The Belated Backlash Against Flock Cameras

“What information are you driving around?” asks a pictorial warning widely shared by U.S. police departments. The advisory, which describes the sort of information that criminals could glean from the back of your car, suggests you might be endangering yourself and your family with stickers that reveal potentially sensitive details about your life.

Thanks to your careless exuberance, the illustration warns, bad actors may know the school your kids attend and the extracurricular activities in which they participate (an indication that you will be “gone most evenings and/or weekends for practices or games”). They also may know your hobbies (which might suggest you have “expensive equipment” at home or in the car), the sort of dog you own (possibly a little, nonthreatening breed), your place of work, and your spouse’s job (which might indicate frequent, prolonged absences).

By advertising your “baby on board,” the advisory adds, you signal that you are “an easy target” because you will be “distracted” and encumbered when you arrive at your destination. Even your personalized license plate might be risky, because it is more easily remembered by a hothead you “unintentionally offend” or a creep who “wants to keep track of” your vehicle.

“Always protect your personal information and limit what you share,” the Schertz, Texas, police department advises in a typical Facebook post. “What could seem like a harmless decal could lead to an unsafe situation.” In other words, drivers should guard their privacy, meaning they should be aware of the facts their cars might be divulging.

Meanwhile, the law enforcement agencies offering that advice have access to all this information and more, thanks to a nationwide network of AI-assisted cameras that photograph vehicles billions of times a week. The information collected by automated license plate readers (ALPRs), 137,000 of which had been mapped as of late August, goes far beyond what someone might surmise from studying the back of your car. It allows police to track your travels, identify other nearby vehicles, and even predict your itinerary.

Police can search that database on computers or mobile phones, conducting sophisticated queries that specify vehicle characteristics and locations, generate travel maps and route predictions, and use “convoy analysis” to show which cars have been spotted in a target’s vicinity. Cops can supplement that information with details from other government databases and publicly available records. They can do all that without any sort of judicial oversight and often without meaningful internal supervision.

As the companies that install ALPR cameras and their customers see it, the benefits of that warrantless surveillance system are clear: It helps detect, investigate, and deter crime, offering an affordable “force multiplier” that lets law enforcement agencies stretch their resources in ways that were previously impractical. But the technological innovations underlying that development raise obvious privacy concerns that judges and legislators have started to address only recently, two decades after ALPRs began proliferating as a law enforcement tool.

Flock Takes Off

Glenn Bronson, an electrical engineer and networking specialist who began tinkering with roadside cameras in 2013 and took several stabs at starting ALPR businesses, understands the technology’s potential benefits. But over the years, he has become increasingly worried by local governments’ tendency to install ALPRs without public debate.

Bronson’s interest in the subject was piqued by a thief who kept stealing metal from his family’s construction business in Connecticut. The burglar would show up before sunrise and walk through the woods to the back of the building, systematically removing and sorting machinery parts, fabrication steel, stainless steel, aluminum, copper, and brass. Then he would carry his loot to the road in front of the building and load it into his pickup truck.

Although Bronson had installed security cameras all over the property, the thief apparently disabled one that was low enough to reach and managed to evade the others, sometimes crawling on the ground to stay below a camera’s field of view while dragging material from the building. But it dawned on Bronson that the thief could still be caught after he returned to his pickup truck.

When Bronson researched the question, he discovered that it was perfectly legal to aim cameras at roads because it was taken for granted that people did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their public movements. Bronson set up his first roadside camera outside his family’s business in October 2013, and the surveillance enabled local police to identify the burglar, who was arrested in 2014.

The cops welcomed Bronson’s assistance in nabbing that guy and other criminal suspects, which suggested a business opportunity. Even a criminal who is careful to avoid detection by security cameras, Bronson realized, typically has to drive away at some point, exposing information that, with the help of ALPRs, can be used to apprehend him. Bronson continued to experiment with roadside cameras, including DIY devices and off-the-shelf equipment. He pitched them as crime-fighting tools to businesses, condo associations, police departments, and investors.

Bronson’s efforts to commercialize the concept ultimately did not pan out. But meanwhile, Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based company that another electrical engineer, Garrett Langley, launched in 2017 along with two fellow Georgia Tech graduates, made a go of it in a big way.

