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Everything covered on this blog about Flock so far has been about fixed cameras, bolted to a pole, reading plates as cars drive past. That’s a real privacy concern on its own. But Flock has spent the last two years building something that goes further than a stationary camera ever could: a fleet of autonomous drones that launch themselves, fly beyond where any human operator can see them, and follow whatever the system decides is worth following. ...

If you’ve followed the backlash against Flock Safety’s license plate readers, you’ve probably heard a pitch that sounds like relief: some cities are ditching Flock for a company called Axon instead. Before you treat that as good news, you should know who Axon is, what it’s building, and why privacy advocates say the switch changes almost nothing. Who Axon actually is Axon Enterprise trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker AXON. It’s headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona, and it used to go by a different name you’ll recognize: TASER International. The company rebranded in 2017 as it expanded from stun guns into a much broader law enforcement technology business — body cameras, dash cameras, drones, virtual reality training tools, and now a fast-growing license plate reader division. ...

Insurance used to work in two simple steps. You paid a premium based on broad categories, your age, your driving record, your zip code. Then if something happened, a person reviewed your claim and decided what the company owed you. Both of those steps now run through algorithms that most policyholders never see, never consented to in any meaningful way, and can’t meaningfully appeal. One decides what you pay. The other decides what you get back when you need it. Texas is already in the middle of the biggest legal fight over the first one. ...

On May 11, 2026, the Cooke County Commissioners Court passed a resolution asking the state of Texas to give counties more say over how data centers get built and run. The resolution doesn’t oppose the industry outright. It says plainly that these facilities will matter to the state’s economy, then says just as plainly that they use enormous amounts of water and electricity, and that rural communities like this one are left with little control over either. Cooke County isn’t an outlier here. It’s one of a growing list of rural Texas counties reaching the same conclusion at close to the same time. ...

The paper price tag is disappearing from grocery store shelves. In its place, small digital screens called electronic shelf labels let a store change any price in seconds from a central computer, no employee walking the aisles with a pricing gun. Kroger says the switch saves labor and improves accuracy. Nearly one in four Kroger stores now runs on the technology, and Walmart plans to have it in every U.S. store by the end of 2026. The efficiency argument is real. The question worth asking is what else that same infrastructure makes possible. ...

Anderson County Judge Carey McKinney found out about it at church. A deacon asked him the Sunday before Memorial Day if he’d seen a groundwater permit application published in the local paper. McKinney went home and pulled the week-old newspaper off his kitchen counter. That’s how the highest elected official in the county learned that a Dallas hedge fund manager wanted to pump 10 billion gallons of groundwater a year out from under his community, roughly three times what the entire county uses annually, and pipe it somewhere else. ...

Drive through most Texas towns now and you will pass at least one Flock Safety camera without knowing it. No blinking light, no sign, nothing that marks it as different from a traffic light or a road sign. It reads every license plate that passes, logs the time, the location, and details like bumper stickers or roof racks, and sends all of it to a searchable database. Cooke County has cameras like this too, installed without public notice, which is what got me looking into the company behind them. ...

Kalibrate and the Quiet End of Gas Station Price Competition For decades, gas stations competed the same simple way: undercut the guy across the street. Drive by two stations a block apart and you’d often see genuinely different prices, because each owner was racing to win your business. That race is disappearing, and a lawsuit filed in June 2026 argues software is the reason why. What the lawsuit alleges A proposed class action filed in federal court in Sacramento accuses Kalibrate, a fuel-pricing software company headquartered in Manchester, England, of running what plaintiffs call a system that coordinates pump prices across competing gas stations instead of letting them compete independently. The suit names major retailers alongside Kalibrate itself, including Marathon Petroleum, BP, Circle K, 7-Eleven, Walmart, and Albertsons, collectively operating more than 1,700 gas stations across California. ...