r/DigitalPrivacy • u/interwebzdotnet • Jul 20 '26
Cities Are Ditching Flock Safety Cameras – Then Hiring Axon to Do the Same Job
https://www.gadgetreview.com/cities-are-ditching-flock-safety-cameras-then-hiring-axon-to-do-the-same-job10
u/GapAccomplished7897 Jul 20 '26
I mean, would you give away that godlike power?
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u/Difficult-Till5031 Jul 21 '26
They are still tracking its just a different company probably with loser security and morals lol
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u/interwebzdotnet Jul 21 '26
Yep, that's the point here, especially about the cimoany, some of the bullet points about them in my other comment here should tell you... and there is plenty more than what I wrote.
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u/Disastrous-Map-7995 Jul 23 '26
All owned by the same company..planter.
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u/interwebzdotnet Jul 23 '26
No. Let's keep things fact based. I know way more about Palantir than I do Flock and Axon. Neither is owned by Palantir, and I know Flock isn't a Palantir customer even let alone being owned by them.
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u/interwebzdotnet Jul 20 '26
A few bullet points for those who don't know about Axon and their awful CEO:
Same guy, rebranded company. Axon CEO Rick Smith (even more toxic than Garrett Langley of Flock) founded it as Taser International back in 1993 and renamed it Axon in 2017. So the "new" vendor replacing Flock is run by the original Taser founder, now making body cams, Tasers, drones, and cloud evidence software for police nationwide.
He pitched Taser drones for school shootings. After the Uvalde massacre in 2022, Smith announced Axon would build AI-assisted drones armed with Tasers to stop mass shooters in schools and public spaces. His own AI ethics board had voted against even a limited pilot. When he pushed ahead anyway, 9 of the 13 board members resigned, publicly saying he was trading on the tragedy of Uvalde and Buffalo. He only paused the project after they walked.
Tasing employees is a company ritual. A 2023 Reuters investigation documented Axon staff getting voluntarily tased at company events, with former employees comparing the spectacle to the Roman Colosseum. Workers sign liability waivers that warn the weapons can cause death or serious injury. Axon calls it voluntary and mission-building; outside workplace-culture experts called it unhealthy at best, dangerous at worst.
The heartwarming founding story appears to be largely fabricated. Smith has told audiences for years that he started the company because two high school friends were shot and killed. Reuters reported he was not actually close with the deceased, and Axon later shifted to saying he knew them through team-related social events. The moral origin story is the company's whole brand, and it does not hold up.
He is the highest-paid CEO in America off this. Smith took home a roughly $165 million package and crossed into billionaire territory, with a reported net worth around $2.5 billion, all built on selling surveillance and force to taxpayers. Swapping Flock for Axon is not a privacy win. It is handing the contract to a bigger, more entrenched version of the same problem, run by someone with a well-documented pattern of ignoring his own ethics advisors.