Thanks for the perspective on this. Powerful tools like this are always a trade off. One hopes that America can have a substantive discussion about the positives and negatives.
to be fair, flock is not just an ALPR, but also uses video to capture all details of the car. They also offer continuous video, available for police playback, unlike other ALPRs. It also shares data into a central national pool rather than just a local department calling for the FBIs api key.
Even if ALPRs or toll transponders are not privacy-violating in a nutshell, surely the technology can become so big as to violate citizen privacy. to use your example, a cop following someone for a bit on a hunch might be ok, but following that person around all day and mapping their every move requires heavy justification even if the cops are doing the same kind of thing.
I think the ‘fingerprint’ of a car that Flock records is no more private or different to a license plate, i.e. colour/make/presence of a roof rack. It is also, from my anecdotal experience, really not very accurate.
The continuous video feature is also not available without requesting it from Flock and documenting a reason for it, it is not something an officer can simply look at default. What an officer sees day-to-day is a single frame picture.
On the last point, I think you are right - in that the Supreme Court acknowledges a cop can follow someone to find a traffic violation to stop them pre textually, but only for what might be considered a reasonable time. As of now, Flock only observes 1,700 miles of America’s 4 million miles of roads - I may change my view if that number becomes very different, but for now I don’t think anyone can suggest the level of intrusion is continuous or unavoidable.
my worry is not about individual cops abusing the systems, but the power imbalance that comes with departments having so much information. This also means I'm equally worried about the continuous video feature, and is also the worry with the national database. Flock has 120,000 cameras, with information from all of them being freely available to all 2,000 police departments.
The worry with flock, additionally, is precisely how scalable it is. Americans are worried precisely about the worry you mentioned: the number becoming very different.
This is also not to mention the drones they plan to roll out.
my point was just that it seems reductive to only focus on the ALPR technology within the article, since that I think very few Americans are worried about just that police departments are using ALPRs.
I think you are maybe misunderstanding the continuous video feature.
Flock sells CCTV video cameras, and Flock sells ALPR cameras. Continuous video is captured on the ALPR devices but only to record plates/cars as individual clips - those clips aren’t provided by default to departments only single frames, but the whole clip can be requested for a specific investigative purpose. There is no ability for a department to view the continuous video the ALPR camera captures.
If the retention period is set by Flock to be seven days, and departments must enter mandatory search reasons and case numbers, what do you think they are able to obtain from the data?
> but the whole clip can be requested for a specific investigative purpose
So that means the data is somewhere, and that's what I think most people are upset about. That our day to day movements can be recorded by a private company and then sold back to our public services. As a software engineer that has been around startups for the past 20 years, this data is the product and when a16z decides they need a higher valuation before the IPO we'll see more and more features that exploit this data that none of us had thought about. Finding stolen cars is a nice story that people can maybe get behind, but we're naive if we think that that is the end goal of this product.
What do you think would be gained by Flock selling to public service a 2-second clip of a car driving past a camera on a pole facing angled down towards a fixed direction? The single-frame already captures the vehicle's description and license plate.
Again, it's not about what they're doing now, it's what this is setting the foundation for. I understand that in many circumstances what is available to law enforcement is only brief clips of cars, but that's a limiter built in to the software on purpose. What they've given you personal access to as a LEO is *not* all that the system is capable of or will be capable of.
While a different product than the basic LPRs, they *are* capturing more high quality video in their private security contracts [1], that *can* do human identification. This part of the network is higher quality because you can wire in, you're not just on a backhaul solar + wireless connection. Plus it's on private property, so 4th amendment doesn't apply here. Once you start feeding more and more data streams into the system you can do all sorts of things: gait analysis, clothing re-ID, daily shopping patterns. Tie this in with their LPR that is storing tuples like (plate, vehicle_attrs, camera_id, timestamp, confidence) you can do things like anomaly scoring: "this vehicle is not normally in this corridor at this hour" paired to the parking lot video cameras that have higher quality video, you can now go see what the person in that anomalous vehicle went to go do.
Will it be abused? I don't know, maybe? Probably? I think to understand why people are upset with Flock you have to consider the potential as a whole, not just the technology as it stands right now. If you told me 2 years ago I wouldn't be hand writing TypeScript or Go code day to day and instead guiding an LLM through my git repos I'd have thought you were crazy. That's to say technological capability changes fast, so think about what a national network of video cameras and microphones unlocks 5 years from now, not as it stands today.
