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Cam Higby @camhigby - That’s rough
Parent Post:
Charles Fain Lehman @CharlesFLehman - oh awkward
Quoted Post:
D. Luigi @DLuigi23 - Flock isn’t a neighborhood security camera.
It’s a private company that built a searchable national movement database of every plate that passes its poles, then sold access to police and quietly let that access leak far beyond what cities thought they bought.
Local control is the marketing line. The record is different. National-lookup toggles, federal pilots, and vendor-side settings sent local plate data to ICE, CBP, HSI, Secret Service, and out-of-state agencies—sometimes after cities had turned sharing off.
Dozens of cities canceled or bagged the cameras when audits showed it. That’s not a glitch. That’s the architecture.
Abuse isn’t hypothetical. Officers have used the same system to track girlfriends, exes, and coworkers hundreds of times.
Most of those cases weren’t caught by Flock’s “audit trail.” Victims found them. If a tool makes stalking that easy and that common, the design is the problem.
They spent years saying the cameras “cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals.”
Then they built OS Investigate: AI that starts with a place, a time window, and a driving pattern, then attaches names, addresses, relatives, and associates. That’s people-tracking dressed as plate-reading.
You can opt out of a store camera by not going in. You cannot opt out of a street grid. No warrant, no notice, no off switch. A government—or the next one—doesn’t need to like you to query where you went last month.
That’s why it should be outlawed as a public, networked tracking system: not because cameras exist, but because this one turns ordinary driving into a permanent, shareable file on everyone.
Private loss-prevention on private property is not the same thing.
Constantly conflating them is how the grid keeps expanding.