Flock cameras are everywhere. Here's how they track cars.

• Flock cameras read license plates and then collect and store the data for investigations.
• Critics say Flock's cameras enable mass surveillance and raise privacy and civil liberty concerns.
• Flock cameras can also misread plates, leading to wrongful detainment.

Flock cameras are almost everywhere and often hide in plain sight.

A Flock camera is an automated license plate reader, or ALPR, made by the public-safety technology company Flock Safety.

The cameras are commonly installed along roads, at intersections, near neighborhood entrances, and around businesses or other private properties.

When a vehicle passes, the camera captures an image and uses machine learning to turn its license plate, color, make, model, and other supported details into searchable information.

That makes them both very useful for those deploying them, like the police, and worrisome for anyone seeking privacy.

Flock says its license plate readers do not use facial recognition and that customers — meaning the ones putting up the cameras, not the ones being monitored — can control access to and sharing of the data collected.

"They are built to focus on the vehicle involved in an incident and the details that can help distinguish it from other vehicles on the road," Flock says.

The company says that vehicle records are automatically deleted after 30 days by default, although customers may configure different retention periods when contracts and local laws permit.

Who makes Flock cameras?

Flock cameras are manufactured by Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based company that develops surveillance and public-safety technology.

Its CEO, Garrett Langley, founded the company in 2017. In a blog post published in May, he wrote:

Nine years ago, I lived in a neighborhood in Atlanta where crime was ticking up. People were breaking into cars and pulling firearms out of glove boxes. Nobody seemed able to do anything about it.A police major told me something I've never forgotten: more than 70 percent of crime involves a vehicle, and most of those crimes go unsolved because police rarely have the license plate.So I did what engineers do. I built a system to find the plate. A few months later, it worked, and that was the beginning of Flock.

Its customers now include police departments, local governments, businesses, schools, homeowner associations, property operators, and other private organizations.

Flock says that it has deployed some 120,000 cameras across 49 states. In an X post, Langley said that during a single day on July 31, those cameras alerted authorities to more than 4,000 sex offenders, some 2,100 stolen cars, over 1,600 wanted people, about 160 missing people, and, most importantly, he said, one Amber Alert.

Flock operates as a subscription business, charging annual service fees for each camera. After its last fundraising round last year, Flock was valued at $7.5 billion.

The company also sells conventional video cameras, audio-detection technology, investigative software, and drones.

Why do people hate Flock cameras?

Many Americans dislike Flock cameras because the devices can collect information about ordinary drivers who are not suspected of crimes.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for civil liberties in the digital world, says Flock cameras constitute mass surveillance because they photograph every passing vehicle rather than only those connected to suspected crimes — like a speed camera might.

Critics say a broad network of cameras can reveal intimate patterns showing when a vehicle visited particular homes, businesses, medical facilities, religious institutions, or political events.

"It has been misused by police to spy on their ex-partners and could be used to target people engaged in First Amendment activities or seeking medical care," the EFF wrote in a blog post.

The EFF obtained records showing that Texas deputies queried Flock's network during an investigation involving a woman suspected of self-managing an abortion. The EFF and the ACLU have also reported that local police departments shared or searched Flock data for immigration-enforcement purposes.

Flock says that data sharing can expand the system's reach by allowing agencies to search records collected outside their jurisdictions.

The EFF says Flock contracts have spread "quietly" across cities, while the ACLU's organizing materials urge residents to examine contracts, city proceedings, data-sharing practices, and rules governing access before their municipalities purchase or renew the systems.

Like anything using AI, Flock also doesn't always get it right. A misread plate can lead police to stop or detain the wrong person.

In Roseville, California, for example, 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.

Business Insider documented drivers being stopped at gunpoint and jailed following incorrect Flock matches. In Toledo, Brandon Upchurch was bitten by a police dog, taken to the hospital, and then jailed after a Flock camera confused a "7" on his plate for a "2."

Are there Flock cameras near me?

Flock does not publish a complete public map showing every camera in its network.

The company says its cameras are used by law enforcement agencies, businesses, homeowner associations, and other private organizations in the United States.

One way to find nearby cameras is to use DeFlock, an open-source, community-run project that maps automated license plate readers.

Local government records can also clarify the location of cameras purchased or operated by public agencies. The ACLU says that residents can search city council agendas, police department policies, contracts, purchasing records, and meeting minutes for terms such as "Flock Safety" or "automated license plate reader."

A growing number of towns and cities have canceled their Flock contracts or banned Flock cameras altogether. Local governments often cite Flock's willingness to share data with the federal government and other privacy concerns in their decisions.

What does a Flock camera look like?

A typical Flock license plate reader looks like a small rectangular box mounted near the top of a narrow roadside pole.

Several installations are also equipped with a small solar panel mounted on the pole, allowing the camera to operate without a conventional connection to the electrical grid.

The camera is usually angled toward one or more traffic lanes to photograph the front or rear of passing vehicles.

Flock says its cameras can be found along road shoulders, in medians, near neighborhood entrances, and around parking lots.

Are Flock cameras unconstitutional?

The Fourth Amendment prohibits unreasonable government searches and seizures, but courts have not ruled on Flock cameras. The law generally treats license plates and vehicles driven on public roads as information in the public domain.

"ALPR cameras sit at fixed and obvious locations and register still images of vehicles at that location and time. They do not follow a vehicle from origin to destination, cover only a small fraction of a city's roads, and provide samples, not a seamless diary of one's movements," Flock said in a white paper published in November 2025.

It added that "the constitutional concern arises when technology stitches together a comprehensive portrait of someone's movements over time that can reveal intimate and sensitive details. Fixed, point-in-time roadway observations occupy the other side of that line."

Privacy and civil-liberties groups disagree. The ACLU and EFF say that networked cameras can collectively create a detailed and searchable record of where people travel, even if each camera captures only one location at a time.