90,000 Flock cameras have quietly gone up in the US: What they track and how to check your city

Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. Flock cameras are tracking vehicles across a shared network. AI searches, cloud security, access, and false alerts are all risks. Residents may not know they're installed until they spot them. By the time I learned that towns all around me in upstate New York had installed Flock "Falcon" cameras, they were already tracking every passing vehicle, including mine. In most of those communities, there had been little warning and no public discussion. I first noticed them because of what happened in Saranac Lake, a village near me. Residents protested last spring, officials were forced to reconsider, and the village ultimately voted to cancel its contract with Flock Safety. Soon after, the cameras came down. The same can't be said for many other US towns, where Flock's AI-enabled cameras actively surveil residents without clear consent. My small town with a population of about 11,000 has several Flock cameras up. I've spotted them on utility poles beside roads and intersections I regularly drive through, but they're admittedly easy to overlook or mistake for ordinary traffic cameras. Most look like small black boxes powered by batteries or solar panels, and they're connected through…