First privateness hawks and motorists have been outraged over Flock cameras. Now, college students are up in arms over the AI-powered surveillance, which has been rolled out in at the very least 100 college districts throughout the nation, in accordance with an evaluation of presidency procurement data by nonprofit information group The74.
“It looks as if the federal government’s attempting to observe you increasingly,” Gabe Sayer, a 17-year-old highschool senior from Loveland, Colorado, instructed The Submit. “It makes me really feel slightly unsafe.”
After 5 Flock cameras have been put in in faculties throughout his district, Sayer organized a petition in opposition to them and launched DeFlock Loveland, a high-schooler-led initiative urging the varsity board and metropolis council to take down cameras.
“I used to be simply so disgusted,” mentioned Sayer, who believes the Flock cams violate the Fourth Modification rights of scholars and group members by subjecting them to unreasonable ranges of surveillance. “I made a decision that we needed to at the very least try to eliminate them in Loveland.”
His Change.org petition — one in all a number of launched by college students throughout the US — has to this point, garnered 719 signatures. “An America the place corporations like Flock are allowed to conduct widespread surveillance of Americans is an America the place our liberties are dangerously in query,” it asserts.
Flock markets instantly to varsities on its firm web site, the place they boast about giving “peace of thoughts” to establishments from “Ok-12 faculties to main universities” by constructing a “digital perimeter” round campuses with license plate readers, video cameras, cellular items, gunshot detectors, and a cellular app for workers.
Its cameras are extra controversial than normal surveillance tools as a result of they use AI to generate databases of details about folks’s actions.
“What are you doing to an entire technology of scholars that principally need to be resigned to the truth that what they do is continually surveilled? There’s kind of a democratic, philosophical query in that,” mentioned Sophia Cope, employees legal professional on the nonprofit civil liberties watchdog group Digital Frontier Basis, based mostly in San Francisco.
When contacted for remark, the Loveland college district instructed The Submit that the cameras, which have been put in in 2024, had been disconnected — not resulting from group pushback however as a result of “the district decided that the sum of money being spent on the cameras was not offering the service that [they] had hoped to get.”
However the cameras nonetheless stay up as a result of they “are the property of Flock and it’s as much as their willpower to take away the tools,” a spokesperson mentioned.
Sayer continues to petition his metropolis council to take down the cameras they function, and a spokesperson confirmed ongoing conversations with him and different activists.
American faculties had large surveillance earlier than the proliferation of AI. In 2021, 93% of public faculties had safety cameras. However AI-enhanced safety programs pose distinctive issues. They’re not simply passively recording; they’re more and more automated, searchable, and interconnected.
The report by The74 discovered that one Texas college district granted US Border Patrol entry to their Flock knowledge. One other Texas district’s eight cameras have been searched by 3,100 totally different regulation enforcement companies from across the nation greater than 733,000 instances in only a single month between December 2025 and January 2026.
However Flock says their programs are a approach to hold children protected from predators and mass shooters. The corporate claims to have the ability to “cease threats earlier than they attain the doorway” by scanning for banned guests and checking on the identification of suspicious automobiles.The corporate didn’t reply to The Submit’s request for remark.
Adam Scott Wandt, affiliate professor of public coverage at John Jay School of Legal Justice, instructed The Submit that “the power of Flock programs to assist struggle crime in America is reliable. It really works.” However, he famous, “The issue is, with Flock, we’re not sure of the boundaries.”
Who precisely can entry the information collected by Flock cameras on college campuses isn’t all the time completely clear. Critics fear that faculties threat turning into surveillance satellites for police departments and different authorities companies.
Flock isn’t the one firm infusing AI into college surveillance. Different corporations equivalent to ZeroEyes and Omnialert provide their companies to districts, as nicely, generally integrating instantly into present safety programs.
Omnialert makes use of AI surveillance to detect weapons and claims to have flagged over 3,000 “AI gun detection occasions” in 2025. However they landed in scorching water final fall after a detection system at Kenwood Excessive College in Baltimore brought about police to strategy a highschool scholar with weapons drawn.
The shocked teen, who was searched by cops known as to the scene, turned out to be armed with solely a Doritos bag.
“Our system operated as designed — it recognized a attainable risk, elevated it for human evaluation, and relied on licensed security personnel for ultimate willpower,” the corporate instructed The Submit. “The principal mistakenly escalated the state of affairs after the varsity safety employees dismissed it.”
In accordance with Kenneth Trump (no relation to the president), a safety guide who has labored at school security for 40 years, the difficulty isn’t essentially the expertise itself however how rapidly it’s been rolled out.
“We’re not fairly prepared for prime time,” he instructed The Submit.
He additionally famous that cameras and AI aren’t any substitute for old skool technique of maintaining children protected.
“You can put 1,000,000 {dollars}’ value of expertise in a single college and it’s nonetheless not going to be as efficient as having adults who’re seen within the hallways, engaged with children, constructing relationships, actively supervising,” he warned.
