The LAPD, the third-largest police force in the country, let its Flock contract expire on July 11, and cited civil liberties and privacy concerns rather than cost. Between August 2021 and May 2026, 82 Flock contracts were terminated across 28 states, with 39 of those in the first five months of 2026 alone.

Niantic just announced their delivery robot deal. When they sold Pokémon Go to Scopely last year, they kept all the data. 30 billion images from player scans over 10 years. They used it to build a navigation system that now guides delivery robots through cities in LA, Chicago and Helsinki. The pokéstops weren't random. They were placed specifically to get photo coverage of urban areas.

This happens in other companies too, google reCAPTCHA did the same thing. Every traffic light you clicked was labeling data for self-driving cars. Millions of hours of unpaid work.

Did you play Pokémon Go back in 2016? Feels weird knowing what those walks were actually for

Could we rely on future games or navigation systems?

I've been following the debate over Flock cameras for a while: the license-plate tracking, the ability to reconstruct people’s movements, and especially what happens when data collected for one purpose becomes available for another.

It reminded me of a consulting trip I made to China in 2019. I spent time in Chengdu and then on the Tibetan Plateau near Hongyuan. The surveillance there was impossible to miss: cameras everywhere, biometric collection at the border, and, as I learned later, a “grid management” system in the Tibetan region I visited that divided communities into monitored blocks.

What has stayed with me isn’t simply that China surveilled its population. It’s how quickly I changed my own behavior because I knew I might be watched. No one had to threaten me. The watching did the work.

That experience eventually led me to a larger question about Flock and the surveillance infrastructure being assembled in the U.S. The cameras themselves concern me, but I’ve come to think they’re only the visible part of a much larger issue: what happens when location data, voter records, citizenship status, health data, financial information and other previously separate databases become increasingly searchable and interoperable?

I spent quite a bit of time researching that question and ended up writing an essay that combines what I saw in China and Tibet with what’s happening here now. I thought this group might be interested.

Where do people here draw the line...not just on Flock cameras themselves, but on the ability to combine the information they generate with everything else governments and private companies already know about us?

Here's a link to the essay if you're interested.

https://tomjohnsonwriter.substack.com/p/the-frog-in-the-pot?r=buanz&utm_medium=ios

Edit: thanks for the award, kind stranger!

Basically, strong enforcement of age rules undermines data privacy.