1. People are right to be anxious and on guard about this sort of thing. There’s no expectation of privacy for my car driving on a public road, nor do these cameras interfere with law abiding citizens’ lives (they help me). But there could be a slippery slope especially in such a hyper-partisan environment.
2. We really need to curtail qualified immunity. The incentives and culture it creates are corrosive.
You are right on point 1, I think. Of course there could be a slippery slope, without guardrails or safeguards.
I’m content that if almost all of the cops found to have abused it have been fired and/or arrested, like the Institute for Justice admits, there is a decent enough framework to prevent misuse.
On Point 2, I think there is likely to be a big QI case in SCOTUS within the next few years.
Viewed from the UK, it seems America is incapable of having a reasoned discussion about anything. And the obsession with the Constitution and what the Founding Fathers might have thought defies belief. Times change, technologies change, attitudes change - and all need debating. But, I fear, we are going your way.
The 2 No / unsubscribe comments don't exactly show much ability / inclination to weigh things up.
Ned, Seriously, Please don't insult our intelligence. If it's so positive and 'above board' why are all the police depts and employees cutting backroom deals or hiding this contract from the people in their towns (I can give you handful of examples only in upstate NY). Your argument holds no weight given all the dishonest machinations that police men, like yourself are using to install this survelliance.
Most cities or political divisions state if a contract is below a certain value, it can be executed by departments directly. Flock is cheap and basic, so it often is below that value. If it was more expensive, it wouldn’t sell, there are better products for more money. Most wealthy cities pay for and have solutions more capable than Flock - like New York City for instance.
Everything described in this article as something that flock doesn't do is an over the air software update away from being something it does do. I was eager to read an interesting counterpoint to the current moral panic but this is basically a cop saying "well it works pretty well for us".
Possible that WiP's UK perspective made this seem reasonable but in the US a traffic stop gone wrong easily and often results in the death of the person being stopped. You can in that sense maybe understand why this endorsement rings so hollow.
I'm against the death penalty for murder even after being convicted by a jury of ones peers. In the US we regularly see the death penalty for running a red light, failing to stop, speeding—on roads designed for speeding—because of an officer escalating the stop.
That takes loved ones away from their families, it harms the public trust in law enforcement, it tears the social fabric.
This is a serious editorial misstep from WiP and I would hope we hear from them about it.
“Possible that WiP's UK perspective made this seem reasonable but in the US a traffic stop gone wrong easily and often results in the death of the person being stopped” - this is the exact point made in the article and by @Sam Bowman when he shared it. Flock allows more precise, and less invasive, policing.
This may be more precise but I think it's hard to make the case that it's less invasive and an earnest, good faith reckoning with it should have been in the article, not the comments.
Cops made mistakes before Flock through incompetence/laziness/good faith, and will do so if Flock gets banned. You can find plenty of stories of people misreading license plates with their own eyes, and I guarantee a Flock camera misreads less than a human.
I don't think this response is engaging with my comment above and your replies are very fast. I think fundamentally I just expect more nuanced and considered thinking from anything promoted by WiP.
"often results in the death", saying something like this is clearly going to isolate a neutral party from your side. It is obviously not true and not helpful.
There's a tension here with your claim that internal audits will be sufficient to control abused, while also talking about how small and understaffed departments are. I work with local governments on risk management (although not law enforcement), and small agencies regularly struggle with these kind of audit and oversight functions due to lack of staffing and overall low levels of professionalism.
Which is why Flock is an advantage. The auditing is done by a well-funded tech company that is able to pinpoint abuse and use that requires further explanation. Small agencies very rarely audit use of their own software, or even CJIS systems.
I imagine you’ve had to stop driving too? It is always challenging to manage the trade off between challenging crime and believing an ALPR is tracking you.
I think the issue is that once a man is targeted for being taken off the board, flock lets you create his schedule and retroactively follow his movements. Building the case and charges after you've decided he has to go down. You find out someone is part of a MAGA group and now Flock has built you the entire network of movement even before a crime happens, for example.
How does it do that? A search (separate to hotlist driven alerts) in Flock requires a mandatory case number. You need to have pulled a case number which requires a reason, a NIBRS crime and an investigation - they can’t be generated for hypothetical fishing expeditions.
