The nationwide backlash against Flock cameras watching your car

Story by Kris Maher

Troy, N.Y.,’s Victorian-era charms include brownstones, cast-iron storefronts and dozens of Tiffany stained-glass windows in churches.

But the city also has a 21st-century problem. Some residents say its artificial-intelligence enabled street cameras are creating a surveillance state.

This spring, tensions boiled over at a city council meeting that dragged past midnight. Dozens of speakers railed against the mayor, police chief and company that provides the cameras for fostering a “dystopian hellscape.” The cameras violate privacy rights, opponents said, and are ripe for misuse.

“As a Troy resident, I am appalled that our own mayor, our own administration, can essentially write off the rights of a significant portion of people who pay their salaries,” one speaker said.

Mayor Carmella Mantello said the technology has helped reduce crime and solve homicides, robberies and narcotics cases, plus recover missing persons and stolen cars.

“Guess what?” she said. “Your iPhone is more of a surveillance camera than the license plate readers.” She raised her own phone for emphasis, as residents holding signs grumbled that she was lying. The city council president banged the table for order.

Liberal and conservative blowback

Similar clashes are erupting nationwide as communities wrestle with privacy rights and the rapid spread of AI-enabled cameras. Often affixed inconspicuously to poles, they photograph the back of every passing vehicle and collect license plate data—as well as color, make, model and features like a bumper sticker or a gun rack.

How these billions of photographs are used, stored and shared has spawned local fights, lawsuits and a national movement aimed at getting cities to cancel contracts with the biggest supplier, Atlanta-based Flock Safety.

Founded in 2017, Flock began by selling its solar-powered cameras, known as automated license plate readers, to neighborhood groups. It now dominates the market and has more than 12,000 customers, including police departments, retailers, schools and homeowners’ associations.

Flock promotes its 20 billion license plate reads a month—and ability to solve crimes across jurisdictions—to prospective law-enforcement customers. Its cameras are in more than 6,000 communities.

About 50 cities and counties have canceled Flock contracts or deactivated cameras since early last year. The list includes liberal college towns like Boulder, Colo., and Cambridge, Mass. Conservatives also oppose government collection of personal data. Right-leaning Lockhart, Texas, and Warrenton, Va., rejected proposals to enter into contracts with Flock.

Saws, spray paint and stickers

Courts have repeatedly found that license-plate readers, like those used by Flock, don’t violate privacy rights or Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, legal experts say.

But privacy-rights groups on the left and right say laws haven’t kept pace with technology and that long-term, persistent tracking of a vehicle amounts to an illegal, warrantless search. Equally troubling, they say, is that data on every vehicle is collected. They want more states to limit the technology’s use and the sharing and retention of data.

“We should be using what is essentially a mass surveillance technology only for the worst possible crimes,” said Chad Marlow, senior policy counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union.

People have attacked the company’s cameras with saws, spray-painted the lenses or covered them with stickers. Websites like DeFlock, FlockHopper and HaveIBeenFlocked purport to turn the tables on Flock by posting camera locations and helping residents elude them.

Flock blames the blowback on misunderstanding its technology and disinformation spread by opponents.

“People walk by it every day, and they don’t understand what it actually does,” said Max Weinstein, Flock’s director of public trust and technology. He acknowledged a privately controlled database of vehicle data is “an objectively pretty scary concept,” but noted Flock’s numerous guardrails and an audit system.

In an online demonstration for The Wall Street Journal, Weinstein showed how a law enforcement officer can search a complete or partial license plate, or terms like “white,” “Chevy,” “pickup truck.” The cameras don’t use facial recognition, the company says, and photos are stored in a cloud-based system.

Flock’s ability to identify vehicles without a plate propelled its growth, Weinstein said, because police value searching for other details eyewitnesses typically recall. Last year, the Providence, R.I., police chief credited Flock’s cameras with helping track down the Brown University shooting suspect, who had changed license plates.

Cities choose whether to share data with other jurisdictions and how long to retain it. Flock’s default setting is 30 days; after that, photos are deleted.

Flock said it doesn’t contract with the Department of Homeland Security or assist with immigration enforcement. How Flock customers use camera data is up to them, the company said.

Flock’s system can alert law enforcement when a vehicle they are looking for is detected, and map its recent locations. A “lookup” function searches across states, where allowed.

Some critics equate those abilities with mass surveillance. They point to incidents where officers using Flock cameras allegedly stalked individuals and reports of an officer accused of tracking a woman traveling out of state for an abortion.

Will Freeman, a software engineer in Boulder, said he started noticing Flock cameras two years ago. He found more than 100 in Huntsville, Ala., his hometown, and started DeFlock, a site to organize opposition and create a crowdsourced map of camera locations.