A town duct-taped garbage bags over its Flock spy cameras
A town duct-taped garbage bags over its Flock spy cameras Séamus Bellamy 7:00 am Thu Jul 30, 2026 A Flock camera. Photographers / Shutterstock Given recent events, it's safe to say that in many communities, Flock's creepy, all-seeing automated license plate readers (ALPR) have become as unwelcome as a fart in a space suit. Things have gotten so bad that, as 404 Media reports, when the city of Verona, Wisconsin opted to end its relationship with the company, Flock refused to remove their hardware from the city.
- ▪A town duct-taped garbage bags over its Flock spy cameras Séamus Bellamy 7:00 am Thu Jul 30, 2026 A Flock camera.
- ▪Photographers / Shutterstock Given recent events, it's safe to say that in many communities, Flock's creepy, all-seeing automated license plate readers (ALPR) have become as unwelcome as a fart in a space suit.
- ▪Things have gotten so bad that, as 404 Media reports, when the city of Verona, Wisconsin opted to end its relationship with the company, Flock refused to remove their hardware from the city.
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Record
| Original publisher | Boing Boing |
| Canonical URL | https://boingboing.net/2026/07/30/a-town-duct-taped-garbage-bags-over-its-flock-spy-cameras.html |
| Publication time | Thu, 30 Jul 2026 14:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-30T14:42:06.611Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-30T14:42:06.611Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | RltINpcMDrb7 · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
A town duct-taped garbage bags over its Flock spy cameras Séamus Bellamy 7:00 am Thu Jul 30, 2026 A Flock camera. Photo: Aaron of L.A. Photographers / Shutterstock Given recent events, it's safe to say that in many communities, Flock's creepy, all-seeing automated license plate readers (ALPR) have become as unwelcome as a fart in a space suit. The company's 90,000 ALPR devices have become a spiteful thing across America: called upon by law enforcement for things as perverse as tracking the movements of a woman who chose to have an abortion to 'immigration-related searches' by law enforcement officials on behalf of ICE (Flock has adamantly stated that they have no contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Boing Boing.
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