"For example, on June 12, 2025 Flock started claiming its new “Proactive Search Term Tool” would block any “impermissible” searches, such as abortion-related searches in states like Illinois that prohibit sharing reproductive healthcare data. But police officers quickly realized they could just input “investigation” or even “hehehe” as a search reason and it would be approved."
You can use the National Crime Information Center (how the FBI store the nation's criminal records) to find your neighbor's criminal record, it requires you to enter a reason in a free text box and you could enter "lmao because I want to." You will be returned the criminal record but guess what happens, you are audited and you are fired and likely arrested.
Departments get monthly records of Flock searches and Flock themselves flag suspicious or out of the ordinary searches and patterns. The Institute for Justice, which dislikes ALPR, themselves admitted that almost every single officer found to have abused the service was fired and/or arrested.
-Most officers were caught by victims reporting getting stalked, not audits.
" But only a few of the dozens of analyzed cases were initially discovered through internal investigations, according to media reports. Most incidents came to light only after victims reported the officers’ behavior to the police, typically in the context of a broader stalking allegation. "
-Institute for Justice said that, "The dozens of cases listed below are almost certainly an undercount.". For example the hehehe guys were not fired.
The hehehe guys had like 110 searched listed just as 'investigation'. The lesson he learns might just be to use some boilerplate term that never get flagged for audit. The cops are potentially using flock every day so 'trust us bro we changed the dropdown box' is not reassuring against a police force that WANTS flock to be able to do what they want.
The conclusion of "Flock allows me to leave you alone" is hilarious. Police budgets are bloated, the system is corrupt, and Flock (and other similar camera systems) are dystopian. Even if I consider this argument not fallacious, I'll take a few more stolen cars over this.
The reason Flock has been successful is because police budgets are strained. The average police department, as explained in the piece, has $1 million a year to spend and fewer than 10 officers. Flock is cheap and doesn’t need grants or new budget to pay for it. If department budgets were bloated, there are more high-tech and capable options - just look at New York City which does not operate Flock whatsoever but instead has a bespoke solution.
Not certain why I engaged, honestly. We are not going to agree on the "cost" of such systems or what is justified in the name of its supposed public-safety value.
One contradiction I noticed between two parts of this piece:
"...even if an officer gets an alert that a vehicle is known to be driven by a wanted felon they must themselves establish who is behind the wheel before having probable cause to stop it."
"A common issue from my experience is stolen front license plates being entered into a database and the innocent owners of the rear license plate being held on suspicion of car theft."
One then wonders, how does any innocent person end up held on suspicion of car theft, when the officer must establish who is behind the wheel before having probable cause to stop it?
Other than that, the author lists a few other moral panics as a categorical comparison to the Flock hysteria. But they're not all equal; for instance, COVID vaccine panic was much more emotional in 2021 than it appears today, following the Fauci revelations. Few people noticed back in 2020 when Scott Gottlieb resigned from the FDA and immediately took a board seat at Pfizer--after which the AstraZeneca vaccine rollout in autumn 2020 got sidelined over the exact sort of nebulous adverse reaction claims that anti-vaxxers were complaining about. Pfizer, curiously, was the first company given federal distribution authorization, despite AZ being ready to ship half a year earlier.
But the most apt comparison to Flock is data center opposition, and for similar reasons. While considerate implementation is often a net benefit for all participants, and local residents even get discounted electricity sometimes, careless implementation gives the entire industry a bad name. So it is with surveillance technology. I suspect that some of the hostility toward Flock stems from an attempt a few years ago to get Ring cameras [without owner consent] to upload their live feeds to local law enforcement when requested to do so. And this is what the author skips in the post, but it's a persistent public concern. There have been numerous past attempts by various agencies to systematically expand surveillance unconstitutionally, and Flock is perceived as such by default, whether it is or not. The author does make an excellent point that the people harmed are much more visible than the crimes prevented, which is always a challenge for any technology or govt policy.
Thanks for the perspective on this. Powerful tools like this are always a trade off. One hopes that America can have a substantive discussion about the positives and negatives.
Thank you! People will always have different opinions but I think it’s useful to get context of what Flock can actually do
to be fair, flock is not just an ALPR, but also uses video to capture all details of the car. They also offer continuous video, available for police playback, unlike other ALPRs. It also shares data into a central national pool rather than just a local department calling for the FBIs api key.
Even if ALPRs or toll transponders are not privacy-violating in a nutshell, surely the technology can become so big as to violate citizen privacy. to use your example, a cop following someone for a bit on a hunch might be ok, but following that person around all day and mapping their every move requires heavy justification even if the cops are doing the same kind of thing.
