SURVEILLANCEFlock Safety’s Feature Updates Cannot Make Automated License Plate Readers Safe
Two recent statements from the surveillance company reveal a troubling pattern: when confronted by evidence of widespread abuse, Flock Safety has blamed users, downplayed harms, and doubled down on the very systems that enabled the violations in the first place.
Two recent statements from the surveillance company—one addressing Illinois privacy violations and another defending the company’s national surveillance network—reveal a troubling pattern: when confronted by evidence of widespread abuse, Flock Safety has blamed users, downplayed harms, and doubled down on the very systems that enabled the violations in the first place.
Flock’s aggressive public relations campaign to salvage its reputation comes as no surprise. Last month, we described how investigative reporting from 404 Media revealed that a sheriff’s office in Texas searched data from more than 83,000 automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras to track down a woman suspected of self-managing an abortion. (A scenario that may have been avoided, it’s worth noting, had Flock taken action when they were first warned about this threat three years ago).
Flock calls the reporting on the Texas sheriff’s office “purposefully misleading,” claiming the woman was searched for as a missing person at her family’s request rather than for her abortion. But that ignores the core issue: this officer used a nationwide surveillance dragnet (again: over 83,000 cameras) to track someone down, and used her suspected healthcare decisions as a reason to do so. Framing this as concern for her safety plays directly into anti-abortion narratives that depict abortion as dangerous and traumatic in order to justify increased policing, criminalization, control—and, ultimately, surveillance.
As if that weren’t enough, the company has also come under fire for how its ALPR network data is being actively used to assist in mass deportation. Despite U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) having no formal agreement with Flock Safety, public records revealed “more than 4,000 nation and statewide lookups by local and state police done either at the behest of the federal government or as an ‘informal’ favor to federal law enforcement, or with a potential immigration focus.” The network audit data analyzed by 404 exposed an informal data-sharing environment that creates an end-run around oversight and accountability measures: federal agencies can access the surveillance network through local partnerships without the transparency and legal constraints that would apply to direct federal contracts.
