Flock Says Nobody at the Company Accesses Your Footage. A City’s Logs Show Employees Did.

Get the facts right first

A viral version of this story claims Flock’s CEO streamed live video of children. That is false, and repeating it would discredit everything else we say. So here is only what the public records establish.

In Dunwoody, Georgia, a resident named Jason Hunyar obtained Flock’s own access logs through a public-records request. They show that Flock employees — not the CEO — viewed cameras in the city’s Flock network as part of the company’s sales-demo program. Among them were cameras in sensitive locations: a children’s gymnastics room, a pool, and other spaces at the Marcus Jewish Community Center, along with fitness studios. A Flock business-development manager viewed community-center cameras on July 23, 2025; a Flock vice president viewed a camera labeled “Gymnastics” on September 30, 2025.

Two more corrections the loud version gets wrong. These were not Flock license-plate cameras. They were privately owned cameras — the community center’s own — that had been integrated into the city’s police Flock network. And we are not calling anyone a predator: Flock says the employees accessed the cameras with the city’s authorization, under a “demo partner” agreement, and denies that anyone was “spying on children.” We take that as its position and move to what actually matters.

Flock’s response, in full

Flock has pushed back hard, and fairness requires stating its case. It says the demos were authorized by the city, that select employees may access accounts with customer permission to build and debug features, and that “no one is spying on children.” It argues it is more transparent than its rivals precisely because it creates these access logs and lets the public obtain them. After the resident published his findings, Flock agreed to stop using Dunwoody’s cameras for demos and said it would train staff to demo only in public locations like retail parking lots. It also defended the named employees, calling the “predator” label false and “a life-altering allegation.” That objection is reasonable, and we won’t traffic in that framing.

So what is the real story?

Strip away the outrage and two documented facts remain — and both matter for any community weighing a Flock contract.

First: the representation gap. Flock’s own FAQ tells customers, in plain words, that “nobody from Flock Safety is accessing or monitoring your footage,” that “Flock will not share, sell, or access your data,” and that customers own their data. The Dunwoody logs show Flock employees did access customer footage. Even accepting that the access was authorized and well-intentioned, the blanket customer-facing promise does not match the documented reality. A vendor cannot tell buyers “no one here can see your feed” while running a program in which staff view the feed. That is a plain question of what the company represents versus what it does.

Second: the integration capability. The logs reveal the architecture. Flock’s platform pulls privately owned cameras into a police network, where Flock staff can reach them. A community center buys cameras for its own building; through the integration, those cameras become viewable inside a police system — and by the vendor. The city’s camera count never captured that, because the capability isn’t a camera. It’s the platform, working as designed.

Why this lands in New Hanover County

This is not a distant Georgia curiosity. New Hanover County runs eight Flock “Condor” live-video cameras and a Fusus real-time-crime-center integration built to pull in outside camera feeds. And we have already documented the gap between what residents are told and what the paperwork allows: the county’s policy says only Sheriff’s Office employees may touch the data — while the contract the county actually signed gives Flock itself standing rights to access it. Dunwoody is that clause, tested in the real world.

So the questions for the next meeting write themselves, and they are answerable: Can Flock employees access New Hanover’s live Condor feeds or any integrated third-party cameras? Under what agreement? And will the county produce the access logs — the same kind a Georgia resident used to surface all of this — so the public can see who has looked?

A vendor cannot promise buyers that no one at the company sees their footage, then run a program in which employees do.

What you can do

• Ask the Commission the access question on Aug 17 — who at Flock can see the county’s cameras, and where are the logs. Here’s how to speak.
• Read the mismatch we already documented — the policy says county-only; the contract says Flock too.
• Sign and share the petition — these questions deserve answers on the record.

Sources

• 404 Media — “City Learns Flock Accessed Cameras in Children’s Gymnastics Room as a Sales Pitch Demo, Renews Contract Anyway” (Apr. 30, 2026) — 404media.co
• Techdirt — “Flock’s Sales Pitch Included Recordings Of Kids’ Gymnastic Classes” — techdirt.com
• Atlanta Press Collective — Dunwoody Flock contract coverage — atlpresscollective.com
• Axios Atlanta — “Dunwoody renews Flock Safety contract despite security and privacy concerns” — axios.com
• Flock’s response — “Understanding Flock’s Testing and Development Program” — flocksafety.com