Flock, Cameras, and the Privacy You Only Get to Keep If You're a Company

There’s a story doing the rounds about a company called Flock, which makes automated licence plate reader cameras that have quietly gone up on poles all over the US, and now increasingly here too. A security researcher built a detailed public map showing where these cameras actually are. Flock’s response was to try and get the map taken down. Not the cameras. The map showing where the cameras are.

I read that twice to make sure I wasn’t misunderstanding it, and no, that’s exactly what happened. A company whose entire business model is watching where you go, in public, without asking, decided that a map of its own watching equipment was a step too far into someone else’s privacy. Someone in the comments put it better than I could: privacy for me, surveillance for thee.

I’ve been half-watching the rollout of number plate cameras and “safe city” tech for a few years now, the way you watch a slow leak in the roof. Not urgent yet, but you know where it’s heading. Melbourne’s already thick with them, speed and red-light cameras, toll gantries, private security systems that quietly feed into bigger networks than anyone advertises. None of that is inherently sinister. A camera that catches someone running a red light near a primary school is doing a job I’m broadly fine with. The problem isn’t the camera. It’s who gets to know what it saw, who it’s shared with, how long it’s kept, and whether anyone outside the company or the police force gets a say in any of that.

What got me about the Flock story wasn’t even the hypocrisy, though there’s plenty of it. It was the argument underneath the hypocrisy, the “no expectation of privacy in public” line that companies like this lean on constantly to justify blanket surveillance, and then abandon the instant it’s turned back on them. You can’t have it both ways, though of course they’ll try. If being visible in public means you’ve forfeited any right to privacy, that has to apply to the camera company too, and to the police department buying the contract, and to the council that approved it without much public debate. Someone in the thread made the obvious point: track the trackers. It’s not a bad idea, and it’s not even hard technically. It’s just that nobody with the resources to build it has the appetite to point it back at power instead of at ordinary people driving to Woolworths.

I don’t think most people are against cameras existing. I think most people are against the asymmetry, the fact that the watching only ever flows one way, and that consent for it is assumed rather than asked for. We’ve had this fight before with data brokers, with facial recognition trials in shopping centres that got quietly shelved once someone noticed, with the My Health Record opt-out fiasco a few years back. The pattern is always the same: roll it out fast, under a vague banner of safety or efficiency, and hope the debate happens after the infrastructure is already too embedded to remove. By the time anyone asks the hard questions, the answer is usually “well, it’s already there, what are you going to do, rip it out?”

I don’t have a tidy solution here, and I’m suspicious of anyone who claims they do. I like some surveillance in principle and dislike almost all of it in practice, which is an uncomfortable place to sit but probably the honest one. What I keep coming back to is a much smaller and more boring idea than “abolish the cameras”: transparency has to run both directions or it isn’t really transparency, it’s just control wearing a nicer word. If a company’s cameras are safe enough for my street, its own locations should be safe enough for a map. If they’re not, that tells you something.