Flock Exposed - Contract Language Shifting
Compiled September 15, 2026, expanded September 16, 2026 - all items sourced to published reporting, company materials, litigation filings, or official government findings. This document is not limited to Flock.
1. The ACLU has flagged the contract terms directly
The ACLU has warned that Flock has made several significant changes to its contractual terms and conditions that appear to diminish cities' and towns' control over data and otherwise shift power from customers to the company. Municipalities considering or renewing a Flock contract were advised to look closely at these changes and seek the advice of counsel first.
Source: ACLU, "Municipalities: Beware of Changes in Flock's Legal Terms," 2026
2. A key customer protection was quietly removed
Flock's previous contract terms stated flatly, "Flock does not own and shall not sell Customer Data." That language is now absent from current contracts - a change documented by independent researchers and confirmed by the ACLU's own review.
Source: ACLU; IPVM; HaveIBeenFlocked.com, 2026
3. Signed contracts reviewed by government auditors show broad company rights over local data
The Los Angeles Police Department's own Inspector General audited the department's Flock contracts and quoted the actual signed language: one agreement lets Flock "retain the right to use the foregoing for any purpose in Flock's sole discretion," while a separate agreement grants the company rights to use anonymized footage for "training of machine learning algorithms." Privacy attorneys who reviewed Flock's contracts elsewhere independently confirmed this same pattern.
Source: Los Angeles Police Department Inspector General audit; Fortune, August 24, 2026
4. A February update quietly dropped the indemnification protections towns thought they had
An earlier version of Flock's contract terms, in place as of December 2025, required the company to indemnify customers for intellectual-property infringement claims and installation damage under its own section 9.3. The February 2026 update eliminated that indemnification language entirely - not just Flock's obligation to the customer, but the customer's matching obligation too - leaving towns with less contractual protection than the version they may have originally signed.
Source: Footnote4a, "The Deal has been Altered Further: Flock Publishes New Terms," 2026
5. Cities technically "own" their data on paper, but independent investigation found they can't actually get clean access to it
An investigation into Flock's data-ownership language found that while customers are formally granted legal "ownership" of their footage, they cannot access high-resolution original files, receive images with unreliable timestamps and scrubbed metadata, and must submit a formal request through Flock's own evidence platform just to obtain their own agency's records. The same investigation traced a December 2025 contract change that removed language guaranteeing customers "owned" their footage in the first place, before a later update restored the word "ownership" without restoring full practical control over the underlying files.
Source: Footnote4a, "You Will Own Nothing: How Flock Safety Keeps Cities From Their Own Surveillance Data," March 2026
6. A "perpetual" license lets Flock keep using your data even after your town cancels
Flock's current terms add a right for the company to use customer data to "support and improve" its services that the ACLU describes as "perpetual" - meaning Flock can continue using a town's surveillance data even after that town has terminated its contract and lost its own access to the same data. Flock's right to use that data would have no expiration date at all.
Source: ACLU, "Municipalities: Beware of Changes in Flock's Legal Terms," 2026
7. The contract shields Flock from its own gross negligence and pushes the cost onto taxpayers
Flock's newer contract terms expand the company's protection against liability for its own willful misconduct or gross negligence, according to the ACLU, potentially shifting the cost of data breaches and other company failures from Flock onto the taxpayers of the towns that hired it. A separate review of the February 2026 terms found Flock's liability is now capped at just twelve months of fees, even in cases involving gross negligence or willful misconduct on the company's part.
Source: ACLU, "Municipalities: Beware of Changes in Flock's Legal Terms," 2026; Footnote4a, "The Deal has been Altered Further: Flock Publishes New Terms," 2026
8. Disputes are quietly steered into private arbitration under Georgia law, away from local courts
The same updated contract terms mandate private arbitration under Georgia law whenever a dispute arises between Flock and a customer - regardless of what state or town is actually using the equipment. That clause moves any legal fight out of a town's own local court system and into a private process governed by the law of the state where Flock is headquartered.
Source: ACLU, "Municipalities: Beware of Changes in Flock's Legal Terms," 2026
9. It's now harder to get out of a Flock contract, even when a council votes not to renew it
The ACLU found the newer contract terms make it harder for customers to terminate their Flock agreements outright, including in situations where a town or city council votes not to approve a contract, or simply fails to appropriate the funding for it going forward - something nearly 50 cities had done in a single recent year. In practice, towns have found early exit often comes with a price tag: Stoughton, Wisconsin agreed to pay a 12,500 dollar buyout fee to terminate its contract early, and Wausau, Wisconsin's first Flock agreement in 2023 included a straightforward exit clause of 500 dollars per camera - but that clause disappeared entirely when the city signed a new five-year, 250,000 dollar agreement later that same year.
