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After officials in Florida’s St. Lucie County opted to end use of Flock cameras and began removing them, they discovered several devices that were not connected to any local agencies. The Washington Post reported that the county leaders thought they had 52 cameras, but found 14 additional ones that were unaccounted for and unpermitted.
Three of the cameras without permits were later claimed by the St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Office, although the department did not inform The Post why that gear did not obtain the paperwork. That means there were 11 Flock cameras placed in the area with unknown owners that none of the county officials knew about. Unsurprisingly, multiple county residents told The Post that they felt unsafe or unhappy about this discovery.
We have reached out to Flock for comment and will update this story if we hear back.
Flock’s cameras have faced extensive scrutiny over their security risks and potential for privacy abuses. Last month, Florida’s Department of Transportation enacted a ban on Flock license plate readers from being placed on state roads by law enforcement. Although some city and state governments have been reversing course on the use of this company’s gear, Flock’s cameras are still common, with more than 100,000 reportedly in use across the US.
A county official told The Post that it put notices at the unclaimed cameras ordering them to be removed by whoever owns them, and in the interim, they will be covered with plastic bags to prevent any further data collection. One of the newspaper’s employees went to the location of an unpermitted camera and found that it had been removed, but there was no sign of who had taken it down.