"Flock Safety’s Feature Updates Cannot Make Automated License Plate Readers Safe", 27 June 2025

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.

… 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…

… 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. …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." …

Flock Safety is adamant this is "not Flock's decision," and by implication, not their fault. Instead, the responsibility lies with each individual local law enforcement agency. In the same breath, they insist that data sharing is essential, loudly claiming credit when the technology is involved in cross-jurisdictional investigations—but failing to show the same attitude when that data-sharing ecosystem is used to terrorize abortion seekers or immigrants...

ALPR surveillance systems are inherently vulnerable to both technical exploitation and human manipulation...The intimate details of people's daily routines, their associations, and their political activities may become available to anyone with malicious intent...

Given how pervasive, sprawling, and ungovernable ALPR sharing networks have become, the only feature update we can truly rely on to protect people's rights and safety is no network at all…