Flock Cameras. Canoodling Lawyers. How Much Surveillance Are We Comfortable With?
A piece examining the spread of Flock Safety license plate cameras prompts broader questions about how much public surveillance Americans are actually willing to accept, even as polls show widespread discomfort with being watched.
Why this matters: Flock cameras are already in thousands of neighborhoods, scanning every passing plate and logging where your car goes. Most people never voted on that. A private company sells the hardware, local governments buy it, and residents find out later, if at all. The gap between what people say they want and what quietly gets installed is where surveillance expands. Discomfort is not the same as a limit. Without clear rules on who can access the data, how long it is kept, and what it can be used for, the cameras just keep going up.
Who should care: Privacy officers · Cybersecurity · General readers · Policy
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