I think the ‘fingerprint’ of a car that Flock records is no more private or different to a license plate, i.e. colour/make/presence of a roof rack. It is also, from my anecdotal experience, really not very accurate.
The continuous video feature is also not available without requesting it from Flock and documenting a reason for it, it is not something an officer can simply look at default. What an officer sees day-to-day is a single frame picture.
On the last point, I think you are right - in that the Supreme Court acknowledges a cop can follow someone to find a traffic violation to stop them pre textually, but only for what might be considered a reasonable time. As of now, Flock only observes 1,700 miles of America’s 4 million miles of roads - I may change my view if that number becomes very different, but for now I don’t think anyone can suggest the level of intrusion is continuous or unavoidable.
my worry is not about individual cops abusing the systems, but the power imbalance that comes with departments having so much information. This also means I'm equally worried about the continuous video feature, and is also the worry with the national database. Flock has 120,000 cameras, with information from all of them being freely available to all 2,000 police departments.
The worry with flock, additionally, is precisely how scalable it is. Americans are worried precisely about the worry you mentioned: the number becoming very different.
This is also not to mention the drones they plan to roll out.
my point was just that it seems reductive to only focus on the ALPR technology within the article, since that I think very few Americans are worried about just that police departments are using ALPRs.
I think you are maybe misunderstanding the continuous video feature.
Flock sells CCTV video cameras, and Flock sells ALPR cameras. Continuous video is captured on the ALPR devices but only to record plates/cars as individual clips - those clips aren’t provided by default to departments only single frames, but the whole clip can be requested for a specific investigative purpose. There is no ability for a department to view the continuous video the ALPR camera captures.
If the retention period is set by Flock to be seven days, and departments must enter mandatory search reasons and case numbers, what do you think they are able to obtain from the data?
> but the whole clip can be requested for a specific investigative purpose
So that means the data is somewhere, and that's what I think most people are upset about. That our day to day movements can be recorded by a private company and then sold back to our public services. As a software engineer that has been around startups for the past 20 years, this data is the product and when a16z decides they need a higher valuation before the IPO we'll see more and more features that exploit this data that none of us had thought about. Finding stolen cars is a nice story that people can maybe get behind, but we're naive if we think that that is the end goal of this product.
What do you think would be gained by Flock selling to public service a 2-second clip of a car driving past a camera on a pole facing angled down towards a fixed direction? The single-frame already captures the vehicle's description and license plate.
Again, it's not about what they're doing now, it's what this is setting the foundation for. I understand that in many circumstances what is available to law enforcement is only brief clips of cars, but that's a limiter built in to the software on purpose. What they've given you personal access to as a LEO is *not* all that the system is capable of or will be capable of.
While a different product than the basic LPRs, they *are* capturing more high quality video in their private security contracts [1], that *can* do human identification. This part of the network is higher quality because you can wire in, you're not just on a backhaul solar + wireless connection. Plus it's on private property, so 4th amendment doesn't apply here. Once you start feeding more and more data streams into the system you can do all sorts of things: gait analysis, clothing re-ID, daily shopping patterns. Tie this in with their LPR that is storing tuples like (plate, vehicle_attrs, camera_id, timestamp, confidence) you can do things like anomaly scoring: "this vehicle is not normally in this corridor at this hour" paired to the parking lot video cameras that have higher quality video, you can now go see what the person in that anomalous vehicle went to go do.
Will it be abused? I don't know, maybe? Probably? I think to understand why people are upset with Flock you have to consider the potential as a whole, not just the technology as it stands right now. If you told me 2 years ago I wouldn't be hand writing TypeScript or Go code day to day and instead guiding an LLM through my git repos I'd have thought you were crazy. That's to say technological capability changes fast, so think about what a national network of video cameras and microphones unlocks 5 years from now, not as it stands today.
[1] From 2024: https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/new-ai-video-analytics-features-24-7-security-coverage-no-extra-staff-needed
I think this article is right but…
1. People are right to be anxious and on guard about this sort of thing. There’s no expectation of privacy for my car driving on a public road, nor do these cameras interfere with law abiding citizens’ lives (they help me). But there could be a slippery slope especially in such a hyper-partisan environment.