Langley, now Flock’s CEO, tells an origin story similar to Bronson’s. “He was troubled by how easy it was to break into cars in his neighborhood in Atlanta,” The New York Times reports. “When he asked police why they were unable to catch the thieves,” Langley told the Times, they said “they needed the perpetrators’ license plate numbers.”

Flock started with homeowners associations, then expanded to police departments, offering solar-powered, internet-connected cameras that it promoted as boons to overtaxed law enforcement agencies. By 2025, Flock was reporting more than $300 million in annual revenue, and its self-estimated value was $7.5 billion, a number it later upped to $8.4 billion. The company, which says it has installed more than 120,000 ALPR cameras in 12,000 or so communities across 49 states, accounts for around 80 percent of the U.S. market. It also offers camera-equipped drones that it says can respond to service calls “anywhere in your jurisdiction” within a minute and a half.

Flock has contracts with about 7,000 law enforcement agencies, nearly 40 percent of the U.S. total, typically charging around $2,500 a year per camera, plus installation fees. In addition to providing the cameras, Flock maintains a database of license plate scans and alerts police when one of them matches a number on a “hot list” of targeted vehicles.

Flock also offers software aimed at maximizing the utility of ALPR data. Flock NOVA, for example, is “a real-time investigative and operations platform” that integrates data collected by the cameras with information from law enforcement records, “public records,” and “approved open sources.” That adds up to a lot of information, all of which can be tied to individuals by combining license plate numbers with motor vehicle registration records.

Bronson has watched Flock’s success with a combination of admiration and dismay. “Finding investigative leads should be as easy as shopping online,” the company declared in a Facebook ad that Bronson noticed several years ago. “Now it is.” To Bronson, who keeps a copy of that advertisement hanging on his wall, Flock’s pitch was alarmingly blasé about the privacy implications of its software. “I fell out of my seat when I saw that ad,” he says. “I could not believe it.”

Bronson, who still describes himself as “a roadside camera advocate,” also faults Flock for overselling the crime-fighting potential of its products. “I want crime to stop,” Langley told the Fox TV station in Milwaukee a few years ago. When asked if he envisioned “a future with a Flock camera on every street corner,” Langley did not flinch. “I envision that,” he said. “I envision an America where crime no longer exists.”

Langley re-upped that prophecy last year. According to Langley, Forbes reported, “Flock’s cameras, airborne and fixed, will eradicate almost all crime in the U.S.” within a decade. “I’ve talked to plenty of activists who think crime is just the cost of modern society,” he said. “I disagree.” He also rejected the notion of a tradeoff between security and freedom. “I think we can have a crime-free city and civil liberties,” he said. “We can have it all.”

The Crime-Fighting Potential of ALPRs

Bronson is skeptical. For one thing, he says, the European experience with surveillance cameras suggests criminals will adapt to ALPRs with countermeasures, such as unregistered plates, which cannot be tied to drivers; drop plates, which attach to existing plates with electromagnets and can be easily removed after a crime; and cloned plates, which range from printed copies to metal reproductions.

That does not mean ALPRs have no impact on public safety. In recent years, the United States has seen sharp reductions in crime, especially homicide but also property crimes such as car theft and burglary. Adam Gelb, president of the Council on Criminal Justice, suggests one factor in the overall decrease is “the spread of public and private surveillance cameras and license plate readers.” Bronson thinks that is plausible, but he emphasizes the limits of what ALPRs can reasonably be expected to accomplish.

Georgia, for example, has the nation’s highest ALPR rate: about 70 per 100,000 people. The Atlanta metropolitan area alone has more than 5,000 Flock cameras, or 77 per 100,000 residents. During a recent visit to Atlanta, Flock’s home city, Bronson saw the company’s cameras everywhere he looked. You notice them “from the second you get off the airplane” and “everywhere you drive,” he says. Yet “Atlanta is still full of crime.”

Like many other U.S. cities, Atlanta recorded substantial reductions in several kinds of crime last year, including homicide, shootings, and car theft. Atlanta nevertheless ranked 171st in WalletHub’s 2025 safety ratings of 182 U.S. cities. “The fact that all these cameras are there and there’s still this crime,” Bronson says, “means it’s impossible for [Langley] to stop crime.”

