In the span of about a week, Arizona said no. Tempe shut off its entire Flock Surveillance (errr, I mean Safety) camera network on August 26. Cave Creek did the same thing hours later. A 20-year-old hero (errr, I mean criminal) was arrested that same week for causing an estimated $47,000 in damage after intentionally destroying a photo radar camera in north Phoenix.
Those weren't isolated. They're the latest in a run that's been building for weeks. Chandler and Apache Junction both ended their Flock contracts earlier in August, in each case after an officer resigned mid-investigation for using the system to track a family member. Surprise canceled its contract too. Zoom out further and the same mood shows up around data centers: the Pinal County Board of Supervisors rejected a massive data center rezoning after residents packed the meeting, and Governor Hobbs just signed a three-year moratorium on data centers receiving state tax breaks.
If this keeps up, expect more of what already happened this month right here in the Valley: more contract cancellations, more rejected rezonings, more local officials willing to say no instead of just accepting whatever gets pitched to them. The companies selling this stuff have had the run of the place for years. That run just hit real resistance, and it started in our own backyard.
So what does this actually mean for you? People are tired of being told what's good for them and handed a bag of garbage in return. Some of the people in charge are finally listening instead of steamrolling ahead. And it's proof that fear based propaganda, whatever it's selling this time around, doesn't work the way it used to. People are fighting back, and it's working.
None of this means these technologies are all bad, or that everyone using them is wrong to. Plenty of people see real value here, and the future is coming whether we're ready or not, so we need to be prepared for what's headed our way. But at some point you have to look at the actual human cost of Big Tech, because it's already showing up in our kids, in the screen time, the endless scrolling, the disconnection from the people actually in front of them. If we don't stop and focus on that, we're missing the boat altogether.
A few things worth flagging: Tempe's decision came even though the city found no evidence its own cameras had been misused, the concern was about what happens to the data once it leaves city hands. Surprise's internal investigation actually cleared the officer involved before the city canceled anyway. And not everyone in Arizona is moving the same direction, Youngtown, a small West Valley town with no police department of its own, just added 40 Flock cameras and is leaning on the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office to use them, since it doesn't have the staff to patrol any other way.
Sources: Arizona's Family, FOX 10 Phoenix, KJZZ
