Flock CEO: ‘We got this one wrong’
By Ruth Behrens ·
The first thing you learn when you live in a town that still has a hardware store is that nothing comes free. You pay for it, usually with sweat equity or a few bushels of corn.
The Cost of Knowing Too Much About My Plate Number
The first thing you learn when you live in a town that still has a hardware store is that nothing comes free. You pay for it, usually with sweat equity or a few bushels of corn. But the kind of cost being levied now—the one written into law by people who have never met a payroll or worried about keeping Main Street open—is invisible. It’s measured in metadata: your license plate number passing through a private company's machine learning system, shared with local police departments, and sold back to us as "safety."
The Business of Watching the Streets
It all hinges on Flock Safety, a for-profit entity that has installed over 120,000 cameras across the country. This isn't public infrastructure; it’s private surveillance hardware operating under contract with local governments. According to reporting from 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS, these automated cameras record license plate numbers as part of criminal investigations. The system promises help in catching bad actors, but what we are actually buying into is a permanent, searchable ledger of our daily movements.
The sheer scope of the data collection is staggering. The "Have I Been Flocked" site compiles audit logs from thousands of agencies nationwide, allowing drivers to check if their plate has been searched by law enforcement systems. While New York Post notes that showing up on the database doesn't mean you were under investigation—and that the dataset is incomplete—the mechanism remains terrifyingly clear: a private company builds an infrastructure for total knowledge.
When the System Breaks Down, People Resist
The resistance to this creeping data collection is palpable and necessary. We see communities pulling back. Sherburne County is ending its use of Flock cameras over public concern, while authorities in Plymouth and Edina have reported vandalized equipment. Even the City of Syracuse opted to change out the systems entirely, citing concerns related both to performance failures and the relationship with federal immigration enforcement (WSTM).
This isn't a new fear; it’s an old one. When powerful entities systematically collect and aggregate personal metadata—when they build an infrastructure for total knowledge—the precedent is set. We must draw a straight line from this automated plate-scanning network to the revelations of the Snowden leaks, where global intelligence agencies demonstrated that the systematic collection of private communication data fundamentally alters the expectation of a free life. The mechanism is identical: the promise of security in exchange for absolute privacy.
The moment we accept that our daily passage through public space must be logged and indexed by a corporation's AI, we surrender something fundamental to the American experience. We are not trading surveillance for safety; we are simply accepting the permanent erosion of anonymity—a right as necessary to a free market town as access to the local bank is.