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Cities covering Flock surveillance cameras with garbage bags after cancelling contracts
Some cities that have terminated their contracts with the surveillance company Flock are unable to remove the cameras themselves and are instead covering them up.
By Eleanor Ellington · 2 min read
Some cities that have cancelled their contracts with Flock, a surveillance technology company, are covering the company's cameras with garbage bags because they cannot take the devices down themselves.
The move highlights the difficulty municipalities face when they decide to end relationships with a provider whose equipment is already installed on public infrastructure. According to the source report, the cameras remain in place even after the contracts are terminated, leaving local authorities to find interim solutions while the hardware stays up. Covering the devices is, in effect, the only visible step these councils can take on their own, since the physical removal of the equipment falls outside their immediate control.
Flock has drawn considerable public criticism, and the report describes the company as wildly unpopular among residents concerned about mass surveillance. The cities resorting to covering the cameras are sending a clear message that they no longer want the systems operating in their communities, even though they have not been able to dismantle them. The gesture is simple but deliberate: a plastic bag draped over a lens makes the decision to end the contract visible to anyone walking past.
The source material does not identify the specific cities involved, nor does it give a count of how many cameras have been affected across the affected municipalities. It offers no timeline for when the hardware is expected to be removed, and it does not include a detailed response from Flock to the terminations or to the covering of its devices. Those gaps mean the full scale of the situation, and how the company intends to handle the remaining equipment, remains unclear from the available reporting.
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