Flock Surveillance
Flock Group Inc., or Flock Safety. They were founded back in 2017 (9 years ago, holy...) and employ over 1,500 people now as of 2025. The products they sell are security cameras. More specifically, they lease Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) to cities around the United States. Cities agree to the contracts Flock sends them and they install the ALPRs in highly-populated areas.
What do these ALPRs actually do?
ALPRs are placed in areas with a lot of traffic. When a car drives past them, the camera realizes and takes a picture. This picture is processed by an Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the information is sent to Flock's data centers. Then, cities are able to search the database and find what cars drove past specific Flock cameras. The databases log the color, model, license plate, and any identifying features to correctly identify your vehicle. Identifying features include bumper stickers, dents, and scratches.
Why is this a problem?
In a perfect world, this wouldn't be a problem at all. Well, in a perfect world these wouldn't be necessary either. Newsflash: we are not in a perfect world. If this information gets into the hands of a bad actor, this could be incredibly helpful in stalking another person. A perfectly curated database in which the only information you need to know is their license plate number? That's the best news a stalker could ever hear. All of this information is logged in real time and could be used as soon as the person drives past a camera.
So, about that perfect world. There have been so many cases of these Flock cameras being used in terrifying ways. One example of this is when official Flock Safety employees watched through the cameras of a children's gymnastics room and a pool for sales demonstrations. What. I think the worst part about that story is the board renewed their contract after that instance. They suffered through 3 entire hours of backlash against these cameras and they renewed the contract.
There have also been multiple instances of these cameras being used for stalking purposes as I said before. In the state of Kansas, the police chief was using Flock Safety ALPRs to stalk his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend. According to the article, it was "...228 times over four-plus months and used his police vehicle to follow them out of town..." Don't worry, there's a worst part for this story, too. He wasn't caught because of his usage of the Flock database. He was caught for something entirely different and then they put more research into it to find his usage. That means that there is absolutely nothing notifying people about the usage amounts of the Flock databases. People can use it completely freely with nobody going out of their way to figure out what they're doing.
What can we do?
At this point in time, we need to talk to our city councils. There is a desperate need for putting an end to this. Ensure that there are people at council meetings that will express their concerns for starting or renewing contracts. According to DeFlock.org, there are 68 cities who have rejected the renewal of their contracts. Get that to be a higher number.
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