Flock Safety's plain English guide has been up for thirteen days. I read it against the contract again this morning, and then I went back and read the version of the contract from December.
The plain English used to be in the contract.
Housekeeping first, and it is a one time ask. If this landed in your Promotions tab, dragging it into Primary is the one thing that teaches Google to put it in front of you. Replying works too, and I read every one.
That video went up August 29th and it stops at the mismatch. Everything under it is what I found when I kept pulling.
The figures, as of September 3, 2026
1 - Flock Safety's Customer Terms and Conditions are stamped "Last Updated: August 21, 2026," and Flock Safety's plain English guide, titled "Data Ownership," is stamped "Last Updated: August 21st, 2026." Both were still stamped that when I loaded them on September 3, 2026.
2 - In the December 19, 2025 version of those Terms and Conditions, section 4 had 4 subsections: 4.1 Customer Data, 4.2 Customer Generated Data, 4.3 Training Data, and 4.4 Data Distribution.
3 - In the version posted on September 3, 2026, section 4 has 2 subsections: 4.1 Customer Data and 4.2 Flock Property.
4 - The phrase "Training Data" appears 0 times in the Terms and Conditions posted on September 3, 2026. It was the heading of section 4.3 in the December 19, 2025 version.
5 - The phrases "de-identified," "never sold" and "personally identifiable" each appear 0 times in the Terms and Conditions posted on September 3, 2026. All 3 appear in section 4.3 of the December 19, 2025 version.
6 - The phrase "Customer Generated Data" appears 0 times in the Terms and Conditions posted on September 3, 2026. It was the heading of section 4.2 in the December 19, 2025 version.
7 - The words "Flock does not own" appear 0 times in the Terms and Conditions posted on September 3, 2026. The sentence "Flock does not own and shall not sell Customer Data" is in section 4.1 of the December 19, 2025 version.
8 - The phrase "machine learning" appears 0 times in the plain English guide and 1 time in the Terms and Conditions posted on September 3, 2026, inside the section 1.12 definition of Flock Property. It appears in section 4.3 of the December 19, 2025 version, in the sentence "This includes training machine learning algorithms."
9 - The words "derivative" and "output" each appear 0 times in the plain English guide. Section 1.12 of the Terms and Conditions assigns "any derivative works, intermediate or final outputs" to Flock Safety as Flock Property.
10 - The guide's block quote of section 4.1, printed in quotation marks under the label "Contract Language," contains the phrase "in writing." Section 4.1 of the Terms and Conditions posted on the same website does not contain that phrase, as of September 3, 2026.
11 - Superseded, do not cite: nothing in this issue supersedes a figure published in an earlier issue of this newsletter.
Start with the part they got right
On August 13th, Flock Safety's CEO said the contract language had confused the public about who owns the camera data, and he promised a plain English explanation. He said next week.
It went up August 21st, and the contract itself was revised and re-stamped the same day. That is a promise kept on schedule, and I said in a video last month that if the explanation showed up I would read it, so here we are.
The contract gained a sentence it did not have when I read it to you in August: "For the avoidance of doubt, Flock shall not sell Customer Data." The next sentence says that any sharing outside the agreement is a prima facie breach of it. That is better paper than what was there before, and the guide quotes the license-back clause in full, both halves, which the older explainer page never did.
So this is not a video about a company that refused to explain itself. They explained. I read the explanation, and then I read the explanation they used to have.
December 19, 2025
Section 4 of the contract was called Data Use and Licensing, and it ran to 4 subsections. The third one was this, in full:
4.3 Training Data. Customer grants Flock a non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free license to use Training Data solely to improve Flock Services. This includes training machine learning algorithms and supporting diagnostic and corrective efforts necessary for continuity of Flock Services. All Training Data is used internally to enhance recognition of vehicles, objects, and descriptions. For example, Flock may use de-identified images of a newly released car to help distinguish it from similar vehicles. These images are never sold or shared with third parties. To safeguard privacy, Training Data is maintained separately and is never combined in a manner that would render it personally identifiable. Use of such data is critical to ensuring the accuracy and effectiveness of Flock Services.
Read that again with an eye on what it gives away and what it promises back. It says the training happens. It says machine learning out loud. And then it makes 4 commitments in a row. Used solely to improve the services. Used internally. Never sold or shared with third parties. Never combined into anything personally identifiable.
That paragraph is plain English, it is specific, and it was binding, because it was in the contract and not on a marketing page. I would have called it a good clause.
Where it went
It is gone. Section 4.3 does not exist in the version posted today, and neither does section 4.4. Section 4.2, Customer Generated Data, which carried a line saying Flock "does not claim ownership of, and will not sell" that data, is gone too. Section 4 is now 4.1 Customer Data and 4.2 Flock Property, and that is the whole of it.
