And they’ve carelessly put zero safeguards in place to prevent abuse and that is where all of their bad PR has come from. If a warrant were required for every query, it would be a completely different story

No, it would be the same story. "Warrantless surveillance" is just a thing for people to latch on to that might be actually illegal about Flock.

But people don't hate Flock because it's legally questionable. People hate Flock because they don't like a corporation spying on them and selling data to cops - regardless of how legal or illegal that is. The rest is downstream from that. People only ask "how is this legal" because they hate it already.