The majority of the time in the US when the power of the state is expanded at the expense of the rights of voters, it's done by providing big optional benefits to voters, and starts out with strong privacy protections which are salami-sliced away.

Tracking people by their smartphones? Voters get smartphones out of it, and the state supposedly needs a warrant to track them (except when they don't). And they can always just not get one.

Tracking people's every purchase? Voters get credit cards, cashback, purchase protection and online shopping out of it. And they can always just use cash.

Tracking people's media consumption? Voters get free/super cheap ad supported media, the widest selection the world has ever seen. And they can still buy in stores with cash if they want.

Access to people's photos, no warrants required? Voters get great quality cameras on their phones, and free basic cloud backup in case their phones are ever damaged or lost. And you can always disable it.

An always-on microphone in every home? Voters get huge, incredibly cheap TVs with 4K netflix/Disney/whatever, incredibly cheap smart speakers etc. And the microphone only turns on when it hears certain things.

Flock's problem is they've done the big power transfer without providing the corresponding payoff, and too quickly.

To borrow an idea from Nilay Patel of The Verge, all the other items in the parent comment describe consumer products. People like smartphone cameras and cheap TVs and effortless data backups, and they'll put up with some significant problems if it gets them great consumer products. When it's a concrete benefit weighed against an abstract harm, the benefit usually wins.

A massive network of surveillance cameras is not a consumer product. For most people, it's an abstract potential benefit of crime reduction weighed against an abstract definite harm to privacy. Definite usually wins against potential.

>Flock's problem is they've done the big power transfer without providing the corresponding payoff, and too quickly.

Their problem is they believed their own bullshit and thought they were offering people a good deal that basically amounted to "the government 1984s you more than they already do but your package thief gets arrested for it".

Ignoring the fact that that deal is not necessarily good, if they had been slightly scummier, not given two shits about actually reducing petty crimes against the people and instead set out to help municipalities collect civil fines they probably could have gotten away without scrutiny for a very long time and gotten their systems deeply entrenched. The useful idiots would've eaten it right up with the flimsiest of pretexts so long as each segment of useful idiots was peddled to individually.