Training Data, 0. De-identified, 0. Never sold, 0. Personally identifiable, 0. Customer Generated Data, 0. Those are searches of the live contract this morning.
Section 4.1 lost something too. In December it ended "Flock does not own and shall not sell Customer Data." The August 21 revision put "shall not sell" back after a stretch without it. It did not put back "does not own." That half of the sentence has not been in the contract since the winter.
Meanwhile the license in 4.1 grew. In December it was a license "to use the Customer Data and perform all acts as may be necessary for Flock to provide the Flock Services to Customer." Today it is perpetual, and it has a second limb: "(b) use Customer Data to support and improve Flock's products and services."
What replaced it
The training did not stop being described. It moved, and it changed shape on the way. Here is where it lives now, section 1.12, quoted from the live page this morning:
"Flock Property" means the Flock Services, the Flock Software, Flock Hardware, the Web Interface, Flock's Confidential Information, and all intellectual property or proprietary information therein or otherwise provided to Customer or its Authorized End Users, including Flock's technology, patents, trade secrets, trademarks, proprietary methods, algorithms, data models, machine learning methods, documentation, and any modifications or improvements. For clarity, Flock Property also includes any derivative works, intermediate or final outputs, analyses, reports, models, or other results generated by or through the Flock Services.
That is a definitions section. It is not a promise about what the training will and will not do. It is a list of what belongs to Flock Safety, and the sentence after it says the customer gets no right to download, extract, export or retain copies of any of it.
So the customer owns the data going in. The models, analyses, reports and outputs coming back out are Flock Property. Where December said "never sold or shared with third parties," today's contract says who owns it. Those are different kinds of sentence and only one of them is a limit.
And the plain English came back as a web page
Eleven months after that paragraph was written into the contract, an explanation with the same job went up on the website instead. I searched it for the words. Machine learning, 0. Derivative, 0. Output, 0. Anonymized, 0.
Its one mention of training is an example about "new and/or special occasion license plate designs."
The part I checked three times
One more thing, and it is small next to the above, but I have now checked it on 2 separate days and it has not moved.
The guide quotes section 4.1 in quotation marks, under a label that reads "Contract Language." Its version says sharing has to be "separately directed and/or authorized, in writing, by Customer."
The contract posted on the same website says "separately directed and/or authorized by Customer."
Two words. The guide also runs what the contract writes as two sentences together into one, so "Flock shall not sell Customer Data" stops standing alone and arrives inside a longer conditional.
I am not a lawyer and I cannot tell you whether two words like that decide anything in a courtroom. When I first flagged it on August 29th I figured somebody would fix it by that night. Thirteen days after the page went up, it is still there.
A plain English page only works if it matches the paper it is explaining.
If you want to check your city's copy
One thing worth knowing, and it is the whole reason I read contracts instead of press releases. The version on the vendor's website is the vendor's current template. It is not necessarily the version your police department signed, and it is not necessarily the version in force today.
So the request is one email to your city, county or state records office. Ask for the executed agreement with Flock Safety, every amendment and change notice to it, and the version date of the terms and conditions incorporated into it. That last clause is the one that does the work, because a contract usually points at a web page, and a web page can be edited on a Friday.
If your agency signed in 2025, the paper it signed may still be the December version, with section 4.3 in it. That is worth knowing before anybody tells you the current terms are the terms.
If they tell you it is a vendor document and they do not have it, that answer is itself a record, and you should keep it.
And if the work is worth something to you, there is a donate page at donate.magneticnorse.com. The records fees come out of my pocket first and get paid back second, or not at all.
The record behind this issue
1 - Flock Safety, "Terms and Conditions," stamped Last Updated August 21, 2026, published at flocksafety.com/legal/terms-and-conditions. Read in full from the live page on September 3, 2026. Sections 1.12, 4.1 and 4.2 are quoted from that reading, as are every count of a phrase appearing 0 times in the current contract.
2 - Flock Safety, "Terms and Conditions," stamped Last Updated December 19, 2025, read on September 3, 2026 from a third party capture saved February 2, 2026. Section 4.3 is quoted from that capture in full and without edit, and the section 4 structure in figures 2 and 4 through 7 comes from it.
3 - Flock Safety, "Data Ownership: A Plain-English Guide to Data Ownership Under the Flock Customer Terms and Conditions," stamped Last Updated August 21st, 2026, published at flocksafety.com/legal/data-ownership. Read in full from the live page on September 3, 2026. The block quote labeled Contract Language and the word counts for the guide come from this document.
4 - Flock Safety's CEO on August 13, 2026, promising a plain English explanation of the contract language. Quoted and shown in the earlier video "Flock's CEO says customers own the data."
Every count in this issue was made against the documents themselves on September 3, 2026, not against a summary of them and not against a previous issue. Nothing here rests on a public records request, so this issue is on the web archive as well as in your inbox.
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