Bronson also thinks it is reckless to pretend that police use of the equipment and software hawked by Flock poses no threat to civil liberties. For years, he has monitored the adoption of ALPRs. And in one town after another, he complains, Flock cameras have been deployed without adequate consideration of the privacy risks and sometimes without any public notice at all.

That lack of reflection led to pervasive surveillance, a reality that police officials subsequently cited as evidence that there was no cause for concern. After a couple in Greers Ferry, Arkansas, complained about a Flock camera aimed at their house last year, for instance, Police Chief Kallen Lacy noted the ubiquity of such electronic sentinels. “There are over 5,000 cities in the country that use [ALPR cameras] in 46 states,” he said, “so there is no constitutional violation there.”

The wide acceptance of ALPRs “was all based on the [premise] of no expectation of privacy in public,” Bronson says. As a result, he notes, politicians have scrambled after the fact to address public objections by implementing safeguards that should have been in place from the start.

“You have to include everyone’s input and be clear in the beginning about what you’re doing,” Bronson says. “This backlash that’s occurring now need not have happened had they done that.”

Bronson nevertheless praises Flock for hosting “transparency portals” that “share general information with the public” about a jurisdiction’s monthly database queries, hot list hits, and data sharing with other agencies. “This is a simple and brilliant way to deploy such a system and keep the public at least somewhat informed,” he says.

Activists have supplemented such information by tracking plate captures, database queries, and camera locations on websites like DeFlock, Eyes on Flock, and Have I Been Flocked? Langley is not a fan of those efforts. In a video interview with Forbes last year, he condemned “terroristic organizations like DeFlock,” which uses crowdsourcing to map ALPR cameras, comparing them to antifa and saying their “primary motivation” is “chaos.”

Langley walked back that characterization in July, taking a more conciliatory tone in response to the recent backlash against Flock cameras. “My comments were a mistake, and I apologize,” he told Forbes. “There are groups today that have real, valid criticisms of the business, and I think what’s changed for us is, as we’ve listened to them and heard them out, what we’re trying to do is find this balance. We believe in a world where we can have safety and privacy.”

Does the Fourth Amendment Constrain ALPRs?

That balance so far has been elusive, largely because Fourth Amendment doctrine has not kept pace with the capabilities of AI-empowered ALPR surveillance. In the 1983 case United States v. Knotts, which involved a radio transmitter hidden inside a container of chloroform sold to a suspected methamphetamine manufacturer, the Supreme Court held that “a person traveling in an automobile on public thoroughfares has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements from one place to another.” But the Court qualified that principle in subsequent cases, making it unclear whether and to what extent the Fourth Amendment constrains ALPRs.

Several state and federal courts have rejected challenges to specific uses of ALPR data, saying they did not qualify as searches under the Fourth Amendment. At the same time, courts have acknowledged that broader uses, especially when combined with advances in technology, might raise constitutional issues.

In the 2020 case Commonwealth v. McCarthy, for example, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts upheld the use of ALPRs to incriminate a drug suspect. The cameras, which had been installed by the state police, were located on both sides of two bridges. Barnstable police searched three months of data from the cameras, which supported their suspicion that Jason McCarthy was crossing the bridges to meet with a heroin dealer he supplied. After they had built a case against McCarthy, police used real-time ALPR information to locate and arrest him.

“The defendant has a constitutionally protected expectation of privacy in the whole of his public movements,” Justice Frank Gaziano conceded in the unanimous opinion. Five members of the U.S. Supreme Court had agreed on that point in the 2012 case United States v. Jones, which involved GPS tracking of cars. And six years later in Carpenter v. United States, which involved phone location data collected by cell sites, the majority opinion invoked the same principle.

That reasonable expectation of privacy “potentially could be implicated by the widespread use of ALPRs,” Gaziano said. But “that interest is not invaded by the limited extent and use of ALPR data in this case.”

Prior state and federal cases “articulate an aggregation principle for the technological surveillance of public conduct, sometimes referred to as the mosaic theory,” Gaziano noted. “When collected for a long enough period, the cumulative nature of the information collected implicates a privacy interest on the part of the individual who is the target of the tracking.”

