Research standard
Methodology
Flock Blocking documents surveillance-location evidence without claiming more certainty than the underlying source supports.
Evidence classes
Agency record. A location disclosed by a government agency in an inventory, deployment list, map, contract attachment, or similar primary record.
Field confirmed. Direct observation or geotagged field evidence supporting physical presence at a particular date. It does not prove continuous operation.
811 installation candidate. A utility-locate record associated with installation work. It is evidence of planned or performed work, not proof of current operation.
Crowd mapped. A location mapped in the OpenStreetMap/DeFlock ecosystem. These records can be precise but are community-maintained rather than agency confirmation.
Record derived. A candidate extracted from a released record that still needs stronger corroboration before being treated as primary-location evidence.
Other. Useful evidence that does not yet fit a stronger category. It remains visible rather than being silently upgraded or discarded.
Coordinates and provenance
Every published record retains a source family and reference where available. Coordinates derived from an agency-supplied address are labeled as derived rather than described as agency-supplied GPS.
Unresolved official locations are preserved as unresolved. Flock Blocking does not invent coordinates to make the map appear complete.
Estimated installation sites
The default map is a conservative reconciliation layer. It groups only strong cross-source spatial matches while preserving every underlying evidence record.
- Cross-source near-exact matches within 3 m may merge.
- Flock 811 and OSM/DeFlock records may merge within 20 m.
- Flock agency records and OSM/DeFlock records may merge within 15 m.
- Field-confirmed records may merge with another source family within 15 m.
- Manual records may merge with another source family within 10 m.
- Same-source points are never merged solely because they are close.
- A complete-link guard prevents any reconciled site from exceeding 20 m in total diameter.
An estimated installation site is not a count of individual cameras. One site may contain multiple devices, and several evidence records may describe the same installation.
Evidence strength and geometry
The coordinate used to draw a point and the evidence strength used to describe it are separate decisions. A precise crowd-mapped coordinate may represent the geometry while a stronger agency record establishes the evidence class.
Public/private boundary
The public export contains surveillance-location research data only. It does not publish Gmail message bodies, request-recipient addresses, credentials, OAuth material, portal tokens, private administration notes, raw private database fields, or license-plate histories.
Search and filtering occur in the browser. Flock Blocking intentionally runs no first-party behavioral analytics.
Corrections
Evidence can be incomplete, duplicated, stale, or later contradicted. Corrections should identify the location or record, explain the claimed error, and provide a source when possible.
Correction and change-log policy
This methodology is a research policy, not a guarantee that every public source is complete or current.