In April, millions of readers came to GNN for the scoop on Maryland’s first-in-the-nation ban on “surveillance pricing” in retail grocery stores.
Now, municipal governments around the country are ending their association with Flock Safety, a company that has cloaked the streets of the nation in surveillance cameras that automatically read license plates using AI.
Ars Technica has stayed up to date on the proliferation of Flock cameras, their official use case, their alleged misuse, and the growing bipartisan backlash against them, and in a recent report they cited data which shows how in just this month alone, 93 US jurisdictions ended their contracts with Flock.
The data came via Secure Justice, an Oakland-based advocacy group, and shows that since 2021, 214 jurisdictions have installed, and then removed, Flock cameras. As public outcry grew against what a Berkeley law professor described as “yet another Silicon Valley product… threatening to change people’s lives [that no one asked for]” the rate of these removals has increased dramatically.
Ars Techinca received a statement from Flock Safety which said that contract cancellations were outnumbered by new county and municipal partnerships by 10 to 1, and that further improvements to its privacy standards were underway.
The United States has an interesting history with surveillance. Being one of the only nations on Earth with any constitutional and/or legal protections against it, Americans don’t always avail themselves of such safeguards.
Something about the spread of cameras manufactured by Flock Safety has triggered the US, and from the citizenry to the Senate, advocates for their removal over privacy, abuse, and mass-data collection concerns are raising their voice.
Senator Josh Hawley (R – MO) announced that he was “investigating Flock Safety’s collection, retention, and dissemination of the data generated by its artificial intelligence surveillance cameras.”
In a few short years, Hawley wrote in a statement announcing the investigation, Flock has assembled an unprecedented national surveillance network, boasting more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states and more than 20 billion vehicle scans every month.
“Instead of serving discrete local investigations, as contemplated by our constitutional processes and safeguards, these camera networks harness artificial intelligence to pool what they capture into a national database that customers can search,” wrote Senator Hawley.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis called their growth across his state “out of control.”
“I’m all about law enforcement having tools to hold criminals accountable… [but] when I see, like, a police officer using this to track an ex-girlfriend, I’m like, you know what the hell’s going on?” DeSantis said in a speech.
WFLA news reported on two abuse instances in the state under investigation. The first, as DeSantis referred to, was when a Haines City police officer was arrested by his colleagues after it was found he had used Flock to track his estranged wife’s movements. Another instance, from Sarasota, involved an officer checking the recordings of the same plate number over 300 times without investigative reason.
A collection of such abuse cases compiled on Flock Safety’s Wikipedia page shows that stalking by police partners dominates documented misuse of the technology.
Business Insider reported that dozens of misreads by Flock cameras have led to mistaken interactions between citizens and law enforcement that have turned violent. In Toledo, Ohio, driver Brandon Upchurch was mauled by a police dog after a Flock camera misread the “7” on his license plate as a “2.”
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In Roseville, California, Flock incorrectly read the plate in 71% of 1,427 stolen-vehicle and felony alerts issued during 2023 and 2024, a Business Insider investigation found.
“Maybe in the past it didn’t feel like every red light cam really meant a pair of eyes was watching you, but with AI, that’s increasingly becoming the reality,” Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Center of Democracy and Technology’s Security and Surveillance Project, said in an emailed correspondence with Ars Technica.
“Flock lets its cameras be searched for keywords and people, cities are incorporating real-time facial recognition into camera networks, Border Patrol is using AI to scan [auto license plate reader] data for driving patterns [and] pulling people over whenever the AI deems their driving ‘suspicious.’”
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Flock routinely states that its cameras have helped law enforcement prevent hundreds of potential crimes, return thousands of stolen cars, and catch hundreds of wanted criminals. In response to the growing privacy concerns, Flock CEO Garrett Langley recently announced that the data retention period for any photo has been shortened from 30 days to just 7.
Ultimately, Flock Safety and their traffic cameras made a proposal to municipal governments around the country that’s right at the heart of the age-old debate on surveillance. Proponents suggest that being able to rely on mass-data collection including on private behavior would allow for robustly informed public safety strategies, while opponents argue that doing so violates the citizenry’s right to privacy, and the relinquishment of that right in the name of safety is a bargain that isn’t worth it.
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