As motorists travel through U.S. cities, a growing network of cameras quietly photographs their vehicles and adds the images to searchable databases.
Police call Flock Safety cameras and other automated license plate readers, or ALPRs, valuable tools for solving crimes, recovering stolen vehicles and finding missing or endangered people.
Civil rights groups call them a threat to privacy, warning that cameras at intersections, neighborhood entrances and parking lots can track people who are not suspected of crimes and reveal routine trips to workplaces, medical clinics, religious centers or political events.
In a recent post on X, Flock CEO Garrett Langley said that on a single day, its automated license plate readers, or ALPRs, sent alerts on 4,144 sex offenders, 2,151 stolen cars, 1,687 wanted people, 158 missing people and kids, and an AMBER alert. Three children were rescued in Dothan, Alabama; Charlotte, North Carolina; and North Kingstown, Rhode Island.
"This is every day," Langley said.
The Atlanta-based company said recently it has deployed 120,000 cameras across 49 states. Flock's customers include not only more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies in 6,000 cities, but also local governments, businesses, schools, homeowner associations, property operators, and other private customers.
Flock isn't the only company providing this service, but the company is the dominant provider of fixed ALPRs across the country.
Flock doesn't disclose the precise locations where its cameras have been deployed, and police agencies generally are not subject to a nationwide requirement to publicly announce that they use Flock cameras, or how they use them. State laws and local rules may require policies, reports, public purchasing approvals or other disclosures.
DeFlock, an open-source project, maintains a crowdsourced map of reported automated license plate readers. Its listings can help residents identify possible cameras in their communities but are not an official or complete government inventory.
To know if their license plate has been read, motorists can check the Have I Been Flocked website, an independent website that collects Flock Safety audit logs obtained through public records requests and makes them searchable.
People can enter a license plate number to see whether it appears in the police search logs currently in the site's database. They can also look up participating police agencies and review information such as the number and stated reasons for searches, which agencies accessed the system, and possible unusual or noncriminal uses.
To determine the placement of cameras that public agencies buy or run, residents can look through local government documents.
According to the ACLU, individuals can review police department policies, city council agendas, meeting minutes, contracts, and purchasing records using search phrases like "automated license plate reader" or "Flock Safety."
In a blog post describing the impetus for Flock, Langley said he developed the license plate-reading system about nine years ago after learning that vehicles are involved in most crimes and investigators often lack a plate number.
"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," he wrote.
Here's how it worked in this actual case:
After a Levi's store was robbed in suburban Colorado, a 911 call describing the getaway vehicle — a white van painted black and blue like a cow — was streamed to a real-time crime center. Police sent a description to nearby Flock cameras and launched a drone while the caller was still on the phone.
Within minutes, a camera spotted the van entering a strip mall less than a mile away, where the suspect appeared to be preparing for another robbery. The drone reached the scene before officers, giving them an overhead view as they approached and made an arrest without injuries or escalation. The entire response took 21 minutes.
The American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontier Foundation have called the expanding network a form of mass surveillance and urged communities to require warrants, restrict data sharing, shorten retention periods and conduct regular audits.
"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.
A Washington Post investigation found that at least 50 law enforcement officers have been charged with or accused of misusing license plate reader systems, including 46 cases involving Flock. In 26 cases, officers allegedly used the technology to track wives, girlfriends, former partners, romantic rivals or women they wanted to meet, sometimes searching their vehicles hundreds of times or adding them to alert lists.
The Post found that inconsistent agency oversight and optional safeguards allowed some officers to secretly follow women's movements, while punishment ranged from firing and criminal prosecution to no charges at all.
The ACLU alleges police used Flock data to track specific people for purposes beyond routine criminal investigations, including local officers conducting nationwide searches on behalf of immigration authorities and a Texas officer who searched for a woman believed to have had an illegal self-managed abortion. It also warned that Flock's planned links to commercial data brokers could let officers move directly from a license plate to a person's identity and other personal information.
Flock denies mass surveillance, stating its cameras log vehicles at specific public spots instead of tracking individuals continuously. To prevent misuse, agencies can implement role-based access, automatic data deletion, audit logs, and transparency portals, according to Flock.
However, plaintiffs in lawsuits across states like Virginia, California, Oregon, and Kansas disagree, challenging widespread, warrantless license plate tracking as an unconstitutional search.
In contrast, certain judicial rulings have affirmed the use of ALPRs, determining that monitoring public roadways does not violate the Fourth Amendment because courts apply the "plain view" doctrine, concluding that drivers lack a reasonable expectation of privacy for license plates displayed openly in public.
"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.
"The constitutional concern arises when technology stitches together a comprehensive portrait of someone's movements over time that can reveal intimate and sensitive details," Flock said. "Fixed, point-in-time roadway observations occupy the other side of that line."
Unless local regulations or specific contracts allow clients to set custom retention timelines, vehicle data is set to be automatically deleted after 30 days, according to Flock.
More than 50 police agencies across the country have jettisoned their Flock contracts amid the growing privacy concerns, including those in Los Angeles; Kaukauna, Wisconsin; and Framingham, Massachusetts, according to Townhall Media, a conservative news website.
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