Wrong Company, Wrong Product, Wrong Everything

A post made to r/anchorage yesterday screamed to the masses that the Anchorage School District is quietly feeding visitor driver's license data into Flock, the license plate camera company that civil liberties groups have spent the last two years fighting in city councils across the country. The post (which you'll find below) asserted that ASD is building a searchable file on every grandparent, babysitter, volunteer, and therapist who walks through a school door.

I get the instinct, and I want to be careful here, because the underlying concern about data collection and sharing is not unreasonable. But, after some research, much of what is outlined in the post easily unravels.

Raptor Technologies, the company that makes the check-in kiosk at your kid's school, did announce a partnership with Flock Safety in 2025. I know this because it's in Raptor's press release. What the release describes is Flock's license plate reader cameras being wired into a different product called DismissalSafe, which is their carline pickup system. The camera reads a license plate as someone turns into the pickup lane, the software matches it against the list of kids you're authorized to pick up, and the line moves faster.

But the school district did not purchase that product. What the school board approved was Raptor visitor management kiosk hardware and software, which is the driver's license ID scanner sitting in the front office. According to the district's website, that system checks the last four digits of your ID, name, and birthdate against the national sex offender registry, and nothing else. So the entire "ASD is feeding you to Flock" claim rests on the fact that a vendor ASD uses for one thing also sells a different thing that ASD isn't using.

By that logic, every school with a Chromebook is running a data broker.

The post's sourcing tells us a lot, too. The link at the bottom of the Reddit post directs to a blog summary dated August 24, 2025, more than a year old. The URL still has the tracking tag, showing it was vomited out of ChatGPT. The post's author asked a chatbot a scary question, the chatbot handed back a year-old aggregator post, which was then repackaged as a call to action.

Meanwhile, On The Assembly

None of this means there's nothing to talk about, because an actual discussion about privacy protections is about to happen. Assembly members Sydney Scout, Daniel Volland and Keith McCormick are introducing a proposal that would mandate deleting camera footage after two weeks unless it's tied to an active case, restrict what plate readers can be used for, and bar sharing data with federal agencies like DHS without a warrant. Its use would be limited to specific, documented public safety investigations and alerts, like speeding, running red lights, or locating missing children.

Now those are exactly the guardrails worth talking about.

I've already had one lunatic knee-jerk lefty decide that I'm pro mass surveillance for simply pointing out that there are no governmental Flock cameras in Anchorage. The municipality uses Axon. Similar, yes, but not the same. It's a hell of a thing to say about a guy who spent years fighting back against Dave Bronson's Save Anchorage disinformation specialists. Nobody sitting at my MacBook is carrying water for Axon or APD, and I certainly don't believe APD deserves a blank check. A two-week retention and a warrant before anything goes to DHS strike me as the floor, not the ceiling.

So have the discussion - perhaps even loudly! Those concerned about how long our data lives in these systems and who gets to search and share it are asking the right questions. But when you walk into that argument calling Axon "Flock" and calling a front desk kiosk a plate reader, you hand the other side the easiest possible win. All the opposition needs to say is "that's not true," and they'll be right, and everything else good you were trying to say dies with it. Getting the names of these devices and programs correct isn't pedantry - it's the difference between a policy fight you might win and a Reddit thread filled with erroneous information that does nothing more than piss people off.