Flock Off

Even if one approves of Flock's digital surveillance as a service as a business model, the specific business way that the conduct business, with thinly veiled bribes to public officials and attempts to cover their operations on public streets under layers of secrecy, are duplicitous.

Now, we learn that when a government decides to terminate a contract, Flock drags its feet on removing cameras as well as refuses to turn the cameras off, which is why we are now seeing municipalities covering the cameras with trash bags.

As a bonus for my reader(s) I will give you this marvelous quote from the subhed, which describes Flock as, "The herpes of the surveillance state."

Flock and other automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras continue to give AI data centers a run for their money as the least welcome presence in American communities.

Things are getting so bad that Flock Safety’s CEO, Garrett Langley, came out of the woodwork last week to apologize for his 2025 comments to Forbes where he likened anti-Flock activists and deflock.org, the site that tracks where ALPRs are placed, to “terrorists.” Calling his past remark “a mistake” and throwing some stock we see you, we hear you-type platitudes to his critics, Langley went on to insist he still believes in a world that can be filled with his probing digital eyes—”a world where we can have safety and privacy.”

………

As reported by 404 Media, the city of Verona, Wisconsin, could not get Flock to come remove the three cameras it had installed after the city council voted to not renew a contract with the surveillance company. Verona officials were instructed by Flock not to remove the cameras themselves. More concerning, after Verona officials asked for the cameras to at least be remotely disabled while they waited for the company to come collect them, a Flock employee said they were unsure if such a thing was even possible—a claim that, if true, would indicate Flock technology is outdated by a factor of decades. It wasn’t true, of course. Flock later made clear that they “can remotely deactivate [the cameras] at any time.”

But while things were still fuzzy about whether those feeds were live and when Flock actually planned to come collect their gear, Verona took matters into their own hands. The decision was made to cover the cameras with black trash bags while waiting for them to be retrieved on some indeterminate date in the future, an analog privacy hack that is catching on nationwide.

………

As Verona, Wisconsin’s council president Mara Helmke so eloquently put it in the meeting where they voted to deFlock their city, “Flock is not trustworthy, no matter what kind of guarantees they have given you… Flock has assured us that our data is ours, right? But we can’t trust that. We simply can’t.” 

Indeed.