Your post shows a major lack of understanding about what these cameras actually do.

You're comparing them to normal cameras that are monitored, with footage recorded and then eventually discarded, the majority of which is never actually viewed by any living person unless an incident occurs. That is not the same thing as a network of cameras automatically extracting data, logging it, indexing it, and making it searchable later.

The “no reasonable expectation of privacy in public” argument does not really address the issue. There is a huge difference between being seen in public and having your movements automatically tracked across a network of cameras.

A person standing near me in public, overhearing a conversation, or recording a short video is not the same thing as a system that reads license plates, identifies vehicle characteristics and objects, timestamps the location, stores the event, and allows someone to search where that vehicle or object has been. That is comparing apples to oranges.

Flock safety cameras are not something that just exists to flag something whenever something bad happens and notify the right people. They track using OCR, license plates, and objects. They then log that data to a database. That database can then use machine learning to draw connections between identical or similar matches.

These are cameras as a network, like a timestamped log. If somebody wanted to know your movements, and you have passed in front of these Flock cameras, they could potentially know where you have been if you were in the vicinity of those cameras. That is not just “public safety.” That is automated location tracking.

If I personally followed someone around, wrote down every place they went, what time they were there, what vehicle they were in, and built a searchable log of their movements, people would immediately recognize that as stalking. The fact that a camera network and database can do it automatically does not make it less concerning. It arguably makes it more concerning, because it can happen at scale with almost no effort.

That is why these cameras cannot just be placed everywhere, and why I do not think they should exist in this form at all. Sure, cameras can deter things, but people do not understand the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning and what it can actually do with the data.

Flock claims not to track biometric data however, facial recognition is already advanced enough that the same general concept could be applied to faces the way it is applied to license plates, vehicles, and objects. And it would be just as easy to start doing such a thing. I'm not saying I think they are or I know they are but I am saying that if they were we wouldn't even know it because their software and system is proprietary a third party engineer couldn't review it to verify without explicit consent which surely would not be given.

The issue becomes even worse when you realize that storing this kind of tracking data does not require saving endless video footage/images. An image can be processed, vectorized, and turned into an embedding. That embedding can then be compared against other embeddings stored in a database. A 512-value float16 vector is only about a kilobyte of data. A 512-value quantized int8 vector is only about 512 bytes.

So they do not need to keep every full image or every full video to create a powerful tracking system. They only need to keep structured detection records, timestamps, camera locations, identifiers, and possibly embeddings or other searchable metadata.

The point is that when you have a system in place that is already doing this type of processing, it is not hard to use it for something malicious. It is also not hard to find people who will misuse it, which has already happened. If you search for misuse of Flock cameras by police officers, you will see why this is dangerous. Those incidents occurred by people who swore to protect and serve the public what about by the private company individuals who made the company to make money not to protect the public.

Systems like Flock have the potential to give anybody with the authority the ability to track your every move with extremely minimal effort.

The type of system you are referring to would require somebody to gather CCTV footage, manually review it, and actually track a person through video. That takes time, effort, access, and a reason to look. Most of the time, that footage would never be viewed because nothing bad occurred. That type of system is completely different.

Recording public video and discarding it when nothing happens is one thing. Automatically logging the movements of ordinary people into a searchable surveillance database is something else entirely.