Surveillance Patent Shows Flock Spying Way Worse Than Advertised
Flock Safety’s own patent reveals that its spying capabilities are far worse than advertised, undercutting the company’s and its defenders’ claims that Flock cameras are simply license plate readers.
The backlash against the Flock surveillance system has been swift and, in many cases, highly effective, with activists and citizens forcing states, counties, and law enforcement agencies to end their contracts with the company. As more and more counties cut ties, Flock has been forced to defend its technology on the grounds that it is a useful tool, not as intrusive as its critics make it out to be, and with new “safeguards” in place, they can crack down on police officers who abuse the system.
But Flock’s patent reveals a system more powerful than the company lets on in public statements.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) granted Flock’s patent, “System and method for object based query of video content captured by a dynamic surveillance network,” in Aug. 2022. The patent names Flock’s current CEO, Garrett Langley, and Flock co-founder Matt Feury as the inventors.
Although Flock’s Frequently Asked Questions claim its technology is “not a live-tracking system” and that each image captured by cameras is a “standalone vehicle event,” the patent shows the system was built to do the opposite.
According to the patent, the purpose of Flock’s system is to weave together unrelated surveillance cameras — whether those are cameras placed at a busy intersection, outside a convenience store, or inside a gated community — into a single, searchable, “dynamic” network.
To use the patent’s own words, “the surveillance network is dynamic because embodiments of the system are not constrained by any geographic footprint associated with a set network of surveillance devices.” The technology allows “unrelated surveillance devices configured to upload video streams to the system.”
By stitching together independently owned surveillance cameras, the system enables searches that go beyond license plates: it allows querying with “face recognition data points.” Additionally, the patent says the system can be used to track and identify pedestrians by sex, race, clothing, height, and even weight:
For example, if the object class of the identified object is that of a human being, then the object detection module may further analyze the image using a neural network module configured to identify different classes of people (male, female, race, etc.). Subsequently, with aspects of the person identified, the object detection module may leverage other, more detailed neural networks to further identify aspects of the person such as, but not limited to, a neural network for identifying clothing types (jacket, pants, shorts, hat, etc.) and a neural network for gauging height and weight.
The patent also outlines a scenario in which a “subscriber” can use the system to recognize and track a named person thanks to the “alert triggering module 158.”
This has the power to”recognize that a person detected in a video segment … is statistically similar to the teenage daughter of a subscriber to the DSOQ system and, in response, may cause an alert signal (e.g., an SMS communication) to be transmitted … to a smartphone associated with the subscriber.”
Despite what its own patent says, Flock published a blog post in May claiming that cameras “do not use facial recognition” and “are not general-purpose surveillance systems designed to identify people.”
“They are built to identify vehicle information, not personal biometric data,” the post says. “They are not designed to search for people, scan faces, or track individuals. That distinction matters because it helps clarify what the technology is built to do and what it is not. By focusing on vehicles rather than people, Flock supports investigations in a way that is more limited and easier to explain. The system is intended to identify visible vehicle details, not to collect biometric information or monitor individuals.”
In June, Flock’s Chief Communications Officer, Josh Thomas, denied that the Flock system tracks people during an interview with Atlanta News First Investigates.
“Tracking the whole of your movements is very different than knowing that you passed by one specific camera, 24 specific cameras,” he said. “Those are different things.”
When the reporter pressed him again later in the interview, Thomas doubled down.
“We’re not tracking people,” he claimed.
https://dailycaller.com/2026/09/17/flock-safety-patent-spying-technology-cameras-facial-recognition-movements-tracking/
https://patents.google.com/patent/US11416545B1/en
https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/77/9a/03/7b3b26499077d4/US11416545.pdf