Clearly, the stories in the press have hurt them, especially the police abuse. Requiring case codes is a good step, and proactively catching signs of abuse is a big change from "we're just an unopinionated tool; you should talk to your police department". They're still passing the buck on educating users on the limitations of their tool. I remain skeptical of any of their claims around data ownership.
Reading these actions, you can pick apart how to circumvent them, and the security audit is still pending — let's see how damning of a report they'll allow to be released.
Flock is still a snowballing disaster for eroding personal privacy and increasing abuse.
Guns have safety triggers but cops still have no problems with discharging them too quickly and wrongly.
Let’s learn from guns, we should have limited them in the US decades ago and today the problem is hugely based on lack of will for action at every step in history.
The only acceptable change is the removal of these cameras.
I can't go walk my dog around the neighborhood without looking up and seeing police accessible cameras. They can track my movements with no probable cause and no warrants.
Flock can make all the promises it wants, but the reality is that once growth stalls out on camera installations, which it must, shareholders will immediately insist that they pivot into other monetization schemes. There aren't really any laws holding them back, just their already weasel-worded contracts that they could easily renegotiate once the police departments are putting pressure on the city/county/state/federal legislative bodies.
The possibilities are endless:
- Is your employee visiting your competitors?
- Where has your husband/wife/lover been?
- What medical buildings has this person been to?
- Does this person go to churches / gun ranges?
The people running Flock are simply bad people with the completely wrong temperament.
We shouldn't have these cameras at all but even if we were forced to have them the people running Flock are the last people who should be in control of them.
The way they act on social media and in interviews they just come off (and surely are) fragile ego children.
Interesting to see the sentiment expressed in the comments here given the context that they are being posted on a promotional website for the private equity firm that launched Flock.
I highly encourage everyone to start organizing locally. It’s extremely easy to do. Read your city’s local meeting transcripts (LLMs can help find ones with Flock mentions), see who said what, email them. Make a website, find who else has publicly commented and reach out to them, reach out to local newspapers.
Make a site specific to your area. I’ve created https://stopflock419.com for my part, and I’ve already had five people in my area reach out to me (after spreading it around via friends and family).
Local campaigning is easier than you think! Most of the councils who approved these were a) lied to about the cameras’ capabilities and b) generally just on autopilot, they aren’t Flock fanboys, they just kind of take the police chief at their word that these are good tools.
> From the beginning, we have been clear that our customers own the data captured by their ALPR cameras. This has always been the case, but some of our contractual language has confused the public on this crucial point... The principle is simple: customers own the data, decide who can access it, and choose who they share it with.
I'm one of the general public that is continually confused by their usage of the word "own". I can't imagine that their language update will make it any more clear.
If the data is on Flock's servers (it is) and accessible by Flock (it is) then it is Flock who owns the data, not the PDs. Sure, they can allow the PDs to have say over what is done with the data, but ultimately Flock has the ability to use the data however they'd like.
This is not hypothetical: Flock have used previously shared data with DHS [0] without the so-called owner's permission and use data for their AI training [1] without option to opt-out.
Their definition of ownership is further contradicted later in this post:
> we will now require case codes for all law enforcement searches by the end of the year.
To be clear, I think this is a good change, but if PDs "own" their data, then they should be able to decide whether or not they want to use this feature.
The general public are not lawyers and will not always understand all the terms across the multi-page terms of service. For all intents and purposes. The customers “own” it. For a SaaS company. What this looks like legally is “licensing” of data to Flock from the customer. Terms like that are needed to properly and defensibly “handle” footage and assets. Manage storage, retrieve and serve the content, etc.
The ToS is negotiable. As it usually is when talking large sums of money. You can retrieve this with a FOIA request and see how they tend to be unique to each city. Some customers like to define the relationship differently or make additional restrictions for data handling.
I really just want to point out that layman terms and contract law are two different things.
I wouldn’t care if anonymized data is being used,I would care if I’m told I control sharing but it turns out I don’t. It’s not clear to me Flock did anything wrong. It sounds like that department inadvertently shared with a federal agency because it wasn’t obvious to them they were doing so. (Federal agencies are clearly marked as such now, product complies with state law to prevent accidental sharing)
> I really just want to point out that layman terms and contract law are two different things.
Totally agreed. My point is that their layman use of "ownership" is inaccurate at best, misleading at worst. I'm speaking to the words as they are commonly understood, not the legal definition.