2. We really need to curtail qualified immunity. The incentives and culture it creates are corrosive.
You are right on point 1, I think. Of course there could be a slippery slope, without guardrails or safeguards.
I’m content that if almost all of the cops found to have abused it have been fired and/or arrested, like the Institute for Justice admits, there is a decent enough framework to prevent misuse.
On Point 2, I think there is likely to be a big QI case in SCOTUS within the next few years.
Viewed from the UK, it seems America is incapable of having a reasoned discussion about anything. And the obsession with the Constitution and what the Founding Fathers might have thought defies belief. Times change, technologies change, attitudes change - and all need debating. But, I fear, we are going your way.
The 2 No / unsubscribe comments don't exactly show much ability / inclination to weigh things up.
I think you’re right. It seems no different to the data center debate in so many ways.
Ned, Seriously, Please don't insult our intelligence. If it's so positive and 'above board' why are all the police depts and employees cutting backroom deals or hiding this contract from the people in their towns (I can give you handful of examples only in upstate NY). Your argument holds no weight given all the dishonest machinations that police men, like yourself are using to install this survelliance.
Most cities or political divisions state if a contract is below a certain value, it can be executed by departments directly. Flock is cheap and basic, so it often is below that value. If it was more expensive, it wouldn’t sell, there are better products for more money. Most wealthy cities pay for and have solutions more capable than Flock - like New York City for instance.
I don't know why they are doing that, but you need to articulate a problem before you can atrack the policy.
Everything described in this article as something that flock doesn't do is an over the air software update away from being something it does do. I was eager to read an interesting counterpoint to the current moral panic but this is basically a cop saying "well it works pretty well for us".
Possible that WiP's UK perspective made this seem reasonable but in the US a traffic stop gone wrong easily and often results in the death of the person being stopped. You can in that sense maybe understand why this endorsement rings so hollow.
I'm against the death penalty for murder even after being convicted by a jury of ones peers. In the US we regularly see the death penalty for running a red light, failing to stop, speeding—on roads designed for speeding—because of an officer escalating the stop.
That takes loved ones away from their families, it harms the public trust in law enforcement, it tears the social fabric.
This is a serious editorial misstep from WiP and I would hope we hear from them about it.
“Possible that WiP's UK perspective made this seem reasonable but in the US a traffic stop gone wrong easily and often results in the death of the person being stopped” - this is the exact point made in the article and by @Sam Bowman when he shared it. Flock allows more precise, and less invasive, policing.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/flock-safety-and-texas-sheriff-claimed-license-plate-search-was-missing-person-it
This may be more precise but I think it's hard to make the case that it's less invasive and an earnest, good faith reckoning with it should have been in the article, not the comments.
Cops made mistakes before Flock through incompetence/laziness/good faith, and will do so if Flock gets banned. You can find plenty of stories of people misreading license plates with their own eyes, and I guarantee a Flock camera misreads less than a human.
I don't think this response is engaging with my comment above and your replies are very fast. I think fundamentally I just expect more nuanced and considered thinking from anything promoted by WiP.
"often results in the death", saying something like this is clearly going to isolate a neutral party from your side. It is obviously not true and not helpful.
Yes, the article sounds like The Works in Progess took money from Flock (is this an advertorial?)
No such thing has taken place, nor has any money been paid by Flock directly or indirectly to me or the publication.
Unsubbing. This is advocating a surveillance state.
There's a tension here with your claim that internal audits will be sufficient to control abused, while also talking about how small and understaffed departments are. I work with local governments on risk management (although not law enforcement), and small agencies regularly struggle with these kind of audit and oversight functions due to lack of staffing and overall low levels of professionalism.
Which is why Flock is an advantage. The auditing is done by a well-funded tech company that is able to pinpoint abuse and use that requires further explanation. Small agencies very rarely audit use of their own software, or even CJIS systems.
i am unsubscribing because of this article.
I imagine you’ve had to stop driving too? It is always challenging to manage the trade off between challenging crime and believing an ALPR is tracking you.
Why?
No.
I think the issue is that once a man is targeted for being taken off the board, flock lets you create his schedule and retroactively follow his movements. Building the case and charges after you've decided he has to go down. You find out someone is part of a MAGA group and now Flock has built you the entire network of movement even before a crime happens, for example.
How does it do that? A search (separate to hotlist driven alerts) in Flock requires a mandatory case number. You need to have pulled a case number which requires a reason, a NIBRS crime and an investigation - they can’t be generated for hypothetical fishing expeditions.
