‘Creepy surveillance’: why some cities are shutting down Flock cameras amid privacy concerns
▻https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/apr/06/flock-cameras-privacy-concerns
Vous avez dit 1984? C’est le passé qu’on a dépassé depuis longtemps.
6.4.2026 by George Chidi - Some cities are cutting ties with firm that provides license plate reader cameras, others are signing new contracts and many are still looking for their footing
In recent city council meetings in Dunwoody, Georgia, a spokesman for Flock Safety, a Georgia-based firm that provides automated license plate readers, has found himself in the hot seat again.
For two months running, some residents of the affluent north Atlanta suburb in the region’s tech corridor have been demanding an end to the city’s contract with the security firm, which has drawn similar protest from California to New York.
Between a recent change in terms of service that removed a line assuring customers that the company does not own and will not sell customer data – done to eliminate redundancy, Flock says – and videos circulating of hackers showing how they had obtained access to live video feeds from Flock cameras, Dunwoody residents and some members of the city council have been in in revolt.
“When you hear from our police department saying they trust Flock, it’s clear that our police are too lazy to verify what a vendor such as Flock says,” said Joe Hirsh, a Dunwoody resident, haranguing the council over privacy breaches last week. “You and I both know the next time Flock is misused in our city, you will turn a blind eye because none of you are trustworthy with our records.”
Kerry McCormack, Flock Group Inc’s public relations manager for the east coast, spent about half an hour explaining that the company doesn’t own the images its increasingly ubiquitous license plate reader cameras take, and that it doesn’t sell the data.
“One hundred per cent of data, which is the photo of the public license plate, is owned by our customers,” McCormack said. “So, you own that data. It is never sold. We don’t have that in our model. It is written into your contract. We do not sell data.”
Skepticism of these statements abounds among Flock’s critics, who have made surveillance a political issue for municipalities. And within the bounds of the law, Flock’s clients can share or sell their data as they see fit.
The Dunwoody councilwoman Catherine Lautenbacher asked city staff what would happen if a local agency with an agreement with ICE wanted to search their databases on an immigration enforcement case.
“We’re not limiting their access essentially to searches … associated to their case,” replied Patrick Krieg of the Dunwoody police. “Say that agency has a representative that is assigned to a unit that is associated with said ICE, would they be able to search our database? Most likely.”
license plate recognition camera
A Flock Safety license plate recognition camera. Photograph: Matthew Jonas/Boulder Daily Camera/MediaNews Group/Getty Images
Leaders in Dunwoody voted to defer renewal of its contract while its staff worked out the details with Flock. But they didn’t cancel the contract outright – not after investing $360,000 to build a real-time crime center and about half a million a year with Flock Safety in its technology and network.
Dunwoody’s struggle for balance between privacy and security is visible in other cities. Some are shutting down their cameras and ripping them off lightpoles. Others are signing new contracts, albeit with stronger language about how data is shared. Many are still looking for their footing.
Benn Jordan’s cluttered studio-slash-laboratory in the Atlanta suburbs has a synthesizer in one corner and computer chop-shop workbench in the other, befitting his general Buckaroo Banzai vibe.
“I’m a scientist and YouTuber and musician,” he said. “I’m basically just somebody who asks a lot of questions about everything.”
Jordan and a collection of security technologists have been looking closely at Flock Safety’s gear for months. They are concerned about privacy issues, but have approached this as a hacking challenge to prove a point: surveillance technology with security vulnerabilities may do more harm than good when misused. They have shared their findings with the company, and the federal government’s academic information security apparatus, and now with the world through a series of YouTube videos highlighting the vulnerabilities of the cameras.
Jordan and security researchers Joshua Michael and Jon Gaines demonstrated how the hardware of one Flock camera they purchased from an online vendor could be penetrated simply by pushing the button on the front three times while using a common Android operating system diagnostic tool. The password to the device was coded in the firmware and readable with the device. With that password, they could upload, download or delete videos.
“Let’s say I was a crazy abusive partner,” Jordan said. “If she said, you know, ‘I went for a walk,’ and I said, ‘no, you got picked up and cheated on me,’ I could go to each Flock camera and do this and see if she’s on the local, because it does take pictures every time the radar sensor detects movement, then it will take that image and store it on the camera.”
He describes this in one video as “Netflix for stalkers”. They said they report all of their findings to Flock before posting anything.
Flock Safety camera at the intersection of West Sylvania in Toledo, Ohio.
Flock Safety camera at the intersection of West Sylvania in Toledo, Ohio. Photograph: Stephen Zenner/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images
Flock’s response has been to say that a device that isn’t connected to the internet doesn’t have the same network security protections as one that does, and that their findings don’t amount to a significant security issue.
Still, among the videos which have millions of views on YouTube, one shows Jordan watching himself on his phone, streamed live from a Flock camera hanging above his head on a pole. Jordan had found some of Flock’s Condor cameras were streaming their feeds live to the open internet, and that some of that archived footage was accessible.