Such “a detailed account of a person’s movements,” Gaziano explained, “encroaches upon a person’s reasonable expectation of privacy because the whole reveals far more than the sum of the parts. The difference is not one of degree but of kind. Prolonged surveillance reveals types of information not revealed by short-term surveillance, such as what a person does repeatedly, what he does not do, and what he does ensemble. Aggregated location data reveals a highly detailed profile, not simply of where we go, but by easy inference, of our associations—political, religious, amicable and amorous, to name only a few—and of the pattern of our professional and avocational pursuits.”

Although Gaziano perceived a difference “of kind,” he was hazy on the line marking that distinction. “While we cannot say precisely how detailed a picture of the defendant’s movements must be revealed to invoke constitutional protections,” he wrote, “it is not that produced by four cameras at fixed locations on the ends of two bridges.”

Last June in Chatrie v. United States, which involved data about cellphone users’ movements collected by Google’s Location History feature, the Supreme Court reaffirmed the point Gaziano was making. As in Carpenter, the majority saw an exception to the “third party” doctrine, which says people generally do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in information they voluntarily share with others. “An individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone’s location,” Justice Elena Kagan said in the majority opinion, “and police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information.”

By similar logic, people have a constitutionally protected interest in records of their movements compiled by ALPR cameras. That argument, which hinges on the “reasonable expectation of privacy” test that the Supreme Court established in the 1967 case Katz v. United States, figures in ALPR lawsuits filed by the Institute for Justice and other civil liberties groups.

ALPRs also arguably implicate an older, property-based test that the Court continued to apply after Katz, which focuses on physical intrusions that facilitate surveillance, such as “spike mikes” driven through walls or GPS trackers attached to cars. The Kansas Justice Institute (KJI), which challenged Wichita’s ALPR network in a state lawsuit filed last July, notes that such systems depend on state laws that intrude on private property by requiring that drivers affix license plates to their cars.

Kansas Lawsuit: ALPRs Turn a License Plate Into the ‘Functional Equivalent’ of a ‘GPS Tracking Device’

“Under its traditional use, verifying payment of registration taxes and adequate insurance, a government-mandated license plate might not have been a trespassory search,” the KJI complaint says. But “when coupled with Wichita’s ALPR dragnet surveillance program, it is now the functional equivalent of affixing a GPS tracking device, which constitutes a trespassory search.”

‘Creepy’ and ‘Deeply Intrusive’ Surveillance

It is not clear how receptive courts will be to these arguments. A constitutional challenge to ALPRs in Norfolk, Virginia, illustrates the potential obstacles.

As of 2024, Norfolk had deployed at least 176 ALPR cameras, about 76 per 100,000 people, which was nearly as high as Atlanta’s rate. “The cameras are strategically placed to capture everybody’s daily travel,” the Institute for Justice noted in October 2024, when it filed a federal lawsuit arguing that the city’s camera network violated the Fourth Amendment. “They’re straight-up surveillance cameras, set up to watch people 24/7 as they go about their lives.”

The complaint noted that Norfolk was “gathering information about everyone who drives past” any of its cameras and retaining it for at least 30 days in a searchable database. That system “violates the longstanding societal expectation that people’s movements and associations over an extended period are their business alone,” it said. “And because the City does all of this without a warrant—instead letting individual officers decide for themselves when and how to access an unprecedented catalogue of every person’s movements throughout Norfolk and beyond—the City’s searches are unreasonable.”

Although U.S. District Judge Mark S. Davis thought that argument was plausible enough for the lawsuit to proceed, he ultimately did not buy it. “Federal and state courts analyzing ALPR claims have almost uniformly concluded that neither taking photos of the license plate of a vehicle on a public roadway nor maintaining and querying a database of ALPR photos constitute a warrantless ‘search,’” he noted in January 2026, when he ruled in the city’s favor.

“It is well-established that police pole cameras or security cameras that photograph or record public areas do not violate any objectively reasonable expectation of privacy,” Davis wrote. As for the resulting database, he said, the plaintiffs had not shown that Norfolk’s ALPR system was “capable of tracking the whole of a person’s movements.” The city’s police chief had conceded that “it would be difficult to drive anywhere [for] any distance without running into a camera somewhere.” But Davis noted that the cameras were “grouped into 75 clusters in Norfolk rather than placed in 176 isolated locations spread throughout the city.”

