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Home Depot is using Flock surveillance cameras in its parking lots and sharing the data with local police and federal agencies.
Hundreds of AI-powered license plate reader cameras, paid for by companies like Home Depot and Lowe’s and installed right outside the places millions of Americans shop every week, are quietly feeding into a massive law enforcement surveillance network.
According to records, sheriff’s offices can access Flock cameras at 173 Lowe’s locations across the country, along with cameras and microphones at dozens of Home Depot stores. The records are the latest to shed light on how expansive Flock’s surveillance network has become, and highlights that it includes cameras that are operated by both police and private businesses.
Two of the biggest home improvement chains in America are helping expand a massive AI surveillance network without most customers even realizing it. The concern isn’t just that stores are collecting people’s movements and handing that data to police, it’s that once the information enters these systems, it can easily be abused, whether by corrupt officers, overreaching federal agencies, hackers, or anyone else who gains access to it.
Flock cameras are stationed all over the country, on roads, intersections, and parking lot entrances. They constantly scan and log license plates, creating searchable records of where people drive, when they arrive somewhere, and how often they go there. Because the network is nationwide, police can often track people’s movements across multiple states without ever getting a warrant.
And once the data enters that system, control over it starts getting very blurry.
Government agencies can choose to share their Flock data statewide or nationwide, meaning departments all over the country can tap into it. In at least four states, federal immigration agents were reportedly able to access that data through local police departments, completely bypassing Home Depot’s supposed restrictions.
More than 4,000 immigration-related searches were found.
And it doesn’t stop at license plates.
Home Depot’s own privacy policy says the company collects, word for word, “biometric information, including facial recognition.”
The same policy says they may also collect in-store video and audio recordings, your WiFi activity inside the store, and your precise location data.
Home Depot was named in a class action lawsuit in California alleging that the department chain was running a covert surveillance system and then feeding that information to a database accessed by law enforcement.
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Home Depot claims the cameras are “solely a security measure to prevent theft” and that it “does not grant access to our license plate readers to federal law enforcement,” but the data still reached ICE, through the local police they share it with.
And regardless of where you stand politically on immigration, this should raise some much bigger questions: If Home Depot and Lowe’s are willing to feed customer movements into AI-powered surveillance systems, how many other major retailers are already doing the same thing behind the scenes?
How long is this data being stored?
Who actually owns it once it’s collected?
Who can buy access to it?
Can insurance companies get it?
Can private investigators get it?
Can political activists, protesters, whistleblowers, or journalists be tracked through it?
What happens when the data is wrong?
What happens when somebody inside the system abuses it?
And maybe the biggest question of all:
At what point does “security” quietly turn into mass surveillance?
The reality is, America is building a surveillance state through private corporations instead of openly through the government, because people would never vote for it directly. Corporations and companies like Palantir and Oracle collect enormous amounts of data under the banner of “safety,” “convenience,” or “loss prevention,” then law enforcement gains access to it through partnerships, data-sharing agreements, or third-party systems like Flock.
In other words, companies build the surveillance infrastructure, and the government taps into it afterward.
You don’t have to be suspected of a crime to end up inside the database. You just have to exist near one of the cameras.
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Looks like I'll be shopping with a ski mask, sunglasses and a hat. They can go straight to hell.
all the more reason to go to Ace, sounds like.