I got rid of my smart phone in 2019 for multiple reasons and went back to a flip phone that stays plugged into the wall covered in a cheap faraday cage (except in emergencies).

It was annoying when they said buy a new phone because they hard-welded the battery into the board (not replaceable). It started to bloat and crack at the seams and i threw it out before lithium drainage burned a hole in my pants. Thinking mac was more secure was still using a mac with a VM for windows while programming my software. By the time of the pLandemic, decided to wipe the macOS and install Ubuntu and airgap all remaining windows machines. Of course, also all the obvious additional opsec measures and some not so obvious.

So this flock thing... was thinking similar to you wondering why they made the cameras so large and obvious when they can be the size of a fly on the wall? Probably also trying to achieve a learned helplessness effect (inevitability).

Agnoia can be a bitch tho. I think palantir might be finding out that the ontology doesn't want perfect pre-crime predictability. An omniscient universe quickly gets bored, so it passed through it's own "waters of lethe" to fracture consciousness.