Police chief unplugs cameras after Flock ignores contract cancellation
- ID
- 41846
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 01 Nov 2026, 10:36 PM
- Fetched
- 02 Nov 2026, 8:51 AM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://www.thedrive.com/news/my-city-canceled-flocks-contract-flock-ignored-it-so-the-police-chief-unplugged-the-cameras
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 6.0
- Created
- 02 Nov 2026, 8:52 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developerssaas_founders
What happened
Plymouth's city council voted on Sept 22 to cancel its Flock ALPR contract after the author and his wife were wrongly tracked and ambushed by four police officers; the police chief suspended all Plymouth Flock accounts the next morning and sent a formal cancellation letter by mail and email. After more than a week of silence from Flock corporate and legal, Chief Eric Fadden ordered staff to physically disconnect the cameras' power cords. The Flock-owned cameras are still mounted around the city and the department says it has no timeline for removal.
Why it matters
This is a concrete offboarding failure for anyone who buys or sells hardware-plus-subscription: cancellation stopped at 'we sent a letter', and the devices kept sitting there powered until someone pulled the plug. If you sell a device-plus-SaaS product, write the shutdown into the contract — revocation of credentials, power-down, physical removal, and data deletion, each with a deadline and a named contact — because 'cancelled' plainly means nothing on its own. If you're the buyer, assume you may have to de-energise rented hardware yourself and check now whether you physically can.
Discussion angle
When a customer cancels, what in your product actually stops — billing only, or access, device state, and stored data? Walk through what a real cancellation SLA would look like for a device you own but your customer hosts.