Although the information those cameras captured could be more precise than the cell site data at issue in Carpenter, Davis said, it was less comprehensive and collected less frequently. For similar reasons, he added, it was different from the GPS tracking that the Supreme Court addressed in Jones. But like other judges in similar cases, Davis acknowledged that “the constitutional balancing could conceivably tip the other way” as “the number and capabilities of ALPR cameras expand.”

Three months after that decision, the Institute for Justice filed another ALPR challenge, this time in California. The federal lawsuit notes that more than 1,000 employees of the San Jose Police Department have access to data collected by the city’s 474 ALPR cameras. And because San Jose shares its information, it also can be perused by people at nearly 300 other government agencies across California.

That “creepy” and “deeply intrusive” system “violates the Fourth Amendment,” the lawsuit says. “Pervasively tracking a person’s movements and then storing them in a government database is a ‘search.’ It creates precisely the type of suffocating atmosphere of surveillance the Framers adopted the Fourth Amendment to prevent.”

Lax Oversight Invites ALPR Abuse

Broad access to ALPR data amplifies the privacy concerns at the center of these lawsuits. Institute for Justice attorney Michael Soyfer notes that “government employees search San Jose drivers’ data thousands of times every day with almost no oversight, creating a situation that’s ripe for abuse.” The KJI makes a similar point in its case against Wichita’s “warrantless ALPR dragnet surveillance program,” which includes about 200 Flock cameras.

The city’s database can be accessed by “virtually every police officer in Wichita,” plus “hundreds of other law enforcement agencies,” the KJI complaint notes. Wichita police are supposed to use the database only when they have a “legitimate law enforcement purpose.” But Wichita police Lt. Brian Safris has conceded that it’s “not even possible” to enforce that policy by making sure that each search complies with it.

That problem extends beyond Wichita. In Norfolk, WHRO reported last April, police often give “incomplete and imprecise reasons” for ALPR searches, including “suspect,” “suspicious,” and “investigation” or “inv.” Such vague labels hardly seem consistent with a state law requiring that cops state a “specific purpose,” including “the offense type,” thereby providing enough information to determine whether a search is legitimate.

The KJI lawsuit mentions several cases in Kansas and other states where cops have been caught using ALPR systems for unapproved purposes, such as stalking ex-girlfriends, possibly unfaithful spouses, and objects of romantic interest. As of August, the Institute for Justice had identified more than 100 incidents like those across the country.

When such abuses are discovered, they may result in disciplinary action, dismissal, or criminal charges. But given frequently lax internal supervision and the complete lack of independent oversight, it’s likely that the cases we know about are just the tip of the iceberg. And the potential for abuse is multiplied again and again because information collected by one agency is typically shared with many others.

She Spent 7 Months in Legal Hell After Cops Used Flock Surveillance To Identify the Wrong Car

The Wichita Police Department, for example, officially shares its ALPR data with a long list of Kansas law enforcement agencies, which may in turn share the information with others. The city does not necessarily know when its partners do that. And when Wichita police officers serve on federal task forces, they may share ALPR information with the agencies they are assisting, even though the city does not have formal ALPR arrangements with those agencies.

The broad dissemination of ALPR data means that even a department with relatively strict internal rules cannot know how the information is used. “Once the surveillance data is shared,” The Wichita Eagle noted in 2022, “Wichita police officials have no control over how those outside agencies use it and no way to flag unlawful searches of its license plate reader database.”

That loss of control raises problems that go beyond cops who improperly use ALPR databases for personal purposes. In 2024, for instance, Illinois legislators barred state and local law enforcement agencies from sharing ALPR information for the purpose of immigration enforcement. Despite that law, records suggest that Immigration and Customs Enforcement gained informal access to data collected by Flock cameras in Illinois via fed-friendly officers.

Other states, including California, Colorado, New Jersey, Oregon, Virginia, and Washington, likewise have tried to stop immigration agents from using ALPR data to nab unauthorized residents. But the ever-expanding circle of agencies and officers with access to that information makes such restrictions hard to enforce.

