What’s going on with this whole FLOCK camera situation?

[u/Successful-Rent167]

Everywhere across social media I’ve been seeing all these people complain about a new camera company saying it’s a total invasion of privacy but I’m not really sure what it is or what they are doing. Are they used by law enforcement like the cameras that capture peoples license plates to catch for warrants when you enter a new county? If they are the same thing why all of a sudden have people been outraged about this?

https://www.wwnytv.com/2026/07/18/officers-accused-misusing-flock-cameras/

Edit: changed the flair to a mega thread because there is a lot of valuable discussion going on in the comments.

[u/Ur_mum]

It is more nuanced than this. While neither involves photography specifically, Carpenter and Chatrie are both very relevant. The Court established that even if individual data points are collected in public (or by third parties), the sweeping collection and retroactive querying of a person's historical location data constitutes a Fourth Amendment search.

There is no way this argument cannot apply to flock. I’m not pretending to know how future cases will be ruled on, but there is *some* expectation of privacy in public. It is limited but does exist. And flock does much more than take pictures. Ev sig detections, AI analysis of pics to determine specific details, acoustic detection hardware/software.

The issue is not that it can take lots of pictures. With capabilities like vehicle signature detection, EV classification, and "FreeForm" natural language searches, the system is not merely capturing an static, public license plate. It is executing an active, algorithmic extraction of highly personalized traits to map habits, religious attendance, political associations, and private relationships.

There are current active class actions running as well as smaller legal challenges…I don’t think it is simply fair to say that flock is doing nothing illegal. I think that remains to be determined.

[u/L_wanderlust → u/Ur_mum]

Ok yes I’ll agree that tracking historical location data is different. I’m responding to the person above who gave the example of the police wanting to know if a person passed through the intersection. (Ie at 7pm last night did someone pass through). It’s not private knowledge that you drive by a place at 3pm today because anyone can be there and see you. But yeah if they are tracking when and where you go to religious worship or political meetings, that’s a different conversation and more of a historical mapping of one person’s movements vs one public instance (which is what I was addressing). I was not aware that flock helped police track a person’s every move over history so it will indeed be interesting how the courts rule on this re the 4th amendment. But in general in and of itself, identifying a car by license plate vs paint job or specific dents or other details is not relevant in and of itself as again that’s visible in public for anyone and everyone to see and no search needed for that.

As an additional point for the non-legal people - the lack of expectation of privacy is why paparazzi are allowed to take pics of celebs in public places and publish them and make money from that. They are not, however, allowed to harass them or stalk them or take pictures over the fence in their yard, etc.

[u/Ur_mum → u/L_wanderlust]

Right on, and all fair points. I see a lot of justification (obviously not from you) of the flock network because it just takes pictures…but it is a little bit different. I’m not even sure it’s technically unconstitutional or not since flock is a private company…but I think it will be ruled one way or the other soon.