Your Neighborhood Has a Flock Camera. Here's What It Knows About You.
Quick Answer
Flock Safety cameras are automated license plate readers that photograph every vehicle that passes, recording the plate, make, model, and color. There are more than 120,000 of them across 49 states, installed by police departments, homeowner associations, businesses, and schools. Data is stored for 30 days by default and shared across a network of agencies. A state audit found that U.S. Customs and Border Protection accessed Illinois Flock cameras through an undisclosed pilot program. Flock data was used to track a Texas resident who drove to Illinois to seek abortion care. More than 80 localities have cancelled their contracts.
There are more than 120,000 Flock cameras in the United States. In most places, nobody voted on them.
Flock Safety makes automated license plate readers. Each camera photographs every vehicle that passes, reads the plate, records the make, model, color, and identifying features of the car, and timestamps all of it. This happens automatically, around the clock, with no human looking at the camera. Every car. Every time it passes.
It's not just the police installing them
Flock started by selling to police departments. It now sells to homeowner associations, businesses, schools, apartment complexes, and private property owners. More than 5,000 law enforcement agencies across 6,000 cities and 49 states use the system. So do private entities that are not subject to the same public records laws or oversight requirements as police.
When a homeowner association installs a Flock camera, it can grant police access to everything the camera collects. The HOA is not a law enforcement agency. It does not go through a public procurement process. The cameras go in and the neighborhood's movement data becomes available to police without a city council vote, a public hearing, or most residents ever knowing.
In many cities, this is how Flock arrived: through a neighborhood association that wanted to track package thefts, and quietly made all of its residents' driving records searchable in the process.
The data goes further than your city
Your local police department does not only see data from cameras in your area. Flock operates a shared network. A department in one city can query what a specific license plate was doing in another city entirely. The owner of that car does not need to be suspected of anything. The query is legal.
This is the design. Each camera makes the whole system more useful. A month of your driving in one city, shared with agencies you've never interacted with, becomes a searchable record of your patterns. Where you went. When. Which route you took. How often you passed a certain intersection.
They said they don't share data with ICE. A state audit found otherwise.
Flock's website states that federal data sharing is disabled by default. In January 2026, the company added an admin toggle to its settings: a single switch that lets any agency cut off all federal access at once. The existence of that feature confirms what it was designed to address.
A state audit found that U.S. Customs and Border Protection had been accessing Flock cameras in Illinois through an undisclosed pilot program. Flock had not disclosed this to the cities that contracted with it. Illinois law explicitly prohibits sharing license plate data for immigration enforcement. CBP was in the system anyway.
This is the longer history of what immigration enforcement agencies do when they want data. We wrote about how ICE was built from scratch in 2003 and what preceded it in the post on how ICE was created. Flock is the current version of the same infrastructure.
More than 53 cities cancelled their Flock contracts after this became public.
It tracked someone driving to get an abortion
In Texas, Flock data was used by law enforcement to track a person who had driven to Illinois to seek abortion care. Illinois law prohibits sharing plate data for abortion-related investigations. The data was shared anyway.
The cameras are not specifically looking for abortion patients. They are recording everyone. The consequence is that the same system that captured your license plate when you drove to the grocery store also captured it when you drove to a clinic, a union meeting, an immigration attorney, or a protest. The data is stored. The data is searchable. The data is available to departments in other states.
What "30 days" actually means
Flock's default data retention is 30 days. That sounds like a limit. It is also 30 days of everywhere you went, when you went there, how often, and which routes you took, stored in a database accessible by law enforcement agencies across the country.
A month of driving is a detailed map of a person's life. Medical appointments. Legal consultations. Visits to family. Attendance at protests. None of it requires suspicion. None of it requires a warrant under the current legal framework for privately-operated license plate readers. It is all there by default.
What's happening now
The ACLU has a campaign called "Get the Flock Out." It is telling communities how to challenge local deployments: require warrants before police can access the data, shorten retention periods, ban data sharing with federal agencies, mandate public audits. In January 2026, a coalition mobilized in Santa Cruz and the city council voted to end its contract. More than 80 localities have ended contracts with Flock in the past year.
DeFlock (deflock.org) is an open-source project that maps license plate readers across the country. You can look up your address and see what cameras are near you.
The cameras are still going in. At least 120,000 of them, across 49 states, at this moment. Most of the people living near them don't know what they capture. Most didn't vote on whether to install them. The systems that do this tend to work best when the people being watched aren't paying attention. We wrote about how that escalation pattern develops in the post on authoritarianism and how to spot it.
The Flock Off Sticker Sheet and Flock Off Patch are in the shop now.
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Frequently asked questions
What are Flock cameras?
Flock cameras are automated license plate readers made by a company called Flock Safety. Each camera photographs every vehicle that passes, reads the license plate, records the make, model, and color of the vehicle, and stores the data in a searchable database. They operate automatically, around the clock, without a human monitoring the feed. More than 120,000 of them are currently deployed across 49 states.
Who installs Flock cameras?
Flock cameras are installed by police departments, city governments, homeowner associations, businesses, schools, apartment complexes, and other private entities. Private entities are not subject to the same public records requirements or oversight as police departments. When a private organization installs a Flock camera, it can grant police access to the data it collects without a public vote or community input.
How long do Flock cameras keep data?
Flock's default data retention period is 30 days. Some jurisdictions retain data longer. During that window, the data is accessible to law enforcement agencies across the country through Flock's shared network. The retention policy applies to all vehicles captured, whether or not they are associated with any suspected crime.
Can police share Flock data with ICE or federal agencies?
Flock states that federal data sharing is disabled by default. In January 2026, the company added a toggle that allows agencies to shut off all federal access at once. A state audit found that U.S. Customs and Border Protection had been accessing Flock cameras in Illinois through an undisclosed pilot program, despite state law prohibiting plate data sharing for immigration enforcement. The company had not disclosed this access to the cities that contracted with it.
Can Flock cameras be used to track someone seeking an abortion?
Yes. In Texas, law enforcement used Flock license plate data to track a person who had driven to Illinois to seek abortion care. Illinois law prohibits sharing plate data for abortion-related investigations. The data was accessed anyway. The cameras record every vehicle that passes, regardless of the reason for the trip, and that data is searchable by agencies in other states.
How can I find out if my city has Flock cameras?
DeFlock (deflock.org) is an open-source project that maps license plate readers across the United States, including Flock cameras. You can look up your address and see what's near you. For a more complete picture, file a public records request with your local police department asking for contracts with Flock Safety and documentation of any camera deployments. Cameras installed by private entities such as homeowner associations may not appear in public records at all. The ACLU's "Get the Flock Out" campaign has additional resources on identifying cameras and challenging local deployments at aclu.org.
