HOA surveillance cameras secretly installed for ‘neighborhood security’ draw massive backlash — and are killing home sales

See more of our coverage in your search results. Add The New York Post on Google.

Key points

• First I believe these cameras are at present in violation of Saranac Lake Police Department policy.
• More than 200 homeowners associations nationwide have signed on with Flock, often funded straight out of resident dues and frequently without ever putting it to a vote.
• Trustee Aurora White, who pushed the toughest language in the resolution, remarked the village had no business holding onto the kind of data Flock's system generates.
• Aubrey Sparks, legal director of the ACLU of West Virginia, argued the accord shouldn't have gone through in the first place.
• "These cameras are not going to keep us safe, " resident Sandra Kalinowski informed the board, drawing applause from the crowd.

See more of our coverage in your search results. Add The New York Post on Google. Major brother is watching your open house.

Homeowners associations nationwide are quietly signing up for Flock Safety's license plate cameras, and the backlash is now solid enough to blow up home sales, kill signed contracts and land cities in court, with New York at the center of the fight.

Nowhere is the backlash more raw than in the Adirondacks, where the fight has already toppled a signed contract and sparked open revolt inside a gated community.

In Saranac Lake, a resident living behind a gate who protested the cameras in his own neighborhood remarked the problem isn't security itself. It's who gets to look.

"The difficulty I have is not with security cameras. It's with the Flock system directly. Anyone and their mother can have straightforward access to this database. The way the data is readily being shared. It is completely unconstitutional, " he informed The Post.

That anger boiled over at a packed Saranac Lake village board session earlier in the year after office-holders quietly signed a contract for a dozen license plate readers and security cameras using a state grant.

Residents remarked they'd learned concerning the rollout only after cameras began going up on telephone poles around town.

"These cameras are not going to keep us safe, " resident Sandra Kalinowski informed the board, drawing applause from the crowd. Another resident, David Lynch, pushed the board to reverse course entirely.

"First I believe these cameras are at present in violation of Saranac Lake Police Department policy. Secondly, I believe the public has been misled regarding Flock's access to our data. My ask of you tonight is to take these cameras down. The village is conducting surveillance in violation of its own policy, " he remarked.

Notably, the board caved. Trustees voted 4-1 to kill the Flock contract outright and swore off ever signing with the firm again, a stunning reversal for a agreement that had already been in place for months.

"We don't have the expertise to be proper stewards of this data, " she remarked.

It's not just a small mountain town. Communities throughout New York are colliding with the same technology, and the fights are getting uglier.

In Newburgh, a city council push to rip out Flock cameras entirely failed to obtain enough votes this week, leaving residents furious and office-holders divided. Councilman Omari Shakur, who led the failed push, didn't hide his frustration with the holdup.

"We've been talking about this for three months, that's discussing what we worked on, " he remarked last week during the failed vote.

In Troy, the standoff escalated into a courtroom fight. After the city council refused to fund its Flock contract, the mayor declared a state of emergency, and the council responded by suing over that move. The dispute now centers on a basic question, how long a city should be allowed to hold onto footage of its own residents driving down the street.

Residents of Troy have since been vandalizing Flock cameras throughout the town in recent months.

New York isn't alone in seeing this spill into court. After a marathon council session where more than 50 residents spoke out against the technology and protesters circled City Hall, in Huntington, West Virginia, a resident sued the city days after authorities approved a $2.1 million Flock contract behind closed doors.

"The legal problems with this contract are numerous, but we are starting with how it was awarded in the first place. Simply put, the city acted hastily and did not follow its own laws when approving this contract, so it should be considered null and void from the start, " Sparks remarked.

Her colleague, ACLU-WV executive director Eli Baumwell, went further, accusing city authorities of working around their own constituents.

"As other towns and cities are waking up to the egregious abuses of this technology, Huntington authorities worked behind closed doors for months to thwart the will of their constituents and push this invasive surveillance on the city. We will not stand by while the city runs roughshod over the will of the individuals and the privacy rights of every person in Huntington, " Baumwell stated.

For context, the cameras themselves are simple. Solar powered and bolted onto poles at entrances, exits and other high traffic spots, they photograph every passing vehicle and run the plate through image recognition software, logging the create, model, color and any distinguishing features along with a timestamp. That data feeds into a searchable, cloud-based system that flags vehicles tied to a "hot list, " things like stolen cars or plates linked to a police investigation.

HOAs typically own their own footage, but once a board opts into data sharing, the same records can become visible to thousands of law enforcement agencies nationwide, not just the local department that installed the cameras. Retention windows vary by contract, often 30 days or more, and critics say oversight of who actually searches that data is thin to nonexistent.

That lack of oversight is exactly what set off residents in Saranac Lake, where critics argued access to the system stretched well beyond police.

Placement has become its own flashpoint. Flock markets the cameras as a license plate tool for roads and entrances, but residents have pointed out the cameras keep turning up somewhere else entirely, aimed at swimming pools, parks and courts where no car could ever pass. If the only job is reading plates on moving vehicles, that raises an obvious question regarding why a lens would be pointed at a pool deck instead of a driveway.

For homebuyers, none of this is abstract anymore. More than 200 homeowners associations nationwide have signed on with Flock, often funded straight out of resident dues and frequently without ever putting it to a vote. Boards pitch the cameras as neighborhood security. Buyers increasingly see them as a liability baked into the cost of the house, one more line item to weigh alongside the roof and the HVAC.

For context, a wave of buyers nationwide are pulling up crowdsourced surveillance maps before they'll even walk through a listing, and what they're finding at HOA-run communities is turning would-be sales into no-shows.

In practice, the clearest example ricocheted throughout social media after a broker, posting in a Reddit forum for real estate agents, described watching a agreement fall apart in real time.

"Just had a buyer cancel a showing because HOA has Flock cameras at both entrances, including one by the pool, " the broker wrote. The post exploded well past its intended audience.

"Yes, this is true. I'm the broker. I scheduled a showing and buyers cancelled since they brought this to my attention, " the broker wrote in an edit. "I was originally asking Realtors (In a sub for Realtors) if they have experienced this. I was not anticipating 500 comments from non agents. But thank you for your input."

Standard HOA disclosure paperwork almost never mentions surveillance contracts at all, leaving buyers to do their own digging on crowdsourced tools like DeFlock before they'll even book a tour.

For now, HOA surveillance cameras secretly installed for 'neighborhood security' draw massive backlash remains the part of the story worth watching, and further updates are likely as more details are confirmed.