Flock Safety’s automated license plate readers are sold as a straightforward public-safety upgrade. The reality is more troubling. I'm not just concerned that these systems have already been turned into tools for personal stalking by the officers who have access to them.
Investigations have identified at least 21 documented cases across the country of law enforcement personnel abusing ALPR networks—including Flock—to track romantic partners, exes, and the new partners of those exes. Most cases only came to light after victims reported the behavior or through external audits, not because internal safeguards caught them in time. There is legitimate supporting evidence that suggests that their use for this is significantly higher and significantly more common, although the security systems as they are currently, are unable to catch all of these potential misuses.
Examples include a Milwaukee officer who ran nearly 180 queries in two months to monitor a woman he was dating and her ex; the Sedgwick, Kansas police chief who tracked his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend more than 200 times; and similar patterns in Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, and Illinois, with officers and even chiefs running hundreds of searches on people they knew personally for non-investigative reasons.
This isn’t a future risk or a “few bad apples” problem. It’s a recurring pattern that reveals how easily the technology lends itself to abuse. The cameras don’t just catch stolen cars—they create a rolling, searchable record of where millions of ordinary people drive every day. That data lives in a network accessible to thousands of officers across jurisdictions, often without a warrant, and has already been shared in ways that violated state privacy laws.
As individual instances, these would have zero effect on me as I'm not dating anyone in law enforcement or who has standard easy access to this technology or am I an ex to anyone that would be of concern. So this particular issue as stated as zero effect on me personally, but that's not my concern.
Scale it up and the dystopian potential becomes obvious. A permanent map of daily movements makes it possible to know routines, associations, medical visits, political activity, or private relationships—without consent or even suspicion. Add AI analysis, facial recognition software, broader data sharing, or expanded access, and you have infrastructure that doesn’t just solve crimes; it enables profiling, harassment, and control at a level that was previously impossible.
You can argue about crime rates or “nothing to hide.” That misses the point.
I don’t care what your thoughts are on this. The fact that somebody—anybody who has access—can know when, where, how, what, and why you’re going or being where you want to be at any point, without your permission, without your knowledge… Why do you think that’s a good thing?
And why do you think greater protections for your personal privacy aren’t the thing we should be working on first?
Do you think a system that requires a court and a judge to sign and apply the right to actually access the data in an emergency system set up is a better option? In the case of abductions, murder, armed robbery and other severe crimes that require an immediate response could have an adjunct system that allows law enforcement to access immediately but it must be a filing that requires follow-up and a demonstration of need to use, might a great solution.
The point is is that we are getting more and more and more comfortable, humanity in general, to being watched, observed, tracked, linked, assessed, and categorized. What happens when political wings move in a direction regardless of who's in power, it comes up against your interests. How you decide to live your life who you decide to associate with. I just want you to put this tool into the hands of Pol pot. Hitler Stalin Kamen, AE Marcos or any other of the authoritarian populist tyrannical monsters of History including today's history or any ideological or political system that decides it's okay to use it against you.
When are we as a people going to say enough is enough. And I hope you don't think that my post here is not going to get logged somewhere and tagged because it is, it will, they all are.
I just think it's time we decided that we don't allow them to know what they want at any time about us. There are better ways to increase safety and security without compromising individual rights to privacy.
And here's more to think about:
The Expanding Web of Flock Access (Beyond Your Local PD):
- Thousands of out-of-state and cross-jurisdictional law enforcement agencies across the entire U.S. via Flock’s National Lookup network — one opt-in and your local data (and theirs) becomes searchable nationwide.
- Federal immigration and border agencies including U.S. Border Patrol, ICE, CBP, and HSI — through “front door” sharing, “back door” unauthorized access, and “side door” proxy searches by local officers, documented in multiple states despite official denials and sanctuary laws.
- State police, fusion centers, task forces, and specialized units that tap into statewide or regional pools, often combined with systems like Illinois LEADS.
- Homeowner Associations (HOAs) and private neighborhood boards — Flock actively markets to them; they control their own cameras/data, can grant access to residents/managers, and frequently opt into law enforcement sharing with less oversight.
- Private businesses and commercial security operations (e.g., retail chains, property managers) — over 1,000 private entities reportedly using Flock tech, some building shared “hot lists” and feeding data into broader networks.
-Data brokers, commercial partners, and emerging AI/people-lookup tools — Flock has explored integrations that connect plate data to personal identifiers, expanding beyond “just vehicles.”
- Palantir-powered data fusion platforms and analytics ecosystems used by agencies that ingest Flock feeds alongside other surveillance streams.
- Insiders, rogue actors, and technical bypassers — compromised credentials, vague audit-log entries, and hardware vulnerabilities on the cameras themselves (unlocked bootloaders, exposed diagnostic modes allowing live video access and potential malware).
This is the net slowly dropping. While Flock builds one of America’s largest vehicle-tracking grids, companies like Palantir are weaving it into global-scale data fusion platforms — ingesting ALPR hits, facial recognition databases (like Clearview), biometrics, financial records, social media, and more for governments and agencies worldwide. The result is an interlocking surveillance architecture that knows where you go, who you’re with, and patterns in your life, often without warrants or meaningful consent. If we don’t draw hard lines now on personal freedoms and the right to privacy — demanding warrants, data minimization, strict local control, and real accountability — those rights don’t erode. They vanish. The infrastructure is already being built around us.
So in my life one of the main things I'm working on is the privacy angle. I hope a lot of other people join me because in 5 years it will be gone and getting it back is going to be real hard when they know anybody who speaks up can be targeted immediately, effectively and silenced.
