Why the Flock Backlash Has Gotten So Intense

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As corporate names go, Flock is cleverly flexible.

It evokes the many cameras that compose the company’s surveillance system and also a group of sheep, protected by a watchful shepherd.

The recent backlash against the company, however, more closely resembles a flight of starlings, seeming to erupt out of nowhere and move as one unified body.

Flock Safety’s cameras are a network of automated license-plate readers (ALPRs), which snap images of passing cars and feed them into an AI-powered-data system.

The company has contracts with police departments and government agencies as well as with some private companies.

The crime-fighting power of such a tool isn’t hard to grasp: It allows law enforcement to track vehicles’ movements over any area where the readers exist.

The privacy concerns about such a dragnet are just as easy to fathom.

The company has existed for nearly a decade and has been growing steadily in recent years.

But something has turned in the past couple of months .

People are pushing cities to cancel contracts and in some cases have taken matters into their own hands.

Individuals have clandestinely sawed down the poles that hold cameras or splashed paint over them.

In one notable example , a Florida man obstructed the devices simply by holding up cardboard placards, a low-tech solution to a high-tech challenge.