Flock cameras are worse, at least imo, because it's "active". The old cameras clocked your speed, took a picture, got processed and sent a fine. The flock cameras will misread your plate, determine you are a violent out of state felon, follow your movement and dispatch a squad to your location. You can be dragged out of the car at gunpoint before you even know what's happening.

Theres also the universal database aspect that can expose all the different department's data to each other, allowing officers to do things like saayy, stalk their ex-wives across state lines.

The history of movement they compile, the analysis tools available, the "proactive policing", and the creep factor of always being monitored all roll together.

Flock is selling software called freeform which tracks people's movements. I don't know if it can be used on their current cameras or if they need upgrades or new cameras.

Also, flock was planning to use stolen information from a hack against a parking lot company until a news story came out about it. Flock got ahold of the hacked data, that included license plates and names on credit cards, and was planning to use it to identify car owners. After news stories released they said they would not use it but it shows that they are a shady company.

It's just a loss of privacy. Those old cameras captured plates but now there are flock cameras everywhere and the data they capture is searchable nationwide. The data is being used by ICE to find people they want to arrest. There is little oversight of their use. If police want to track your phone they have to get a warrant and show it to your phone carrier. If they want to track your car they just look it up in flock. A lot of police officers are using flock lookups for their own personal use, like to track people they know.

Those ones didn't track anything. At most they counted the number of cars. They didn't identify you in any way, nor track you as you moved around. Nor could you search the data, except though manual review.

Here's a good article this week on just one reason why Flock is terrible:

https://www.wired.com/story/flock-safety-os-investigate/

Flock Has a Powerful New AI Tool for Police. We Got Its Code

Flock’s surveillance cameras have already sparked outrage. WIRED reconstructed its next-generation AI system, already in use by some police, to confirm it goes much further than tracking license plates.

VEHICLE SURVEILLANCE GIANT Flock Safety has told the public for years that its technology “cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals.” It has now built a system that does both, an artificial intelligence tool for police that can identify drivers and track vehicles by their patterns of movement alone, WIRED has learned.

Drawing on a network of cameras that logs the movements of drivers in more than 6,000 communities, the tool can pick out potential witnesses by how often their cars pass through a neighborhood, or surface a driver’s “associates” from the cameras they pass together. Because the system also reaches police case files, 911 dispatch logs, and commercial identity records, those plates can be turned into names, home addresses, and relatives. It can search for people in an area drawn on a map based on nothing more than a physical description.