Hi friends. Want to share some local Flock Safety links here? I know it can hit rather close to home, so you may not want to share, and I understand that. But anyway, I have been in the local Flock Safety fight in communities near me, and this made me angry.
Here’s the issue: as long as public photography is legal, this is the inevitable result. By-definition you cannot have “privacy” in public. The best you can do is stop your government from paying for these services or prohibiting that information from being used in Court. But there will always be a market in gathering large amounts of public data and synthesizing it.
You may not be completely familiar with the issues here. Flock’s a mass surveillance-as-a-service company. The cameras are only the most visible part of the company. As you can see here, Flock Has a Powerful New AI Tool for Police. We Got Its Code | WIRED they’re pushing into Minority Report territory as fast as they can. I take what used to be a pleasant drive home from work on some side roads and these eyes of Sauron are pointed directly at my face the whole way.
The Supreme Court has made different decisions that make it difficult to guess whether they’d find that Flock’s mass surveillance, equivalent to stalking by a private corporation, violates the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights or not (since they’re hiding, for now, behind police to pretend at legitimacy), but they have found in the past that degrees of expectation of privacy do exist even in public.
At the same time, states like New Hampshire and Maine, with relatively sane laws governing ALPRs, don’t have very many Flock cameras. They’re almost illegal in those states.
A step further, there’s nothing in principle that prevents the good ol’ US of A from criminalizing data brokers. We should do that. If we had any laws, these people would be criminals.
So the cops are just straight-up lying. That’s cool.
They can do that everywhere except in court, while under oath. But you are not allowed to lie.
That is true that when out and about the courts have ruled there is no expectation of privacy and people are allowed to take photos and videos of things going on in the world. One of the problems though is how far Flock is taking this. Some youtubers who have made videos speaking out against Flock have found that one day a Flock camera is put up at the closest public land area to their property with the camera pointing in the direction of the persons driveway. Sure it is technically public, but that is also direct intentional surveillance of a specific individual.
Flock’s CEO has said publicly that anyone involved with actions against Flock including speaking out against them are people he considered terrorists, hence the need to keep them under surveillance. Of course, he apologized for calling them terrorists when it became too big in the media, but the behavior has still continued.
So just because a camera is on public land and viewing public areas does not mean it doesnt cross major privacy barriers. The company is deliberately placing US citizens under direct surveillance which has typically be against the law, and is using their technology to track specific individuals which is also illegal. Flock is saying “probable cause” on these individuals, because they are speaking out against Flock.
That’s a bit outdated view of it. The Supreme Court has been moving towards a direction that is limiting what is considered public domain. Of course, they are still sticking to the idea of “no reasonable expectation of privacy in public,” but a new mosaic theory of Fourth Amendment doctrine is emerging.
Essentially these have one theme: the Fourth Amendment doesn’t allow for mass surveillance because location data is a person’s own.
P.S. There are holes in this evolving legal framework still, but I think that if it goes to the Supreme Court, they will strike down, or at least severely limit, what the government can do with surveillance technologies like ALPRs.
Not necessarily local, but
Fuck my local government:
I think the closest one to me is about 15 miles away. So not currently an issue for me. I might venture past one once a month.
I agree that there’s generally no expectation of privacy in public. The bigger issue is how Flock is using that idea.
If someone speaks out against Flock and then a camera gets installed on nearby public land pointing toward their driveway, that feels less like general public surveillance and more like intentionally targeting someone.
The CEO has even called people criticizing Flock “terrorists,” although he later apologized. So saying the cameras are on public property doesn’t really address the bigger privacy concern. There’s a big difference between recording public activity and specifically monitoring individuals because they oppose the company.
Three different sources:
What went down? (from the perspective of a local group fighting ALPR in this area)
For all of 2026 now, the local Western New York anti-ALPR group has been in Cheektowaga town meetings speaking continuously in opposition of this technology.
In June, three people who work in the Cheektowaga PD (2 dispatchers, one dispatcher who was promoted to officer) were caught abusing the Flock system.
“Police said an investigation began after an internal audit found that the three dispatchers allegedly used the Flock automated license plate reader system to search for another employee’s plate over a period of months without the employee’s knowledge.”
From June until end of September 2026, the public was never told about this investigation. News of this was leaked to the local press.
From June until end of September 2026, the police department AND the town council continued to push and approve the expansion of ALPR in Cheektowaga while this investigation was ongoing.
The local Western New York anti-ALPR group happens to also have the Flock FOIL logs (including Network Audit logs) of this town going back years. The misuse and the “attempts to correct it” are in those logs. More to come on that.
Edit 10-6-26: “Crazy that one of the law enforcement misusing Flock is the son of a member of the republican committee in Cheektowaga and she is very vocal in the community. And his father is a retired Cheektowaga cop who also served on the board in 2024. I wonder how much strings they were pulling to get this covered so nicely.”
Here are two recent feel good Flock stories worth mentioning that aren’t local to me.
Folks who follow ALPR might recognize this one from a while back in Texas:
I would be somewhat “fine” if Flock only stored the data for 7 days, unless a court order was made to keep the reverent data longer. I could see some good use cases for that. But I don’t see why it needs to stay around longer.