Your daily commute is being tracked. See how many cameras are on your route—then find a way around them.
What’s the problem?
Mass Surveillance of Americans
A private company logs the movements of Americans living their everyday lives. License plates, locations, timestamps—all stored in a searchable database accessible to law enforcement without a warrant, without suspicion, without your knowledge.
Documented Abuse
The system is being abused. It has been used to stalk ex-partners, track protesters with no crime alleged, help ICE locate immigrants, and pursue women across state lines for abortions. Security vulnerabilities have exposed sensitive data to the public internet.
Unchecked Power
No federal regulation. No independent oversight. No warrant required. And after all that—there’s little evidence these cameras actually reduce crime. We’re surrendering our civil liberties for a system that can’t prove it works.
What is Flock Safety?
A private surveillance company operating 90,000+ cameras nationwide, scanning 20 billion license plates per month.
Nationwide Network
75% of Flock’s law enforcement customers share data with each other. A scan in your neighborhood can be searched by agencies thousands of miles away.
What Gets Captured
License plate, make, model, color, bumper stickers, dents, exact location, and timestamp. Every detail uploaded to a centralized cloud database.
30-Day Retention
All scans are stored for 30 days by default—creating a rolling record of where every car in the network has been.
Warrantless power gets abused.Here’s proof.
Tracking Abortion Seekers
In May 2025, a Texas deputy searched 83,345 Flock cameras nationwide to find a woman who self-administered an abortion. The search reason: “had an abortion, search for female.” Despite Flock’s claims it was a “welfare check,” court documents prove it was a criminal “death investigation”—and prosecutors were consulted about pressing charges.
Immigration Enforcement
ICE and CBP access Flock’s network—despite having no formal contract. Local police perform searches on their behalf, logging reasons like “ICE” and “deportee.” In Virginia alone, nearly 3,000 immigration-related searches were logged in 12 months.
Source:404 Media|UW Center for Human Rights
Surveilling Protesters
EFF analyzed 12 million Flock searches and found 50+ agencies ran hundreds of searches targeting political demonstrations—including the “50501” and “Hands Off” protests. Many searches simply listed “protest” as the reason, with no crime specified.
Source:Electronic Frontier Foundation
Stalking Partners
A Kansas police chief searched his ex-girlfriend’s vehicle 164 times and her new boyfriend’s 64 times—logging false reasons like “missing child.” A Kechi lieutenant was arrested for stalking his estranged wife.
Source:Wichita Eagle|KWCH
Racial Profiling
80+ law enforcement agencies were found using anti-Roma slurs in Flock searches. Police performed hundreds of searches using terms like “g*psy scam”—often without specifying any suspected crime. One Texas department targeted an entire traveling community.
Source:EFF|Arizona Mirror
Security Vulnerabilities
Security researcher Jon Gaines documented 51 vulnerabilities in Flock devices—including hardcoded passwords. At least 67 cameras were exposed to the public internet, including live footage of children on a playground.
Source:GainSec Research|Straight Arrow News
It’s not just bad apples. The system itself is the problem.
01
No meaningful consent
Your HOA or a local business can install a camera that feeds into a nationwide law enforcement database. You don’t get notice, opt-out, or any say in who searches your movements. Flock’s business model relies on this—more cameras, more data, more value.
02
It only expands
There’s no natural stopping point. More cameras get added. Retention periods get extended. More agencies get access. Flock has grown from 0 to 90,000+ cameras in under a decade—and their business model depends on that number going up.
03
The capabilities will evolve
License plates are just the start. The same cameras can support facial recognition, vehicle occupant detection, travel pattern prediction—all added via software, not new hardware. Flock already partnered with Ring to integrate doorbell cameras. Connect enough systems and the network doesn’t just track where you’ve been. It learns your patterns—where you work, where your kids go to school, when you’re not home.
04
We’ve seen where this leads
China deployed the same tools—license plate readers, facial recognition, centralized databases—for “public safety.” Today the system screens all 23 million Xinjiang residents, flags anyone with overseas ties for immediate arrest, and has enabled the detention of over one million Uyghurs. The cameras weren’t rebuilt for repression. They were repurposed.
Axios·Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Do They Actually Work?
Flock Safety claims their cameras are crime-fighting miracles. Independent research tells a very different story.
The Marketing vs. The Data
What Flock Claims
The Reality
70% Crime Drop
San Marino, CA residential burglariesFlock Marketing
Crime Actually Increased
Forbes found burglaries increased 5% from 2019–2023. The police chief acknowledged the 70% claim was inaccurate.Forbes Investigation
10% of U.S. Crime Solved
Flock claims to help solve 10% of all reported crime in AmericaFlock White Paper
“Borders on Ludicrous”
Criminologists called the methodology deeply flawed. “I doubt this would survive peer review.”
62% Crime Reduction
Cobb County, GA and other cherry-picked case studiesFlock Homepage
No Causal Link Found
Randomized controlled studies show no statistically significant crime reduction once confounders are accounted for.Forbes Investigation
Independent Research
16-Year Study • Piedmont, CA
Less than 0.3% of alerts led to a useful lead
Piedmont spent $576,000 on ALPR cameras over 16 years. Out of tens of thousands of license plate “hits,” almost none resulted in catching a criminal.
“Improper to conclude that ALPRs are an effective treatment for deterring vehicle theft.”
0.3%led to useful leads
Exposed: Manipulated Marketing
Leaked internal communications revealed Flock rushed to publicize favorable results while ignoring data that “did not meaningfully depict” a public-safety benefit.
Dr. Johnny Nhan (TCU), an academic partner, later said he would have handled the study differently. He confirmed police data was “varied and incomplete”—yet Flock published the study anyway.
Forbes found that in cities where Flock claimed dramatic crime drops, crime often stayed flat or increased, with short-term dips cherry-picked for marketing.
404 Media InvestigationTechdirt AnalysisForbes Investigation
