Flock Safety still thinks you are livestock.
They spent years selling the glossy brochure version. “Cutting-edge AI.” “Fully automated.” “Privacy-first.” “Machine-learning magic” that reads every plate, hears every scream, and keeps the suburbs safe without a single human ever peeking into your life. The brochure is a lie.
The real engine is not in Atlanta. It lives in the Philippines on Upwork where whoever bids three dollars an hour gets to listen to Americans losing their minds in 2 a.m. driveways and guess whether it was a child or an adult. Gunshot or firework. The same freelancers hand-transcribe license plates the AI cannot read, tag helmeted motorcyclists, box pedestrians, and clear the endless backlog of neighbourhood footage that Flock’s cameras vacuum up around the clock. These are not cleared analysts. They are whoever answered the gig post fastest. No real NDAs, no security training, no clue they are annotating a scream from Michigan at 3 a.m. their time.
The leak was not a glitch. It was the curtain ripping off the stage. Behind the marketing sits a global conveyor belt of the cheapest eyeballs money can rent. Flock brags about “nationwide search” while quietly shipping your daily commute to random apartments in Manila. They call it community safety. The community is not the one doing the watching. The community never signed the Upwork contract.
When journalists found the live unsecured dashboard counting how many screams and plates were labeled that day, Flock did not explain. They did not reassure. They panic-yanked it offline the second the email hit their inbox. Innocent companies do not move that fast.
This is not a scandal because offshore workers exist. Every tech giant uses them. This is a scandal because Flock spent a decade pretending its system was a pristine fully automated warrantless panopticon while the entire thing only scales because some kid in Quezon City gets paid pennies to decide whether your fight with your spouse counts as “person screaming.”
They wired up entire cities with cameras that police search every single day without a warrant, then outsourced the gaps in their AI to the lowest bidder on the planet. That is not innovation. That is surveillance arbitrage.
Flock does not see you as a citizen. It sees you as unlabeled data. Something to be cropped, tagged, indexed, and shipped to whichever desperate freelancer clicks “accept task” first.
That is not a safety tool. That is a slaughterhouse pretending the livestock volunteered.
Blackout VPN exists because privacy is a right. Your first name is too much information for us.
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FAQ
What did the leak reveal about Flock Safety
It exposed that offshore gig workers were manually reviewing and labeling US surveillance footage.
Does Flock rely on real automation
No. Large parts of its system depend on human labor to interpret audio and visuals.
Why is this a privacy problem
Raw footage of Americans is sent offshore with little oversight or informed consent.
Did Flock address the exposure
They removed the dashboard immediately and offered no meaningful explanation.
What does this say about Flock’s model
Its system scales only by treating people as data to be labeled by the cheapest workers available.