The same goes for policies that aim to prevent the use of ALPR data to enforce abortion bans. California, for example, prohibits the sharing of ALPR information with agencies in other states, and a 2022 law bars California cops from assisting “the arrest of any person for performing, supporting, or aiding in the performance of an abortion or for obtaining an abortion.” According to a 2024 grand jury report, the Sacramento Police Department and the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office nevertheless were “sharing ALPR data with anti-abortion states.”

Second Thoughts About Flock Cameras

Policy makers did not pay much attention to privacy concerns or the potential for abuse when they began signing contracts with Flock and other ALPR companies. But that is starting to change. As of late August, the Institute for Justice counted 137 local governments that had canceled or declined to renew their ALPR contracts. DeFlock listed 153 cities “rejecting” ALPRs, which includes camera de-activations. Although that is a tiny share of Flock customers, it signifies a new awareness of the risks highlighted by ALPR critics.

A few examples reinforce that impression. Last December in Oregon, the Eugene Police Department (EPD) announced that it had terminated its Flock contract after identifying “vulnerabilities and limitations that raise concerns about the system’s ability to meet EPD’s operational needs, data security requirements, and community expectations.” Two months later, CBS reported that the Mountain View, California, police department had “turned off its Flock cameras after the police chief said out-of-state agencies were accessing data collected in the city.” Last May in Ohio, the Dayton Police Department said it was indefinitely suspending its Flock contract after discovering that, contrary to policy, its ALPR data had been shared for immigration enforcement purposes thousands of times.

These second thoughts reflect the objections raised by local residents. Last year, for example, Scarsdale, New York, terminated its Flock contract after more than 400 residents signed a petition expressing concern about “the broad and lasting implications of deploying such a surveillance system.” Although polling on the subject is scarce, a NextGen survey conducted in August found that 63 percent of Arizonans opposed police use of ALPRs, while 82 percent were “concerned” about “misuse.” Around the same time, a Spry Strategies survey of likely voters in Knox County, Tennessee, found that 58 percent opposed Flock cameras, including 42 percent who were “strongly” opposed.

Flock seems to be alarmed by these indicators. In August, the company announced new “safeguards” aimed at “strengthening privacy, accountability, and security.” The list of changes included “case codes” to give agencies “more control while strengthening oversight,” “mandatory multi-factor authentication” to protect “data security,” and a recommendation that police retain ALPR information for seven days, as opposed to the previous default of 30 days, unless it is tied to an ongoing investigation.

Robert Frommer, an attorney at the Institute for Justice, was not impressed. “This is yet more window dressing,” he said in a press release. “Flock suggests that police departments limit their retention periods to 7 days, while admitting that decision is still entirely up to the police departments themselves.” Flock “also suggests that police departments conduct their own audits,” he added, but “there can be no effective review of audit records when the people tasked with auditing are understaffed.” Frommer warned that “the police cannot police themselves,” which is why his organization “is fighting in federal court so that courts and judges are put back in the driver’s seat.”

In addition to its Fourth Amendment litigation, the Institute for Justice has offered a model statute that would generally require a warrant to access “historical location information.” The proposed law makes exceptions for “exigent circumstances,” stolen vehicles, and toll, parking, or traffic enforcement.

Bronson suggests several narrower legislative fixes, including explicit penalties for abuse of ALPR databases, easier access to relevant public records, and limits on new ALPR features. He emphasizes that legislators need to be aware of potential developments that could compound the privacy concerns raised by ALPRs.

Cameras can be modified, for instance, to detect Bluetooth signals, which might appeal to Flock and other companies trying to thwart vandalism of their equipment. If a saboteur has Bluetooth in his car, Bronson notes, that will be “the last thing the camera saw before it was cut down.”

That enhancement would enable identification and tracking of drivers, or even pedestrians, who are carrying cellphones or other Bluetooth-equipped devices. And even if it is not initially presented as a feature for ALPR customers, its use could eventually expand to law enforcement agencies. “You can track everybody by their Bluetooth,” Bronson says.

That scenario would be consistent with what has happened since Flock began pitching ALPR cameras to homeowners’ associations nearly a decade ago. Devices that were presented as an easy solution to local crime transmogrified into a countrywide dragnet with far-reaching implications that Americans are only now beginning to recognize.

The post The Belated Backlash Against Flock Cameras appeared first on Reason.com.

Source: https://reason.com/2026/08/31/the-belated-backlash-against-flock-cameras/