Lautenbacher cited that video while talking with Flock’s public relations director at the Dunwoody hearing last month. “He said he hacked your cameras. You said that never happened?”
“Our systems, our data, our customers data has never been hacked,” McCormack answered. “We’re aware of one instance … we put this stuff out when we find out about it.” McCormack attributed it to an installation error that was fixed immediately.
Lautenbacher asked if McCormack uses customer data to train AI. “For product improvement when there are problems,” he replied. “Is there an inherent, outright access to that data? No.”
Though other companies make automated license plate readers, Flock Safety may be in the headlines because it offers its police customers a unique service: nationwide search capacity. With more than 80,000 cameras in its network, that data sharing agreement makes Flock attractive for local investigators tracking crime suspects fleeing their jurisdiction. But it also means other agencies can reach into a local police department’s records of license plate sightings looking for someone.
404 Media revealed in May 2025 that local police around the country had repeatedly searched Flock’s database to assist federal immigration enforcement. An examination of school records by education news group The 74 showed dozens of national searches made by local school police departments to assist with immigration enforcement. An Atlanta police department investigator made similar searches, even though the department has a no-cooperation policy with ICE.
Flock uses imagery data to train artificial intelligence. In the wake of a Super Bowl ad highlighting Amazon’s Ring cameras use of AI to track down lost dogs, customers quickly understood the corollary: their cameras could be used to track people, too. , The ad provoked intense backlash, and precipitated an end to Ring’s partnership with Flock Safety.
“I think the Super Bowl ad really was an exemplification of how creepy this surveillance can be,” said Rindala “Rin” Alajaji, associate director of state affairs at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a longstanding critic of license plate reader technology. “Ring miscalculated the public reaction to the ad and what it represented.”
The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) strategy for immigration enforcement has increasingly relied on imagery-driven technology and data analysis. The DHS entered a five-year, up to $1bn agreement with Palantir Technologies to build profiles of deportation targets, and has a contract with Clearview AI for facial recognition software. Flock doesn’t do facial recognition. But the mere possibility that ICE will access the license plate data and add it to its pile of information is enough cause for some communities to pull the plug.
Even though ICE can’t do a search itself, “the fact that ICE has access to their data is a symptom of a larger problem about how law enforcement works in this country,” Alajaji said. “This is not just a Flock problem … There’s more to it than stolen cars and missing persons.”
In a website post in January, Flock said it did not work with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or any other sub-agency of the Department of Homeland Security, noting that it had concluded pilot programs with federal agencies in August.
The debate has been loudest in California, which passed a law in 2015 barring municipalities from sharing automatic license plate data with federal or out-of-state agencies. Flock disabled that function for California cities in March 2025, to comply with state law.
Last month amid an outcry, the city of Mountain View, California, shut off all of its Flock cameras after they discovered in an audit that federal agencies had accessed the city’s camera data without explicit local authorization in a brief period of 2024.
“I share your anger and frustration regarding how Flock Safety’s system enabled out-of-state agencies to search our license plate data, and I am sorry that such searches occurred,” wrote Mike Canfield, Mountain View’s police chief, in a message to the community. “I know how essential transparency is for maintaining trust and for community policing. This is why MVPD has been so open about what we learned and why we are pausing this program until our City Council can weigh in.”
Mountain View, Santa Cruz, South Pasadena and other California cities have recently terminated their contracts with Flock, citing questions about its recent change in terms of service and fear about sharing data indirectly with ICE. South Pasadena council members cited the “inadvertent” sharing of data as the reason for their cancellation.
The other reason Flock Safety has been in the headlines is, counterintuitively, because the company is relatively open about its technology and its data practices.
“We’re not the only one with a national network,” said Holly Bellin, a Flock Safety spokesperson. Bellin was referring to competitors Axon and Motorola. Axon’s real-time crime center and intelligence platform Fusus also allows agencies to share camera data between public and private entities. Axon has a contract with ICE, albeit not to provide license plate data.
Motorola’s Vigilant division integrates its license plate reader network with Thompson Reuters Clear.
Both firms have escaped the sometimes-withering public criticism Flock Safety has faced by remaining opaque. Neither Axon nor Motorola responded to requests for comment.
The attention parallels the public policy arguments other tech firms have faced as adoption expanded, like the accusations of online homestay rental firms distorting housing markets, or of ride-sharing companies exploiting workers, or of the general backlash against AI companies.
“I completely think that is what’s happening is that people are anxious and they’re looking for a bully pulpit, and they’re looking for someone to be upset at,” Bellin said. “I think the reason we’re in headlines across the country – in fact, I know it – is because we have the audit records, because individual citizens can actually audit this technology. And so it’s almost like we’re being punished for transparency.”
