Forever Is a Long Time: What Flock Safety’s Contract Actually Says About Your Data

By Andy Parrish
Sunday, August 2, 2026

Your city council voted on a camera’s. Thie is what your elected officials agreed to.

Somewhere in the packet — behind the crime statistics, the testimonials, the slide with the recovered stolen vehicle — sits a document almost nobody reads. It is Flock Safety’s standard Terms and Conditions, and it is where the actual deal lives. Not the deal about cameras. The deal about you.

I read the current version, dated February 16, 2026. Here is what is in it.

The word is “perpetual.” It appears in Section 4.1.

Flock’s public messaging is emphatic and repeated: customers own their data. The contract agrees, in its first sentence on the subject. Then comes the second sentence.

“Customer hereby grants to Flock a limited, non-exclusive, royalty-free, irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide license to (a) use and disclose Customer Data to provide the Flock Services; and (b) use Customer Data to support and improve Flock’s products and services.” — §4.1

Read the adjectives slowly. Irrevocable. Perpetual. Worldwide. Royalty-free.

“Customer Data” is defined at §1.6 as everything the hardware captures — “images, audio, and/or video” — plus the metadata. That is your plate, your car, your location, your timestamp, your pattern of movement.

So the city owns it. And Flock has a license to use it that the city can never take back, that never expires, and that costs Flock nothing.

Now turn to §7.3, the survival clause. It lists the sections that outlive the contract:

“The following Sections will survive termination: 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.5, 9, and 11.”

Section 4 is the data license. When your town cancels Flock — as 82 jurisdictions across 28 states have done since 2021, by one tally — the cameras come down, the town loses its login, and Flock’s perpetual license to use everything already collected keeps running. Forever.

The ACLU’s Jay Stanley flagged exactly this in April 2026: the perpetual right lets the company “keep using driver surveillance data even after a town, city, or other customer has terminated its relationship with Flock and no longer has access to that data itself.” Flock has characterized the clause as a standard software industry provision.

Maybe it is. Adobe has a perpetual license to your font choices. Flock has one to a record of where your neighbors drive.

A sentence that used to be there isn’t anymore

Earlier versions of these terms contained a flat, unhedged promise:

“Flock does not own and shall not sell Customer Data.”

Search the February 2026 document for that sentence. It is gone. Reporting by IPVM, HaveIBeenFlocked and the ACLU documented its removal as one of at least four material changes Flock made in the seven months before this version.

Flock’s position is that the language was redundant. That may be true as a matter of drafting. It is also true that a promise you can point to in a contract and a promise a company makes on its blog are not the same instrument, and only one of them is enforceable.

To be clear about what Flock says today: the company states plainly that it “never sells customer data” and that customers control all sharing. That statement lives on flocksafety.com. It does not live in the contract anymore.

You own it. Flock decides whether you can have it.

Section 4.1 continues:

“Flock retains the exclusive right to determine and control the method, timing, format, and medium of such access or delivery, and is not obligated to provide Customer Data in any alternative form, format, or transmission method outside of the Web Interface.”

This is a remarkable species of ownership. The city holds title. Flock holds the key, sets the hours, picks the format, and owes the city nothing outside its own web portal. HaveIBeenFlocked has reported that what customers can actually download is degraded, lower-resolution footage stripped of metadata like timestamps — the very metadata that makes evidence usable in court and makes audits possible.

Then §1.13 goes further. It defines “Flock Property” to include not just software and hardware but:

“any derivative works, intermediate or final outputs, analyses, reports, models, or other results generated by or through the Flock Services. … no rights are granted to download, extract, export, or otherwise create or retain copies of such derivative works, outputs, or other elements of Flock Property.”

Parse that. The raw footage of your street is the city’s. Everything the AI concludes from it is Flock’s — the analyses, the models, the reports. And the city is contractually forbidden from exporting any of it.

For a public agency, this is a governance problem, not just a privacy one. Public records laws, evidence preservation duties, and defense discovery obligations all assume the government can produce what it has. Here the government has agreed it cannot.