Source: ACLU, "Municipalities: Beware of Changes in Flock's Legal Terms," 2026; Fox47, "Stoughton council members vote to terminate Flock contract," 2026; Wausau Pilot & Review, "Will Wausau and Marathon County drop Flock?," 2026
10. Some contracts quietly build in a right for Flock to fight a town's own attempt to remove its cameras
Flock's terms bar a customer from removing, repositioning, reinstalling, tampering with, altering, adjusting, or otherwise taking possession or control of Flock's own hardware - and state that doing so voids the warranty. Verona, Wisconsin discovered what tha can mean in practice: after the city's contract lapsed and officials repeatedly asked Flock to remove its three cameras, emails later obtained by 404 Media showed Flock scheduled the cameras for "maintenance" instead of removal, and the company separately objected to the city removing the equipment itself. With no clear legal certainty about whether it could touch Flock's own hardware, Verona's actual solution was to cover all three cameras with black trash bags while it waited months for Flock to act.
Source: Flock Safety, Terms and Conditions, flocksafety.com/legal/terms-and-conditions; 404 Media, "Flock 'Objects to Our Removing Their Equipment': Emails Reveal Why a Town Put Bags Over Its Flock Cameras," 2026; Wisconsin Examiner, "Verona has waited months for Flock cameras to come down after canceling contract," 2026
11. Special terms a city negotiated can be wiped out by a routine paperwork renewal
Independent researchers reviewing Flock's contract structure found that once a customer agrees to new online terms and conditions by executing any new order form, nothing prevents Flock from altering the deal further going forward - because Flock controls the terms of its own contract. Cities like Denver, which had negotiated special protective terms and conditions, risk having those special terms wiped out entirely by running a new order form through a routine council consent agenda - if the new order form does not explicitly re-include the exact special terms of the original agreement, the original protections are simply superseded and gone.
Source: Footnote4a, "Flock is altering the deal. Pray it does not alter it further.," 2026
12. In some agreements, it is the town that must indemnify Flock - not the other way around
A signed Flock services agreement obtained from a public records request shows a customer indemnification clause requiring the local agency to indemnify and hold Flock harmless against damages, losses, liabilities, settlements, and expenses - including the company's own attorneys' fees - arising from a claim tied to the agency's use of the system, a breach of the agreement, or the agency's own installation obligations. Flock's separate product-specific terms for its drone operations go further still, requiring the customer to defend and indemnify Flock even for losses tied to the customer's own site conditions, such as structural integrity or electrical capacity, or the customer's decision not to implement a Flock-recommended safety measure.
Source: Flock Group Inc. Services Agreement, Whitestown, Indiana, published contract document; Flock Safety, Product Specific Terms, flocksafety.com/legal/product-specific-terms
13. Auto-renewal clauses are the quiet trap that keeps towns locked in year after year
Most Flock contracts renew automatically each year unless the customer gives written notice of non-renewal inside a narrow window, typically 30 to 60 days before the renewal date - miss that window and the town is locked in for another full year at the same terms. One published Flock order form spells this out directly: the agreement "will automatically renew for successive renewal terms of the greater of one year or the length set forth on the Order Form" unless either party gives notice of non-renewal at least 30 days before the current term ends. Annual renewal pricing can also increase from one term to the next.
Source: Placa.ai, "How To Cancel Flock Safety Contract"; Placa.ai, "Flock Safety Pricing Explained for HOAs"; City of South Portland, Flock Group Inc. Order Form
CLOSING SUMMARY FOR THE WEBSITE
No surveillance vendor in this space sells a single, fixed product. They sell a hardware-and-software platform the company itself can expand from a distance - adding gunshot detection, pulling in a town's existing non-vendor cameras through devices like Wing Gateway, or enabling nationwide data-sharing features - all without requiring a new town vote, and in several documented cases, without the town's knowledge at all. Flock has stated outright that it can remotely deactivate its own equipment at will, which necessarily means it can also activate capabilities at will. And the written contracts themselves have been quietly rewritten over time to grant vendors broader rights over community data, weaker liability exposure, and a harder exit door than many local officials realized they were signing away. The core problem for any town is this: whatever a board approves in a public meeting is not necessarily what the system will still be doing a year later, on what terms, or under whose control - and the town often has no independent way to verify or renegotiate that on its own.
This page will be updated as more factual sources become available.