do that for weeks, months, or years.
What you end up with is basically a diary of your life. Except you did not write it. You did not have the right to say no.
Who gets to look at this diary?
Mostly the police. That’s who the Flock company sells this to.
If a police officer wants to know “Where has this car been for the weeks?” they can search the Flock system and get a list. Which streets, which days, and which times?
Sounds fine if it’s catching a stolen car or a bad guy, right? Sometimes it does help with that. Police have used the Flock system to catch stolen cars and solve crimes. That part is true.
But here’s the catch: it does not get used for scary criminals. It logs “everybody.” The mom is driving to daycare, the man is going to his doctor’s appointment, and the teenager is driving to their girlfriend’s house. Nobody asked any of these people if it is okay. The Flock camera does not check if you did something or not before it takes your picture. It takes everyone’s picture all the time in case.
A Real Example That Should Worry You
This is not made up. This actually happened.
A police officer in Texas used the Flock camera system to search over 80,000 license plate records, pulling info from Flock cameras in three states, all to try to track down a woman. What did she supposedly do? She was believed to have ended her pregnancy in a state that’s against the law.
Now sit with that for a second. A system that was sold to towns as “catching car thieves and stopping crime” was used to hunt down a medical choice a woman made about her own body. Not a robbery, not a shooting, but a health decision.
That’s the danger of this stuff. It’s never really about “catching guys.” Once the tool exists, it gets used for whatever the person holding it decides matters. You do not get a vote.
“I Have Nothing to Hide”
I know that’s what you’re thinking. Most people think about that.
Ask yourself this: would you still feel fine about it if you knew someone was writing down everywhere you drove to every day for years and keeping that information somewhere you can’t even see or control?
It’s not about hiding a crime. It’s about not wanting a company or a random cop in a town you’ve never visited to have a map of your private life. Where you go to pray, where you go for treatment, and who you visit late at night. That is nobody’s business but yours.
How Big Is This Really?
Big. There are already more than 80,000 of these Flock cameras spread across the country in thousands of towns and cities in states. The Flock company started with three guys building cameras by hand around a dining room table in 2017. Now it’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
It’s still growing. More towns are signing up every month, usually because a city council votes for it after one news story without regular people even knowing it happened.
So What Do You Do About It?
Honestly most people cannot do much on their own. You cannot out-drive a Flock camera network.
But here’s what actually works:
– Show up to your town or city council meetings. These Flock cameras get approved in meetings that almost nobody attends. That’s where this gets approved easily.
– Ask your police department if they use Flock and ask them how long they keep the data and who else can see it. You have the right to ask. You have the right to get an answer.
– Talk about it with your neighbors. Most people do not even know these Flock cameras exist or what they do. Just knowing is the step.
The Bottom Line
The Flock company built a tool that watches every car every day, everywhere it’s installed. It gets sold as “safety.” Sometimes it does help. It also quietly builds a record of every ordinary person’s private life. Where they go, who they meet, and what they do.
Nobody voted on this. Nobody signed anything. It just showed up on a pole near your house, and one day it started watching.