The Problems with Flock Safety
There's a bunch, but we've tried to distill them down to the main ones
Follow the links for all of our sources.
The data they collect extends way beyond license plate numbers
When Flock Safety and their proponents call their cameras “license plate readers” it is a calculated oversimplification. Flock Falcon “ALPRs” record your vehicle's:
License plate
Image
Timestamp
Location
Direction of travel
Make
Model
Year
Color
Condition
Bumper stickers
Accessories
Aftermarket wheels
They call this a Vehicle Fingerprint®.
Flock Condor AI-controlled pan-tilt-zoom cameras are meant to record people. They create a profile of every person that comes within their view. The profile of your person includes your:
Image
Timestamp
Location
Direction of travel
Hair color
Height
Weight
Age
Gender
Race
Clothing
Gait
Condor cameras have an additional neat trick up their sleeves, they can also record your Vehicle Fingerprint®. So- if you’re in from out of town for a nice little Saturday on the square, their Falcon camera can connect your vehicle’s registration to your Vehicle’s Fingerprint® and when you step out of your car, their Condor camera can connect your vehicle to your person. Now all of that data, and the images they’ve collected is connected to your name. They make a point of claiming that they do not do facial recognition, but that’s only because they don’t need to.
The centralization and wide sharing of data allows bad actors to stalk people through Flock searches
This risk often gets dismissed as a hypothetical, or a “rogue actor”, or a “bad apple”. The problem is that if thousands or tens of thousands of people have access to a month of location data for anyone passing one of their 100,000+ camera network, it’s going to be misused. It’s too much power to trust to this many people. It was never a question of if, it has always been a question of when. News stories of abuse have popped up all over the country, all over the state, and now right here in McHenry County.
Note: the Woodstock Police Department shares all of the data that it collects with all 466 Flock customers in Illinois, so each alleged stalker in our state likely searched our data.
They not only share this data, they also sell this data
Here is the price sheet from a procurement company called Omnia Partners:
Now that the data (raw images and metadata) has left Flock’s servers, it can be used by a third-party for any purpose, including:
putting facial recognition on it
using machine learning to analyze your clothing or bumper stickers (rainbow colors, pro-anything, anti-anything, 2A messaging)
using machine learning to analyze where you've been (political rally, protest, gun range, church)
using time and location data to construct a 'pattern of life'
combining it with other data streams (social media records, phone records, credit card statements, court records)
That aggregation of data can then be re-sold it to any government agency or private company that they want (FBI, NSA, DHS, Palantir, etc). They do this kind of thing in China, where they call it a Social Credit System.
Retrieving historical location data without a warrant is a violation of your privacy and your 4th amendment rights
It may be true that it’s not illegal for a private surveillance company like Flock Safety to monitor, record and store your movements for 30 days (it called the “Third-party doctrine”). It is illegal for law enforcement to do so. If a police officer tracks your movement for month in order to charge you for a crime, that information will certainly be inadmissible in a court of law because it violates your 4th amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures. How does purchasing that same information from a private company make it OK?
Proponents like to say that you "have no expectation of privacy in public", but does that extend to the ability to know everywhere you've been in the last month with a simple search?
Their hardware security is atrocious
Their cameras store data on an SD card for 30 days (or more), so you don't have to hack Amazon AWS GovCloud to steal data. All you need is 30 seconds and a stick.
Their cameras are internet-connected, so you don't even need physical access, just a web browser and search engine to connect to misconfigured cameras.
See Benn Jordan’s fantastic video about the vulnerabilities of Flock Safety’s hardware.
Their security controls are a joke
As long as you don't type “ice operations” or “immigration enforcement” or “stalking my ex” as your reason for the search, it will be allowed. Agencies know this and are training their people accordingly. The "bad apples” know this too.
Stolen/leaked/sold Flock credentials are available for sale on the dark web, so you don't have to hack anything.
A buddy in the next precinct over (or across the country) can run a search for you, so you don't even need to buy stolen credentials.
Their “immutable” audit logs can be modified and deleted
They claim their audit logs are immutable (unable to be changed or deleted), and thus provide transparency about the data they collect. This has been proven to be untrue. They can change and hide audit logs from their customers. They can hide setting changes that they’ve made for their customers. They can hide changes of their customer's user lists. They can hide searches made by their own employees. If their logging is not immutable, their actions cannot be transparent.
They are a billionaire-funded multi-billion dollar private surveillance company chasing an IPO
Rapid growth is their primary objective, not anyone's safety.
(Edited 6/28/26 11:40p CST to note the number of data sharing agreements WPD are under and to fix various grammatical errors.)
Thank you for all your due diligence in investigating the reality behind these cameras and information access and misuse, and abuse. Our officials need to rectify this situation and have these cameras removed and do a far better job gathering information before they make decisions like this. This is a huge liability for our town and I know from earlier posts it is very costly. Our tax money could be put to much better use.