As I See It: You’ve Been Flocked

September 21, 2026 Victor Rozek

Perhaps you have had a similar experience. You’re hiking in a park or in a wilderness area and since it’s ungodly hot, you’ve taken care to eat well and hydrate. Now you’re miles from the trailhead and the nearest bathroom and you have to poop. Into the bushes you go. Ordinarily, not an event worthy of mention or concern. But these days, on at least one occasion, I’ve had a disquieting thought: I wonder if there’s a trail cam filming me?

Privacy, if not dead, is on life support. It’s a safe bet that wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, someone is filming you. Cell phones, doorbell cams, dash cams, traffic cams, and surveillance cameras in nearly every publicly accessible space pretty much guarantee that your movements are tracked multiple times a day.

Trail cams are only a small part of the growing surveillance infrastructure courtesy of the ironically named company, Flock Safety. There are an estimated 100,000 cameras deployed across more than 12,000 communities in 49 states. Flock cameras are solar-powered and AI-driven and were originally marketed as Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs). They use infrared technology that allows them to read plates any time of the day or night, while AI captures the make, model, color, and any distinguishing features the car may have, like custom rims, bumper stickers, or a dent in the fender. It’s effectively a digital fingerprint of your vehicle. All of it is time, date, and location stamped for identification and tracking.

But Flock quickly morphed into markets beyond traffic safety. Government offices, residential communities, private businesses, schools, churches, synagogues, mosques and, yes, even parks. And as it did, it increased its scope of services to include “people detection,” and made it available to law enforcement as well as private clients.

As functionalities and the customer base grew, it created a vast network of video cameras, some with audio detection capability, and such specialty items as mobile security trailers and drones.

Like many technologies, ALPRs are not inherently menacing or inevitably harmful. It’s not their capability, but their intended use, largely governed by the purchaser, which is problematic. While the company has assorted safeguards that limit who and what can be done with the data, many of those safeguards depend on ethical people policing themselves. Like a gun company absolving itself from accountability by claiming its products were not designed for school shootings. What could possibly go wrong?

In Flock Safety’s case, quite a bit. Alec Hively, writing for BGR, reports that: “According to an ongoing Institute of Justice report, police officers nationwide have used the ALPR tool to stalk women, coworkers, and acquaintances.” Flock’s National Lookup has also been used as a racial profiling tool. Specifically, there are reports that “federal authorities used Flock cameras to execute the Trump administration’s deportation program.” That theoretically unintended use caused several cities to revoke their contracts with the company.

For its part, the company denies having any contracts with ICE. But, the fact that what appears to be a lawless agency has access to such technology without restraint or accountability is cause for concern.

Meanwhile, peaceful protesters have been filmed, tracked and catalogued as terrorists. “According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation,” writes Hively, “law enforcement agencies have already executed hundreds of Flock searches targeting protestors and activist groups.”

There are, of course, a number of legal issues with this level of surveillance. Tracking and recording someone’s movements over time would typically require a warrant. Further, some states have passed laws forbidding the sharing of data gathered by ALPR cameras. Nonetheless, writes Hively, “Federal and out-of-state authorities continue to access Flock ALPR data in states like California, Massachusetts, Illinois, Virginia, and Washington, where state laws prohibit ALPR data sharing.”

Even as laws and Flock Safety guardrails are proving ineffective, communities and activists are fighting back. In the last five years, at least 82 communities across 28 states have ended their contracts with Flock Safety and/or removed all automated license plate readers. Among them are cities like Austin, Seattle, Denver, Eugene, Fort Collins, Syracuse, and Evanston. The reasons cited: Privacy concerns and data sharing violations. Audits revealed that local scan data was accessible to federal immigration enforcement agencies without local consent. So much for unreasonable search and seizure.

Likewise, the higher education community is feeling pressure from student and faculty activists to remove Flock cameras from college campuses. An estimated 150 campuses across the country have installed Flock surveillance networks. The University of Wisconsin-Madison is the first prominent campus to explicitly cancel its contract and remove the hardware. Other institutions being pressured to DeFlock include Cal Poly, Penn State, the University of Arizona, Emory University, and Cornell.

On the streets, writes Hively, “A wave of anti-surveillance vigilantism is gripping American activists.” People are simply ripping cameras from their mounts.

The gradual deployment of interconnected and searchable AI-powered systems has created a vast national surveillance apparatus largely dependent on user integrity to minimize abuses. By all appearance, its uses have far exceeded traffic safety concerns, as it is becoming weaponized against the general population. In George Orwell’s prophetic novel 1984, Winston Smith notes that: “Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.”

For now.

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