I dunno man, it's not sounding good.
"For example, on June 12, 2025 Flock started claiming its new “Proactive Search Term Tool” would block any “impermissible” searches, such as abortion-related searches in states like Illinois that prohibit sharing reproductive healthcare data. But police officers quickly realized they could just input “investigation” or even “hehehe” as a search reason and it would be approved."
https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/tracking-alpr-cameras/despite-new-updates-flocks-creepy-cameras-remain-major-civil-liberties-threat
You can use the National Crime Information Center (how the FBI store the nation's criminal records) to find your neighbor's criminal record, it requires you to enter a reason in a free text box and you could enter "lmao because I want to." You will be returned the criminal record but guess what happens, you are audited and you are fired and likely arrested.
Departments get monthly records of Flock searches and Flock themselves flag suspicious or out of the ordinary searches and patterns. The Institute for Justice, which dislikes ALPR, themselves admitted that almost every single officer found to have abused the service was fired and/or arrested.
Institute for Justice doesn't seem to say that.
-Most officers were caught by victims reporting getting stalked, not audits.
" But only a few of the dozens of analyzed cases were initially discovered through internal investigations, according to media reports. Most incidents came to light only after victims reported the officers’ behavior to the police, typically in the context of a broader stalking allegation. "
-Institute for Justice said that, "The dozens of cases listed below are almost certainly an undercount.". For example the hehehe guys were not fired.
https://ij.org/police-have-reportedly-used-license-plate-readers-to-stalk-romantic-interests-at-least-14-times-in-recent-years/
The hehehe guys had like 110 searched listed just as 'investigation'. The lesson he learns might just be to use some boilerplate term that never get flagged for audit. The cops are potentially using flock every day so 'trust us bro we changed the dropdown box' is not reassuring against a police force that WANTS flock to be able to do what they want.
The conclusion of "Flock allows me to leave you alone" is hilarious. Police budgets are bloated, the system is corrupt, and Flock (and other similar camera systems) are dystopian. Even if I consider this argument not fallacious, I'll take a few more stolen cars over this.
The reason Flock has been successful is because police budgets are strained. The average police department, as explained in the piece, has $1 million a year to spend and fewer than 10 officers. Flock is cheap and doesn’t need grants or new budget to pay for it. If department budgets were bloated, there are more high-tech and capable options - just look at New York City which does not operate Flock whatsoever but instead has a bespoke solution.
Not certain why I engaged, honestly. We are not going to agree on the "cost" of such systems or what is justified in the name of its supposed public-safety value.
One contradiction I noticed between two parts of this piece:
"...even if an officer gets an alert that a vehicle is known to be driven by a wanted felon they must themselves establish who is behind the wheel before having probable cause to stop it."
"A common issue from my experience is stolen front license plates being entered into a database and the innocent owners of the rear license plate being held on suspicion of car theft."
One then wonders, how does any innocent person end up held on suspicion of car theft, when the officer must establish who is behind the wheel before having probable cause to stop it?
Other than that, the author lists a few other moral panics as a categorical comparison to the Flock hysteria. But they're not all equal; for instance, COVID vaccine panic was much more emotional in 2021 than it appears today, following the Fauci revelations. Few people noticed back in 2020 when Scott Gottlieb resigned from the FDA and immediately took a board seat at Pfizer--after which the AstraZeneca vaccine rollout in autumn 2020 got sidelined over the exact sort of nebulous adverse reaction claims that anti-vaxxers were complaining about. Pfizer, curiously, was the first company given federal distribution authorization, despite AZ being ready to ship half a year earlier.
But the most apt comparison to Flock is data center opposition, and for similar reasons. While considerate implementation is often a net benefit for all participants, and local residents even get discounted electricity sometimes, careless implementation gives the entire industry a bad name. So it is with surveillance technology. I suspect that some of the hostility toward Flock stems from an attempt a few years ago to get Ring cameras [without owner consent] to upload their live feeds to local law enforcement when requested to do so. And this is what the author skips in the post, but it's a persistent public concern. There have been numerous past attempts by various agencies to systematically expand surveillance unconstitutionally, and Flock is perceived as such by default, whether it is or not. The author does make an excellent point that the people harmed are much more visible than the crimes prevented, which is always a challenge for any technology or govt policy.
Really interesting to learn about the policing and privacy problems Flock solves.