"We can't leave them"

Elgin Community College installed six Flock safety cameras in April 2025 to monitor its campus. By September, the school's leadership wanted out — concerned about privacy, costs, or both — and discovered something that should have been obvious but felt like a trap: Flock declined to release them from the contract. Once a school plugs surveillance infrastructure into its operational nervous system, the vendor becomes harder to remove than to keep paying.

This is not new desperation. It is a template with a track record. In the early 2000s, Blackboard became the de facto Learning Management System for American universities. When institutions tried to leave for Canvas or Desire2Learn, they discovered their entire institutional apparatus had fused with Blackboard's data structure. Years of grade records, course shells, integration pathways, and workflows that couldn't migrate without catastrophic institutional rebuilding. Exit was technically possible. Operationally, it was ruinous.

Vendors learned from this. The playbook works because it doesn't feel like a trap when you sign up. A LMS is genuinely useful. A surveillance camera genuinely deters theft. The vendor is not dishonest about what you're buying. But the architecture of the contract, the data ownership, the integration depth. These are designed so that staying costs less than leaving. The switching cost is not financial. It is operational.

Flock's refusal to release Elgin is the same move Blackboard perfected two decades earlier, scaled into a new domain. The surveillance vendor is not being unreasonable by refusing to cancel. The contract was written so that cancellation would hurt the college more than the vendor. That was the design. Flock did not invent this power dynamic. It inherited the playbook from an entire industry of edtech vendors who discovered that the surest way to lock in a customer is to make them dependent on data they cannot afford to lose. The college's only real option is usually to keep paying, or to absorb the cost of rebuilding what the vendor controls.

What makes this matter is that Elgin is not an outlier. Every school considering surveillance infrastructure should understand what they are actually buying: not just cameras. A relationship they cannot exit without damage. The vendor is betting you will not read the fine print. The vendor is betting you will not imagine cancellation as a future possibility. The vendor is betting right.