Seekerette

Flock Just updated its Terms and Service August 21st 2026 …and they are committing a FEDERAL CRIME ⚠️🚨 Flock cameras query the National Crime Information Center, the FBI's criminal database. This data is Criminal Justice Information. Some of the images Flock feeds into its AI pipeline only exist because an FBI database query triggered an alert. The FBI has incredibly strict laws (the CJIS Security Policy) stating that any data coming out of their system or anything derived from that data is protected federal property. It cannot be used for commercial profit. Flock's says they strip the metadata (the GPS location, the timestamp, and the text of the license plate) from the image and claim, "Look, it's just an anonymous picture now! It's no longer federal data." But Flock's machine learning models have been trained on Customer Data. Section 4.1 explicitly authorizes this. Customer Data includes NCIC hotlist matches. ALPR reads triggered by FBI criminal database queries are Criminal Justice Information. Flock has fed this data into their neural networks to train their plate recognition algorithms, their vehicle classification models, and their predictive analytics. When the FBI demands CJIS purging upon contract termination, Flock cant comply. The influence of the criminal justice data is permanently embedded in the trained weights of their neural networks. You cant delete "training data influence" from a machine learning model without retraining the model from scratch. The data has been mathematically absorbed into the model parameters. It is structurally inseparable. Flock has created a situation where They baked federal criminal data into commercial AI models. They classified those models as Flock Property. They wrote a perpetual license to keep using them. And they made all of it survive contract termination. —— ALSO OWNERSHIP CONTRADICTIONS ⚠️🚨 Flock is speaking out of both sides of its mouth To Police and the Public: Flock publishes blog posts stating, "We do not own your data. Customers own and control everything." This satisfies privacy advocates and local city councils. To Investors and Wall Street: Flock’s legal Terms of Service state that Flock owns all "Property," which explicitly includes the machine learning models and the mathematical outputs generated by the system. Also Flock publicly states they "don't share customer data with 3rd parties like Palantir," they are using hyper-specific legal definitions. They might not share the raw customer footage, but nothing in their terms stops them from sharing or selling the AI models that were built using that data.⚠️ —— Red Flag 1 : Section 2.3 Service Suspension. Flock can cut off police access based on "reasonably suspected violation" determined by Flock alone, with no remedy for the police. A private company can blind a police department's surveillance system unilaterally. —- Red Flag 2 : Exhibit A Insurance Limits. Flock carries $5 million in cyber liability and $5 million in errors and omissions, shared. For a company handling FBI criminal data for 6,000 agencies with 120,000 cameras. A single data breach exposing NCIC records nationwide would cost hundreds of millions in liability. Flock is structurally underinsured, which means the cities and the federal government bear the uncompensated risk. — Conclusion🚨 Flock is not a camera company. Flock is a data company that uses cameras as collection devices and police departments as legal authorization shields. The August 21, 2026 terms reveal the corporate strategy with precision. The perpetual license. The survival clause. The Flock Property classification of machine learning models. The metadata retention carve-out. The prohibition on police touching hardware. The liability cap. The arbitration fortress in Georgia. Every single term is designed to achieve one outcome: Flock keeps the data forever, no matter what the city decides to do.