Discovered via Have I Been Flocked RSS feed.
There were two sets of promises made about Flock Safety’s cameras in Dunwoody. One was made to a private community center. One was made to the public. Both were broken by the same two parties.
In September 2024, Dunwoody PD Major Patrick Krieg requested access to the private security cameras at a community center on behalf of the department. When the community center pushed back and demanded to know what the access would be used for, Krieg was unambiguous: “This is solely for real-time critical incident response.” The community center agreed to share their cameras, including cameras in gymnastics rooms, pools, and fitness studios, with Dunwoody PD for emergencies.
To the broader public, the City made the same promise in a different form: Flock is a public safety tool that catches criminals and keeps your community safe. It’s only used for law enforcement purposes. When citizens raised concerns, we were given three minutes at a podium, requests for open meetings were ignored, and we were silenced by a unanimous vote.
Both promises had the same problem: while the city was making them, Flock employees were inside Dunwoody’s camera network, including a private community center’s cameras (the ones shared solely for emergencies) to allegedly pitch their product to other law enforcement agencies.
From 2023 through April 2026, Flock employees viewed live and recorded cameras in Dunwoody over 1,000 times. In 2025 alone, they searched Dunwoody citizens’ data over 400 times. No one in Dunwoody consented to this.
When I asked the City of Dunwoody to produce any agreement authorizing this, their answer was simple: “The City of Dunwoody found no records that are responsive to your request.”
There was no authorization or explicit permission. Just a promise to a community center, a promise to the public, and a company that treated both like an open door.
It’s only used for law enforcement purposes.
As if even that is in any way okay, especially considering how fascist the government is becoming!
Even if this was working 100% as the public intended, it would still be evil.
No shit…
If a private corporation with zero oversight has the keys, they’re gonna take it for a spin. And once they do it the first time and break the stigma, they’re quickly going to get used to it and just do it all the time.
The company could 100% fix this with oversight internally, but clearly they won’t unless someone makes them.
Everytime someone looks at any camera, and Everytime they stop, just needs to create a log entry. Set the system to flag whatever, and confront employees for abusing it.
Literally all it takes, but these surveillance corps won’t put in it any oversight, be ausenits better to pretend the problem doesn’t exist
I wish more people understood this problem isn’t restricted to Flock systems: every modern IP surveillance system can (and does) share evidence digitally, or set access privileges to their systems (allowing for real-time monitoring by third parties: mostly law enforcement); or if you’re a larger organization in the European Union, the GDPR requires a ‘Data Protection Officer (DPO)’ to have access to personal data being collected at all times, and must abide to any request being made by authorities, while under professional secrecy (and explicitly not disclose such additional processing, in access requests filed by data subjects). All of these seemingly separate systems (regardless of being privately or publicly owned), are increasingly growing interconnected, typically resulting into local ‘Operation Control Centers (OCCs)’; which may in turn share data they aggregate to further national, or even globally spanning OCCs.
every commercial modern IP surveillance system can (and does) share evidence digitally
Minor quibble.
Self-host Frigate (https://frigate.video/), buy generic Power over Ethernet security cameras (Amcrest has good ones in my experience) and keep everything wired and isolated from your regular LAN. Then you actually control your own security system.
Buy a Nest camera from Amazon and it’ll be easier. They’ll do all of the work for you while helping themselves to video of your property and family for them to do with as they please.
