SATIRELocal Flock

Town announces new privacy policy: please stop asking about the cameras

The document is four pages long, three of which explain how much the town values transparency.

The Flock Desk · 2026-09-07 · 3 min

Satire — this story is fiction and describes no real people, agencies or deployments.

SATIRE. Fiction. Not a real news story. No real municipality, policy, official or vendor is described here.

Section 1 affirms the town's deep commitment to privacy. Section 2 affirms the town's deep commitment to safety. Section 3 affirms that both of those things are true simultaneously and that further questions will be taken at a future meeting to be scheduled.

Section 4, the operative one, is a single sentence in a smaller font.

An imaginary resident asked how long the data is kept. An imaginary clerk replied that the policy speaks for itself, which it does, in the sense that it says almost nothing at considerable length.

This is the entire reason we read contracts instead of press releases. Retention, access, sharing and audit rules decide what a camera actually is. Everything else is stationery.

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