Flock Safety Is Changing Who Can Search Its 120,000 Police Cameras, and Why
After reports of officers using licence-plate readers to stalk ex-partners, the surveillance firm is adding new rules. Critics say the fixes have a big hole in them.
Key points
- Flock Safety operates a network of 120,000 automated licence-plate reader cameras used by around 5,000 law-enforcement agencies across the United States.
- A Washington Post investigation uncovered 46 cases in which officers were accused of using Flock's cameras for unauthorised ends, from stalking ex-partners to checking on neighbours.
- Flock now requires officers to enter a criminal case number before running a search, a step that was optional since last year but is now mandatory.
- At least 30 cities dropped Flock contracts in the year to February 2025, according to NPR, with the activist group DeFlock putting the number higher.
- The ACLU says the new rules are a start, but real accountability requires independent researchers to audit Flock's systems directly.
Imagine a speed camera that never forgets. Flock Safety's network of 120,000 cameras sits on roads and car parks across the United States, quietly reading licence plates and logging where each vehicle was, when. Officers at thousands of departments can type a plate into Flock's system and pull up a map of everywhere that car has been spotted.
That's enormously useful for finding stolen vehicles or tracking a suspect. It also, critics say, makes it trivially easy to follow someone's daily movements without a warrant, the court order that normally forces police to justify surveillance to a judge. Our earlier report on Flock's camera hazards, published 30 July, showed the company was already fielding complaints on multiple fronts before this latest backlash.
Why is Flock under fire right now?
Officer abuse made the headlines. A Washington Post investigation, reported by MIT Technology Review, identified 46 cases in which officers allegedly used Flock's cameras for personal reasons: tracking an ex-partner's car, checking up on a neighbour, confirming a spouse's location. Flock's reach made those searches devastatingly easy.
Civil-liberties groups argue the deeper problem is structural. A database recording the movements of millions of ordinary drivers lets officers investigate people with no threshold of suspicion, because searching that data doesn't require a warrant. "In America, you only get to investigate someone if you think they've done something wrong," Chad Marlow, a senior policy lawyer at the ACLU, told MIT Technology Review.
At least 30 cities cancelled Flock contracts in a single year, and some states are moving to ban automated licence-plate readers altogether.
What is Flock actually changing?
Three things, effective now.
First, officers must enter a valid criminal case number before running a search, tying every query to a stated investigation. The catch: Flock won't verify that the number is genuine, so an officer could enter anything and proceed.
Second, an automatic auditing tool that scans search behaviour and flags suspicious patterns to supervisors is now mandatory rather than optional.
Third, departments can restrict what other departments are allowed to search from their cameras. A city might permit searches linked to kidnapping investigations but block searches for immigration enforcement.
| Change | Previous status | New status |
|---|---|---|
| Case number required before search | Optional | Mandatory |
| Automatic search-behaviour auditing | Optional | Mandatory |
| Data retention recommendation | 30 days | 7 days (agencies can override) |
| Reason-based search restrictions between agencies | Not available | Now available |
Should ordinary drivers be worried?
The new rules help at the margins. The ACLU points to a telling precedent: when Flock previously asked officers to type a reason for each search, some entered the word "investigation" as a catch-all, and one Oregon department used the phrase "hehehe" twenty times in a row. A case-number field is a stronger prompt, but it's just as gameable.
Marlow welcomes the changes and says they fall short by the same measure: let independent researchers examine the auditing system to see how well it actually catches abuse. Flock hasn't agreed to that.
Flock CEO Garrett Langley told MIT Technology Review the backlash is partly driven by misinformation, specifically the false belief that Flock does facial recognition or sells data to advertisers. He says it does neither. Critics counter that the company has its own record of misrepresenting its capabilities to local councils.
For drivers in cities with Flock cameras, their plate is likely being logged every time they pass one. The new rules make misuse slightly harder. Whether they make it rare enough is a question only an independent audit could answer, and Flock hasn't opened the door to one.
Common questions
Does Flock do facial recognition?
Flock Safety says no: its cameras read licence plates, not faces. The company also says it doesn't sell the data it collects to commercial buyers.
Can I find out if my local police department uses Flock?
Many departments publicly list their technology vendors in budget documents or through public-records requests. The activist group DeFlock publishes a running list of known Flock contracts and cancellations.
Do police need a warrant to search Flock's database?
No. Searching a licence-plate database doesn't currently require a warrant in the United States. That's the core concern civil-liberties groups raise: the legal threshold that normally protects people from surveillance doesn't apply here.
