[tptacek]

The Flock contract I read from Oak Park, where we designed what I think are the country's most restrictive ALPR rules and ultimately took our cameras down, did not allow Flock to continue running, recording, and selling data after we turned the cameras off. In fact: they explicitly didn't allow them to sell the data at all. Can I ask where you got this idea from?

[cadamsdotcom]

Thank you for pointing this out, I would just assumed the parent commenter was correct.

[tptacek]

We didn't really negotiate the contract, either; these were just their stock terms. Does someone have a Flock contract that says something else? A reminder: for most munis deploying Flock, these contracts are public record; you can just ask for them.

[mistercheph]

reproducing the same links as above:

https://www.lakeexpo.com/news/politics/felony-charges-droppe...

https://www.wmtv15news.com/2026/06/05/dane-county-covers-flo...

https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/cities-covering-flock-surv...

https://dailynorthwestern.com/2025/09/28/top-stories/flock-c...

https://www.newsfromthestates.com/article/verona-has-waited-...

And these are just the cases where the municipality wants the cameras taken down, GP also talks about the cases where they just want to sate the public while keeping law enforcement and lobbyists happy. LA is a great example, the inaction of letting the contract expire in no way means that the cameras will be taken down, if no further action is taken, those cameras stay up, and law enforcement will continue to have access to all flock's alpr data.

And further it's unclear if the "data" governed in these contracts applies to the CCTV footage or the data produced for the customer by transforming the footage with models into identifying information. Given that flock has a profit incentive, it's reasonable to assume these contracts are written adversarially to maximize Flock's ability to persuade jurisdictions to sign the contracts and Flock's ability to use all of the data they harvest to maximize profit, we have enough examples of this in the 21st century to know this isn't paranoid, this is the basic playbook of all surveillancetech/adtech companies and they have all used language in contracts that is confusing to nonexperts that affords them maximum leverage to store all the data they harvest permanently and use it however they want.

[tptacek]

Please don't paste walls of links into threads, especially not when they're copies from the same thread.

[mistercheph]

You made the same claim based on a personal anecdote in multiple places in this thread, giving it the same reply seems reasonable, but I'll grant there's probably a better way than a wall of links.

[tptacek]

It is never reasonable to copy and paste on threads.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...