You’ve probably driven past one of their cameras. Slim, unassuming, bolted to a pole at an intersection near your neighborhood. You might have assumed it was a traffic camera. It wasn’t. It was a Flock Safety ALPR — automated license plate reader — and it was logging your car, your location, and the exact time you passed through.
And the company that put it there? They’ve been lying to the people who approved it.
Not once. Not twice. Repeatedly, across the country, to city councils, police departments, and the public they claim to serve.
When a surveillance company tells you it cares about your privacy, check your wallet. Then check your streets.
Here’s what makes this maddening: Flock Safety didn’t just sell cameras. They sold a story. The story was that they were different — a privacy-conscious partner, a company that worked with civil liberties groups, a tech firm that understood the weight of what it was building. They even claimed to collaborate with the ACLU.
They didn’t. The ACLU never asked for their partnership. The ACLU is the one calling them out.
That’s not a misunderstanding. That’s not a miscommunication. That’s a company weaponizing the credibility of an organization built to protect your rights — to erode those very rights.
Think about what happens in a city council meeting. Elected officials, most of whom are not technologists, sit through a polished presentation. A Flock representative shows slides about crime reduction. They mention privacy safeguards. They drop the ACLU name like a shield. And the council votes yes, because who would oppose public safety?
The most dangerous lie isn’t the one that hides the truth. It’s the one that borrows the credibility of the people fighting for it.
This is where the story gets bigger than Flock. Because the real damage isn’t any single camera or any single contract. The real damage is systemic. Every time a company like Flock lies to a city council, it doesn’t just burn its own credibility — it torches the social license for every technology company trying to work with communities in good faith.
You want to know why people don’t trust smart city initiatives? This. You want to know why privacy advocates fight every new deployment tooth and nail? This. You want to know why a legitimate surveillance technology with real safeguards gets killed in committee? Because Flock made it impossible to tell the difference between a partner and a predator.
The comment sections tell you everything. “Were they ever credible?” someone asks. That’s not curiosity — that’s exhaustion. It’s the sound of a public that has been lied to so many times that the default assumption is deception. When “words don’t mean anything” becomes the cultural baseline, democracy doesn’t function. You can’t have informed consent when the information is manufactured.
And then there’s the infrastructure itself. Commenters point out that Flock and companies like it install cameras on poles that don’t comply with highway safety standards. So even the physical hardware — the thing you can actually see and touch — is cutting corners. If they’ll cut corners on a pole, what are they doing with your data?
A company that lies about who its friends are will absolutely lie about what it does with your data. The lie is never isolated. It’s a culture.
Here’s the twist nobody wants to hear: the surveillance state isn’t coming. It’s here. It arrived quietly, pole by pole, contract by contract, in city council meetings that you didn’t attend. And it didn’t arrive because of some government conspiracy. It arrived because a private company told enough lies to enough people who didn’t have the time or expertise to check.
If a politician advocates for surveillance cameras in your neighborhood, ask them one question: who verified the claims? Not the company’s claims about crime reduction. Not their claims about data retention. Ask who verified the company’s claims about who they are.
Because Flock Safety just proved that the answer, far too often, is nobody.
The cameras are watching. The question is whether anyone is watching the company that installed them.
FAQ
Q: Weren't they always just another surveillance company? Why is anyone surprised?
A: You're right that skepticism was warranted from day one. But the issue isn't surprise — it's that Flock actively manufactured a false image of being privacy-conscious, even name-dropping the ACLU. That's not just being a surveillance company; that's being a surveillance company in a privacy costume. The deception is the story, not the surveillance itself.
Q: What does this mean for other surveillance tech companies?
A: It means they're collateral damage. Every legitimate company with real privacy safeguards now has to climb out of a hole Flock dug. City councils will be more suspicious, public meetings will be more hostile, and contracts will take longer — all because one company decided lies were cheaper than honesty.
Q: Isn't the real problem that we allow surveillance at all, not that one company lied?
A: Both are true, but they're connected. The reason surveillance spreads so easily is precisely because companies like Flock lie to make it palatable. If they had to be honest — 'we're logging every car, retaining the data, and sharing it broadly' — far fewer councils would approve it. The lie isn't separate from the surveillance. It's the mechanism that enables it.