Story Time: Flock Cameras Cost Me A Thousand Dollars
I won’t go too deep here, as I think the discourse surrounding the proliferation of Flock cameras is already overwhelmingly in line with my position on them, but I do want to document my own personal experience with them for posterity’s sake.
In January, I was rear-ended on my drive home from work. The guy driving the other car had apparently fallen asleep at the wheel and didn’t realize he was approaching a line of cars at a dead standstill waiting at a red light. He hit me at a fairly substantial speed, causing notable damage to my rear bumper and lift gate. The driver was a young Ecuadorian guy and it was unclear if he was in the country legally, and as this was at the height of the ICE raids and immigration crackdown in Chicago, the police ended up taking him in rather than just giving him a citation. All that to say, it seemed fairly unlikely that he was properly insured, so I ended up filing a claim to repair the damage through my own insurance policy at the time, which was through Progressive.
A few weeks after submitting the claim, I was contacted by Progressive and told that they couldn’t fix the damage to my bumper and lift gate because there was significant preexisting damage to the rear of my vehicle that I would need to submit an additional claim to repair first. I asked what damage they were referring to, because I haven’t had any other accidents, and the damage that now existed was a clear result of the January accident. They told me that they had photos showing the alleged damage (I had never sent them any photos of the vehicle before this accident), but when I asked to see them, they told me that they were the property of Progressive and they were not obligated to show them to me.
I was quite angry at this point, and I was pretty sure I knew what was going on.
I asked where they got them from and pointed out that I hadn’t provided any photos prior to the accident, and after a bit of prodding, got them to admit that they had purchased the photos from Flock cameras that had recognized my license plate as I commuted through the Chicago suburbs, presumably in an attempt to manufacture a reason to either deny my claim or extract an additional deductible from me. They were able to find what they wanted.
A few months prior, I had noticed a small dent on my car’s lift gate that looked a lot like a door ding. I’m not sure if this was caused by a rogue shopping cart or something, but it was minor enough that I never bothered getting it repaired. The dent was shallow and only as wide as a kiwi.
As it turns out, this was the “significant preexisting damage” Progressive was referring to. As I said, I had never filed any claims related to this because it was purely cosmetic, and would hardly be worth the price of the deductible to get it repaired. Nevertheless, Progressive required that I submit a second claim to repair this damage as well if I wanted my rear bumper replaced and my lift gate to be operational again. Simply put, it seems like they just wanted a second deductible paid, and thanks to Flock cameras, they could point to a small cosmetic issue in order to demand it.
There are real-world privacy implications to having surveillance cameras accessible to anyone with enough cash on every block. This time, that meant an additional $1000 deductible to repair damage from an accident that was clearly not my fault in the first place. Fuck Flock, and fuck Progressive for paying them for their stalker shots.