In a stunning moment of self-awareness, the CEO of Flock Safety admitted this week that his company took too long to notice police officers were using its license plate recognition cameras to track romantic partners. Apparently, when you sell a tool designed to surveil everyone’s movements, you should expect it to be used for… surveilling everyone’s movements.
The revelation that officers quit their jobs rather than face consequences for using Flock’s cameras as a romantic reconnaissance tool has sparked an obvious business opportunity. Why waste time being shocked? The company should lean into it.
Introduce Flock Dating: a premium service pairing license plate data with relationship verification. Want to know if your partner is really at the gym? Check the lot at their gym. Wondering if that “work trip” is real? Cross-reference their plate against hotel parking zones. It’s not stalking—it’s data-driven commitment verification.
The beauty is that Flock already has the infrastructure. The cameras are installed. The database exists. The only missing piece is honest branding. Instead of pretending surprise that surveillance tools get used for surveillance, why not monetize the inevitable?
Of course, this is absurd. But it’s less absurd than selling mass tracking infrastructure and acting genuinely shocked when people track things. The real punchline isn’t that police abused the system—it’s that the system was designed to be abusable from day one. Flock’s delayed response wasn’t a failure to predict human nature. It was a failure to admit what they were actually selling.