Cities Are Ditching Flock for Axon. Nothing Stops Axon From Becoming Flock.
Thirty-nine Flock Safety contracts were canceled in just the first five months of 2026 alone -- after Mountain View and Ventura County discovered Flock's own "nationwide" sharing setting had been quietly active, feeding roughly 600,000 unauthorized searches to agencies that never signed a data agreement. Most of those cities are hiring Axon to do the identical job. Axon's contracts genuinely lack Flock's national lookup network -- that part is real. But so far that's a competitive selling point, not a locked-in architecture: Flock proved it can build hard technical guardrails when it wants to (encrypted storage, true data deletion); the one setting that caused two scandals was left as a switch instead of a wall. Axon has already announced plans to build the same kind of interoperable network, and its own leadership overrode its ethics board on a different surveillance product four years ago.
Home Depot Is Being Sued Three Times This Year Over How It Watches You. Its Camera Vendor Has a Playbook for Backlash Like It.
Home Depot faces three separate privacy lawsuits in 2026 across three states. The most serious: a California class action says its Flock Safety license-plate cameras at 233 stores feed a searchable, nationwide police database, with a policy that doesn't meaningfully restrict sharing with ICE or out-of-state agencies. That's not hypothetical -- the same complaint documents two real cases where cities that explicitly disabled nationwide Flock access got it secretly turned back on anyway. Separately -- and not shown to be connected to Home Depot's case specifically -- a leaked Flock coaching guide obtained by 404 Media shows the company has a practiced playbook for handling this kind of backlash generally: don't deny it's mass surveillance, reframe the debate around "accountability," and get to officials before the public can organize against it.
A Bipartisan Bill to Protect Kids Online Would Also Outlaw GrapheneOS's Account-less Design
A federal bill sitting in the Senate Commerce Committee -- introduced by two Democrats and two Republicans -- would require every operating system on every general-purpose computer to gate use behind an account and a declared age. Its text carries no exemption for open-source, nonprofit, or small developers. GrapheneOS, the account-less privacy OS BL:UF profiled after a traveler's duress-wipe feature got him federally charged, has already told the identical state-level requirement it would rather leave a market than build the account system this bill demands.
He Gave Border Agents a Passcode. It Wiped His Phone Instead of Unlocking It. Now He's Facing Federal Charges.
CBP stopped Samuel Tunick at the Atlanta airport in January 2025, saying they suspected child exploitation material on his phone. He gave them a passcode; instead of unlocking the device, GrapheneOS's built-in duress feature wiped it permanently. Federal prosecutors indicted him in November 2025 for destroying property to prevent its seizure — the first known US case charging someone specifically over a phone's duress-wipe feature. His lawyers say the child-exploitation justification doesn't hold up and that the real target was his connection to the "Stop Cop City" activist movement. Neither claim has been ruled on yet.
I Graded Every App on My Phone From A to E. Instagram and PayPal Both Failed.
A volunteer project called Terms of Service; Didn't Read has spent since 2012 reading the agreements nobody else does, grading them A through E. I checked what's actually on my phone: Instagram and PayPal both land at E, the worst grade, for reasons including PayPal tracking you even after you opt out of tracking. Headspace — the meditation app — isn't much better. There's a free browser extension that shows you the grade before you tap agree, which is the closest thing to actually reading the fine print that most people will ever do.
Police Used License-Plate Cameras to Stalk Their Exes. One of the Officers Who Investigated the First Case Was Caught Doing the Same Thing.
Milwaukee police officer Josue Ayala used the department's Flock license-plate-reader system to look up his romantic partner's location 124 times and her ex's location 55 times. He resigned and pleaded guilty. One of the two detectives assigned to investigate him, Tehrangi Chapman, was later charged with the same kind of misuse — tracking two people himself and secretly planting a GPS tracker on one of their cars. Georgia's state investigators have arrested five more officers this month for the same pattern; two more were fired in South Carolina. An Institute for Justice count puts documented cases like this at two dozen and climbing. And in Norfolk, Virginia — Flock's own backyard for one of the most consequential pending court fights over whether any of this requires a warrant in the first place — the city just voted to add more cameras, not fewer.
Every Privacy Law in America Exempts the Government. That's Exactly Where Your Data Is Moving Fastest.
Three separate government surveillance stories broke this month — a police drone leak, license-plate cameras used to stalk exes, a consumer-safety agency demanding hospital ER records — and they're the same story: agencies are sharing and buying data across walls that used to separate them, almost always without a public vote. The part almost no coverage gets to: every one of America's 20 state privacy laws, and the federal proposals that died before becoming law, explicitly exempts government from the rules that bind companies. Add in the terms-of-service agreements nobody reads — a 2008 study put the reading time at roughly 244 hours a year, popularized since as "76 work days" — and the honest answer is that citizens have a little real recourse against companies and functionally none against the government programs documented here.
A Website Bug Exposed Peter Thiel's Secret Society. The Real Scandal Isn't the Secret — It's How Rarely We Catch One.
A misconfigured website — not a hack — leaked member and attendee data from Dialog, a private networking society Peter Thiel co-founded in 2006. The viral claim that Jeffrey Epstein was invited is false: two other people forwarded him their own invitations, and a different, fully-identified 'Jeff Epstein' appears on a leaked list. What's actually documented: a badly-secured but otherwise unremarkable version of something powerful people have always done in private. The real story isn't that this happens. It's that we almost never get to see it when it does.
San Francisco Police Put Five Drone Feeds Behind a Link With No Password. The Leak Showed How Much the Drones See.
Color video, thermal images, locations and pilot identities were accessible from the open web. The exposure was a security failure—and an accidental window into a surveillance system expanding faster than its safeguards.
Your Phone Never Stops Talking. I Put a $20 Filter on Mine to Hear What It Was Saying.
In under a week, my phone made 91,118 requests to the internet — about one every six seconds, awake or asleep. A $20-a-year filter called NextDNS flagged 5,937 of them (7%) as ads, trackers, and junk I never agreed to, and blocked them before they connected. I didn't feel one. Here's why you'd want it, what it actually does for you, and where it falls short.
Your TV Is Watching You Watch It. Here's the Setting That Makes It Stop.
Almost every smart TV ships with a feature called ACR — automatic content recognition — switched on by default. It snapshots whatever's on your screen (even from your console or laptop), fingerprints it, and sends it back to be matched and sold. In 2017 the FTC caught Vizio doing it on 11 million TVs — over 100 billion data points a day, tied to your age and income. It's still standard. Here's the buried toggle on every major brand, and why you should block the TV at your network too.
Your Car Is a Data Broker With Wheels. Here's How to Make It Stop Selling You.
Your car may be one of the worst privacy threats you own. Mozilla reviewed 25 brands in 2023 and every one failed — 19 of 25 said they can sell your data. And it's not hypothetical: from 2020 to 2024, GM sold driving data — your speed, hard braking, late-night trips — to brokers like LexisNexis, who fed it to insurers and quietly raised people's premiums. The FTC banned GM from doing it and California reached a $12.75 million settlement with them. Here's how to find what your car shares, and shut it off.
My Smart Glasses Record for Meta by Default. I Found the Switches That Make Them Stop.
I almost stopped wearing my Ray-Ban Meta glasses — all I'd heard was that footage gets reviewed by some company to train an AI, with no real oversight. The fear isn't a myth: in April 2025 Meta turned the AI on by default, made your photos and voice usable for training, and removed the opt-out for storing your voice. But you can't fix it by installing anything — the glasses are locked. You fix it in three settings, one network block, and how you wear them. Here's exactly where the switches are.