Cities Are Dropping Flock as Privacy Fears Mount

Flock Safety became a familiar sight in hundreds of US cities with its solar-powered license plate reader cameras. Now, some cities are backing away. From Bend, Oregon, to the LAPD in Los Angeles, local governments have canceled contracts, while other communities have reportedly covered cameras with plastic bags as they try to confirm whether the systems are actually off.

CNET spoke with Flock, the ACLU, and other experts about what residents should know when the company arrives in town. The immediate answer is usually ALPR cameras — automated license plate readers — but Flock’s reach now extends well beyond that.

Flock signs contracts with city governments, police departments, businesses, and HOAs. Its cameras are marketed as tools to reduce property crime and help solve violent crimes, but the company has also expanded into broader surveillance products, including its Drone as First Responder system. Those drones can launch automatically in response to 911 calls or gunfire, travel up to 60 mph, and follow vehicles or people.

What Flock’s systems can identify

Flock says its standard license plate cameras do not technically “track” vehicles, but capture a point-in-time image. In practice, police can use Flock’s search tools to reconstruct a vehicle’s movements over time. The company’s machine learning can also identify details such as:

• Body type
• Color
• License plate condition
• Roof racks
• Paint features
• Items visible in the vehicle

CNET also reports that Flock offers an investigative tool called Freeform, which lets users search with natural language prompts, including descriptions of a person’s clothing. A Flock spokesperson said the company does not use facial recognition, but acknowledged that its wider-angle cameras can detect when a person appears in frame.

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That has sharpened privacy concerns. While Flock argues that license plates and vehicle descriptions are not personal information, critics say vehicle data is often tightly linked to an owner’s identity. Searches such as “red pickup truck with a dog in the bed” can reveal far more than a plate number, exposing details about a person’s routines and private life.

Data security, abuse, and ICE access

On paper, Flock’s storage and encryption practices are fairly standard. The company says it stores data for 30 days on Amazon Web Services, uses KMS-based encryption, and keeps criminal justice information available only to official government agencies. But customers — including police departments and private organizations — ultimately own the data and control access to it.

That is where many of the biggest problems have surfaced. CNET cites multiple cases in which law enforcement officers allegedly abused Flock systems, including:

• A Kansas police chief who used Flock cameras 164 times to track an ex
• A Texas sheriff who said he was tracking a missing person but was later found to be investigating a possible abortion
• A Georgia police chief arrested for using Flock to stalk and harass citizens
• A lawsuit in Norfolk, Virginia, where a man said Flock cameras were used to track him 526 times

Flock says its audit tools log every user search, and the company points to that system as something that helped expose abuse in Georgia. But critics argue that vague justifications such as “investigation” or “crime” can still allow broad or discriminatory searches with limited accountability.

A major flashpoint has been ICE. Flock says it has not shared data or partnered with ICE or other Department of Homeland Security officials since ending its pilot programs in August 2025. But local police agencies can still share data with federal authorities, and CNET points to a University of Washington Center for Human Rights study that found at least eight Washington law enforcement agencies directly shared their Flock data networks with ICE in 2025, while 10 more allowed backdoor access without explicitly granting permission.

That gap — between Flock’s stated limits and what local agencies do with the data — is a big reason the company is facing mounting opposition even as its cameras and drones keep showing up in more neighborhoods.