Beware the seemingly innocent “traffic cams” proliferating nationwide! They’re Flock Safety’s automated license plate readers, building a warrantless mass surveillance network that tracks every driver’s movements with minimal oversight.

If you’ve noticed new cameras popping up along the streets, parks, and shopping centers where you live—and assumed they were just “traffic cams” or speed monitors—it’s time to look a little closer.

What appears to be innocuous municipal surveillance is likely part of a nationwide mass tracking system deployed by a for-profit company called Flock Safety. With every installation, these cameras are eroding our privacy, enabling warrantless tracking of everyday life, and creating a database that law enforcement and other agencies can search at the drop of a hat and with little transparency or oversight.

This network isn’t simply a “crime-fighting tool.” In reality, it’s a surveillance dragnet that captures everyone’s movements—literally—regardless of suspicion or even due process. And far too many local governments are installing and renewing contracts with Flock without truly understanding—or caring about—the costs to civil liberties and to taxpayers. Let’s take a look at what Flock cameras really are, why they’re dangerous, and how you can push back.

What Is Flock Safety—Really?

Flock Safety builds and sells automated license plate readers (ALPRs). These cameras are designed to automatically photograph every single vehicle that passes by and extract its license plate data—along with additional data like vehicle characteristics, including make, model, color, and even things like sticker placement and windshield angle.

Flock’s network of cameras logs millions of vehicles every day. And the volume is increasing rapidly as more and more Flock cameras are rolled out across the country.

These aren’t just cameras pointed at stop signs and busy intersections. They can go anywhere and constantly collect images of public or even private roads, logging:

License plate numbers
Time and location of every trip a vehicle takes
Vehicle descriptors (color, model, stickers)
And even historical patterns of movement

And it’s all done under the guise of improving safety. Flock pitches this technology as a “security solution,” arguing that its solar-powered, cloud-connected cameras are cheaper and easier to deploy than traditional ALPR systems. But this sales pitch masks a much more intrusive reality: Flock’s data feeds into a vast, searchable network of surveillance that even local law enforcement can browse as needed and without a warrant.

The growing network of Flock cameras was designed to be transparent and privacy-compliant in theory, but in practice, and as Deflock.org emphasizes, “unregulated video analysis can bypass legal safeguards” when deployed without oversight.

The Surveillance Dragnet: Capturing Everyone, Everywhere
Unlike human-operated cameras, ALPRs don’t discriminate between a suspected criminal and an ordinary person driving to work or a family heading to the local library. Every car that passes by a Flock camera is photographed and logged—every single one, every single day, everywhere.

Once collected, those license plate reads don’t just sit in a local database. Flock’s system allows:

Multijurisdictional searching – Law enforcement anywhere in the network can query plates against other agencies’ data.
Long-term retention – Data spanning weeks, months, or longer can be accessed, all without a judicial warrant.
Cross-agency sharing – Local police can share their Flock data with hundreds of other agencies, often without community knowledge.
Here’s where it gets really alarming: Flock’s minimal hardware requirements mean it could be installed anywhere—on street corners, in parks, or even in private properties—without public awareness.

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have warned, these multijurisdictional databases track the movements of cars across cities and states and are “ripe for abuse.”

If Flock and Flock-like systems are used without strict privacy protocols, we risk similar outcomes at scale. A list of additional ALPR camera vendors can be found here.

Read More: Flock Off! How Flock Safety Is Turning Roads Into Surveillance Networks – And What You Can Do About It