You're probably right this this problem is not unique to Flock: other SaaS companies probably make the same misleading claims about ownership.
I would encourage anyone concerned about cameras in their town to explore the DeFlock website map (and app). It allows crowdsourced reporting of camera locations.
I also would STRONGLY encourage people to actually go look for any ALPR reported in their town, because DeFlock also allows crowdsourced corrections to misreported instances.
Where I live, it had been reported that we had 9 ALPR cameras, which in fact were not ALPR cameras but rather traffic management cameras - or in two cases not cameras at all. It gave the impression of a problem that didn't exist here.
I did not know about this when I wrote https://andrewpwheeler.com/2026/08/12/license-plate-reader-s... the day prior, but one of the things I did state was deleting data (except in the extreme case, like New Hampshire's 3 minute retention), will not prevent abuse. People just do illegal queries over and over again.
Part of the reason I wrote that post is it is better to retain the data indefinitely and have a warrant standard than continue to reduce the time period in which the data is retained.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 24.9 ms ] threadReading these actions, you can pick apart how to circumvent them, and the security audit is still pending — let's see how damning of a report they'll allow to be released.
My police chief is okay with it and the case number "abc123" is FOIA-exempt out of operational security concerns.
Guns have safety triggers but cops still have no problems with discharging them too quickly and wrongly.
Let’s learn from guns, we should have limited them in the US decades ago and today the problem is hugely based on lack of will for action at every step in history.
Just another example of tech bros enriching themselves and destroying as much as they can along the way.
See also: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/06/06/web-of-knowledge/
I can't go walk my dog around the neighborhood without looking up and seeing police accessible cameras. They can track my movements with no probable cause and no warrants.
The possibilities are endless:
We shouldn't have these cameras at all but even if we were forced to have them the people running Flock are the last people who should be in control of them.
The way they act on social media and in interviews they just come off (and surely are) fragile ego children.
Make a site specific to your area. I’ve created https://stopflock419.com for my part, and I’ve already had five people in my area reach out to me (after spreading it around via friends and family).
Local campaigning is easier than you think! Most of the councils who approved these were a) lied to about the cameras’ capabilities and b) generally just on autopilot, they aren’t Flock fanboys, they just kind of take the police chief at their word that these are good tools.
Now, flock investor should get more hate.
I'm one of the general public that is continually confused by their usage of the word "own". I can't imagine that their language update will make it any more clear.
If the data is on Flock's servers (it is) and accessible by Flock (it is) then it is Flock who owns the data, not the PDs. Sure, they can allow the PDs to have say over what is done with the data, but ultimately Flock has the ability to use the data however they'd like.
This is not hypothetical: Flock have used previously shared data with DHS [0] without the so-called owner's permission and use data for their AI training [1] without option to opt-out.
Their definition of ownership is further contradicted later in this post:
> we will now require case codes for all law enforcement searches by the end of the year.
To be clear, I think this is a good change, but if PDs "own" their data, then they should be able to decide whether or not they want to use this feature.
All in all, this is not ownership.
[0] - https://apnews.com/article/immigration-abortion-license-plat...
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/apr/...
The ToS is negotiable. As it usually is when talking large sums of money. You can retrieve this with a FOIA request and see how they tend to be unique to each city. Some customers like to define the relationship differently or make additional restrictions for data handling.
I really just want to point out that layman terms and contract law are two different things.
I wouldn’t care if anonymized data is being used,I would care if I’m told I control sharing but it turns out I don’t. It’s not clear to me Flock did anything wrong. It sounds like that department inadvertently shared with a federal agency because it wasn’t obvious to them they were doing so. (Federal agencies are clearly marked as such now, product complies with state law to prevent accidental sharing)
Totally agreed. My point is that their layman use of "ownership" is inaccurate at best, misleading at worst. I'm speaking to the words as they are commonly understood, not the legal definition.
You're probably right this this problem is not unique to Flock: other SaaS companies probably make the same misleading claims about ownership.
The company is dead to rights in the eyes of the public.
I also would STRONGLY encourage people to actually go look for any ALPR reported in their town, because DeFlock also allows crowdsourced corrections to misreported instances.
Where I live, it had been reported that we had 9 ALPR cameras, which in fact were not ALPR cameras but rather traffic management cameras - or in two cases not cameras at all. It gave the impression of a problem that didn't exist here.
Part of the reason I wrote that post is it is better to retain the data indefinitely and have a warrant standard than continue to reduce the time period in which the data is retained.