Plymouth fired Flock and the cameras are still bolted to its streets

Plymouth's city council voted on 22 September to stop using Flock Safety's licence plate cameras. A month later the cameras are still mounted around the city, and Flock's corporate and legal teams have not answered the city. The only reason anyone can be confident the cameras aren't reading plates is that the police chief sent staff out to pull the power cords.

I expected a privacy story when I read the piece in The Drive. Its author is a resident who says four officers ambushed him and his wife after tracking them with Flock cameras for days. What held my attention was the procurement story underneath. The city did everything a careful buyer is supposed to do. It suspended every Plymouth user account the morning after the vote and told Flock the same day. It then ran the cancellation letter past the City Attorney's Office and sent it by post and email. Chief Eric Fadden says the only reply came from Flock's local representative. After more than a week of nothing, he had the cords disconnected "to be sure that they are not functioning or recording plates."

To be fair to Flock, nobody has shown that it kept collecting data after the vote. Fadden's move was a precaution. But I read the precaution as a measure of how little the city trusted the paper it had signed.

Flock sells a subscription. It installs and owns the hardware, and the customer pays for access to the software. That model suits a sales team very well: the buyer needs no capital budget and the fee renews as a recurring line. It also means that when the customer leaves, the vendor's property stays on the customer's streets and the vendor decides how fast to come and collect it. Fadden says the cameras belong to Flock and he has no removal date. Flock didn't tell The Drive what its cancellation process even is, despite being asked several times.

The obvious reply is that Plymouth won. It shut off logins and cut the power without asking anyone's permission, so a termination clause looks unnecessary. I think that misreads where the leverage sits. Pulling a plug stops future capture on cameras the city can reach. It does nothing about plates already held on Flock's systems. It doesn't let the city take down equipment it doesn't own without inviting a dispute. And it gives Flock no reason to hurry. A vendor that has lost the revenue has every incentive to let decommissioning drift to the bottom of the queue, because every week the hardware stays up is a week in which a new council might change its mind.

I don't think that incentive is peculiar to Flock. Any company bundling hardware with software on subscription, whether door access systems or fleet telematics, makes its money on the renewal and loses money on the van that comes to take the kit away. If the contract doesn't price the exit, the customer pays for it in staff hours and in uncertainty about its data. Plymouth's chief is now spending his own department's time chasing a supplier for a timeline. That cost lands on the buyer, and I suspect that is exactly why vendors are content to leave termination vague.

In my experience buy-side lawyers negotiate hardest over price and liability and skim the exit section, because nobody signs a deal planning to leave. In a hardware-plus-SaaS deal I would argue the exit section deserves the most attention. The terms that matter fit on half a page. The vendor gets a fixed deadline to remove its equipment after termination. If it misses that deadline, the customer gets the right to remove the equipment itself at the vendor's cost. The vendor must supply a written certificate that customer data has been deleted. And the customer should be able to switch the devices off from its own console, so that nobody has to go up a ladder.

If you run procurement for a city, a hospital or a company with vendor-owned devices on its premises, take the contract out this week and read the termination clause. If it doesn't name a date by which the hardware leaves and a document proving your data is gone, add both at the next renewal, while the vendor still wants your money.

Prompted by My City Canceled Flock's Contract. Flock Ignored It, So the Police Chief Unplugged the Cameras, The Drive.