The company has set up a transparency portal allowing the public to see what searches have been made for its data. Flock Safety conforms to state and local regulation, Bellin said. As legislation changes, Flock adapts.
“Without regulation, we’re sometimes caught between a rock and a hard place,” she said. “When regulation is put into place like it is in Washington or New Mexico … it’s really easy for us to go in and put in a search filter on all agencies to pull it from an offense type. We’ve built all of that from an engineering standpoint. We just can’t do it until there’s regulation.”
Flock Safety worked with Gaines when first approached last March, said its chief information security officer, Chris Castaldo. But Gaines and Jordan would not conform to the company’s “bug bounty” process of identifying vulnerabilities, he added.
The findings Jordan publicized in YouTube videos have either been fixed – like cameras that were misconfigured to stream video – or did not exist in properlyinstalled systems, like being able to access a camera through a diagnostic tool, Castaldo said. The Miami-Dade county sheriff’s office recently tore some Flock cameras apart as a penetration test, looking for vulnerabilities and came back clean, Castaldo said.
Miami’s police use gunshot detection and other technology from Flock Safety, and appear to be happy with the tools. Meanwhile, Flagstaff, Arizona, deactivated its cameras and then physically removed them. Denver cancelled its contract with Flock and is preparing to sign a new contract with Axon to administer license plate readers.
Richmond, California, disabled its cameras in October, but voted in March by a 4-to-3 margin to extend its contract, after intense debate. Flock continues to gain new customers, even as existing customers re-evaluate the technology.
As the customer revolt intensified, Flock has – with increasing alarm – been reaffirming that it has ended its pilot programs with federal agencies and no longer conducts pilot projects with federal agencies, and built safeguards into its software to screen searches for sensitive information like abortion or healthcare related activities, or for immigration enforcement.
The new tools would not prevent a police officer in an ICE-friendly jurisdiction from fudging the purposes of a search. Nonetheless, these efforts have been enough to satisfy other communities.
“The contract thing is gonna drive me batty,” said Lynn Deutsch, Dunwoody’s mayor in the public meeting. “I do not understand a system in which I sign a contract, and it’s a subscription for a year, and the terms can change nine months in. These changes don’t feel insignificant to me. I have a lot of mayor friends, and we’re all talking about this.”
Deutsch was referring to a recent change to Flock’s terms of service, which the company describes as a clarification about how it uses customer data, but which has raised hackles for appearing to expand the company’s rights to use that data to train AI.
A bifurcation is emerging between cities that view the cameras as a relatively inexpensive enhancement to an overstretched police force – and a mechanism for generating ticket revenue – and those that do not want to be held responsible for assisting federal immigration enforcement while ICE engages in politically toxic behavior.
A change in terms of service might have been the catalyst for hard conversations like this, but the underlying concern is political, like in Dunwoody.
The city was an early adopter of Flock gear. Using money from the city’s business district tax zone, Dunwoody spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to build a real-time crime reporting center with Flock technology at its core, integrating the city’s 400 or so cameras with thousands of other cameras owned by businesses.
One of the new Flock Safety drones that will be used by the city of Bridgeport, in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
One of the new Flock Safety drones that will be used by the city of Bridgeport, in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Photograph: Connecticut Post/Hearst Newspapers/CT Post/Getty Images
The system includes gunshot detection devices and M350 drones with Flock Aerodome software that police can deploy in 30 seconds from its headquarters to the mall or a street junction to provide aerial surveillance before police can get there in a car. Police credited the Flock technology with helping identify and track a major jewelry theft ring’s vehicles from south Atlanta into Dunwoody to prevent a planned heist in the city.
The mayor has been talking with her peers in other cities, she said. Two different communities may have very different perspectives on the technology based on the particular issues at hand. One city may need more cameras. Others might need to get rid of them.
“To me, the public policy question is public safety,” Deutsch said. “People move here because it’s safe, and companies won’t stay if it’s not. And so they argue that the research shows this isn’t helping with safety. That may be true overall, but that is not true here.”
Dunwoody again postponed re-signing its Flock contract last Monday, citing community concerns about privacy. A Dunwoody resident, Jason Hunyar, said that he discovered through records requests that a live feed from the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta had been shared through the Flock network, even though the center’s private network had been marked in the system as “do not share”.
Jordan also attended the meeting. He has offered to pay for a security audit.
“I want someone to help me understand, given the evidence that we produced, how anyone would think that signing any more contracts with any third-party surveillance vendor would be a good idea without setting up an independent security and ethics audit first. I can’t open up a barbershop or a Chick-fil-A without a safety inspection.”
Flock camera map
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A live, interactive map of Flock Safety cameras and other automated license plate readers across the United States. Zoom into any area to load the cameras reported there, or jump straight to cameras near you.
FLOCK Network
▻https://ringmast4r.github.io/FLOCK
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💡 How to use:
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• Dotted lines = data sharing to other agencies
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