Who owns the cameras on your street? Not your city.

This surprises people, so let’s be precise. Section 10.1:

“Customer is not permitted to remove, reposition, re-install, tamper with, alter, adjust, or otherwise take possession or control of Flock Hardware. … Customer shall not perform any acts which would interfere with the retention of title of the Flock Hardware by Flock.“

Your city does not own the pole camera. It leases access to a device Flock owns, mounted in your public right-of-way, pointed at your street. If the city touches it, all warranties are void and Flock can terminate.

Section 10.2 hands Flock the siting pen as well:

“In the event that Flock determines that Flock Hardware will not achieve optimal functionality at a designated location, Flock shall have final discretion to veto a specific location.“

And once installed, moving a camera — even trimming a branch in front of one — triggers charges under a “Reinstall Fee Schedule” that is not in this document. It lives at a URL on Flock’s own website (§1.18), and §1.1 incorporates it into your binding contract by reference. Same for the “Customer Implementation Guide” (§1.8). Two terms of a government contract, hosted on the vendor’s marketing site, editable by the vendor.

The contract explicitly says you have no rights under it

Section 11.15, in full:

“Except as explicitly set forth herein, none of the provisions of the Agreement will be for the benefit of or enforceable by any third-party.“

You are the third party. Every driver photographed by these cameras is a third party. Whatever privacy protections exist in this agreement, the people being surveilled cannot invoke a single one of them.

Section 11.5 completes the enclosure:

Disputes are “governed exclusively by … the laws of the State of Georgia” and “shall be settled by arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association.“

Private arbitration, in a forum your city did not choose, under the law of Flock’s home state. No public docket. No discovery the press can read. No precedent. When a surveillance dispute between a municipality and its vendor goes to arbitration, the public record of that dispute is a blank page.

If it all goes wrong, the bill is capped

Section 9, in the contract’s own capital letters:

“FLOCK’S CUMULATIVE, AGGREGATE LIABILITY … WILL NOT EXCEED THE TOTAL AMOUNT PAID BY CUSTOMER TO FLOCK IN THE TWELVE (12) MONTHS BEFORE SUCH CLAIM AROSE.“

Flock will also not be liable for “LOSS OF DATA.” Section 8.5 provides the services “AS IS” and disclaims all other warranties.

Public reporting suggests LPR cameras run roughly $2,500–$3,000 per camera per year. A town with ten cameras has capped its vendor’s total exposure — for a breach, a leak, a wrongful arrest driven by bad data — at roughly $30,000.

Exhibit A requires Flock to carry $5,000,000 in cyber liability coverage, on a shared limit with its errors-and-omissions policy, “per incident and in the aggregate.” Flock has said it passed 100,000 cameras nationwide. Five million dollars, aggregate, across a hundred thousand cameras, is not an insurance policy. It is a rounding error with a certificate.

Your council may not be able to vote its way out

Section 11.12 is the non-appropriation clause — the standard escape hatch that lets governments exit contracts when the money isn’t there. Read the last line:

“non-appropriation shall not be based on discretionary budget decisions or operate as a termination for convenience right.“

A council that changes its mind and defunds the program has, per this clause, not validly exercised non-appropriation. IPVM has reported that the new terms make termination harder precisely when councils vote it down — and roughly 50 councils did exactly that in the year before the ACLU’s April 2026 piece.

Two more small ones worth knowing:

• §11.6: Flock “may refer to Customer as a current customer without first obtaining Customer’s consent.” Your town is marketing collateral by default.
• §11.10: any “Special Terms” in an Order Form override these public Terms and Conditions. Order Forms are not published.

That last point deserves emphasis. The document the public can read is not the contract. The retention period (§1.19), the price, and any overriding Special Terms all live in an Order Form that is not on Flock’s website. Flock states a 30-day default retention; the contract itself specifies no number at all. If you want to know how long your plates are kept in your town, the public terms cannot tell you. File a records request for the Order Form.

Part 2: Live Streaming – Flock’s very own words on how to livestream any camera anwhere.

TOS Feb 10, 2026