What Is Flock & Why You Should Care
Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs)
Automated License Plate Readers, or ALPRs/LPRs, are AI-powered cameras that capture and analyze images of ALL passing vehicles. They store details like your car’s location, date, time, your car’s make, model, color, and identifying features such as dents, roof racks, and stickers. They turn these into searchable data points. These cameras collect data on millions of vehicles regardless of whether the driver is a suspect of a crime. According to the Flock ‘Vallejo Transparency Portal’ [link here], there are 122 cameras in Vallejo, and the data is stored for 30 days. These systems are marketed as indispensable tools to fight crime, but they ignore the tools police already have to track criminals, such as cell phone location data, creating a loophole that doesn’t require a warrant. For more details, see deflock.org, this ACLU article, and this EFF article.
Flock Group, Inc.
Flock Safety is one of the biggest ALPR vendors in the United States. Police departments, businesses, and HOAS install their cameras to capture vehicle data. Captured data is uploaded to Flock’s cloud system, where participating agencies can search and share information across participating jurisdictions. Flock is not the only ALPR vendor – just the most common! Other vendors participate in similar practices, and Vallejo also uses a system called BOSS4.
Why You Should Care
Just because you’re not doing anything wrong doesn’t mean you’re not being watched – Flock cameras capture every vehicle, and track every vehicle. License plate readers, such as Flock, don’t know or care about your intentions, only your location and movement. Driving through a “high-crime” neighborhood to see a friend or family member, an AI misreading your plate, or a trip to or near a protest can have you labeled as “suspicious”.
There’s no independent research to prove that ALPRs such as Flock can reduce crime. headlines and supporting studies claiming otherwise are often produced by the companies selling ALPRs and the police agencies buying them. For example, Flock Safety claims that 0% of Reported Crime in the U.S. Is Solved Using Flock Technology [link]. The study that Flock cites was conducted by two Flock employees and “given legitimacy with the ‘oversight’ of two academic researchers whose names are also on the paper” according to a report by 404 media [link]. As stated by deflock.org, ‘Flock Safety is suing the veneer of an academic study as part of its sales pitch.’
Why It’s A Problem
ALPRs are a serious risk to your privacy and civil liberties. These systems continuously record your movements with a warrant, probable cause, or reasonable suspicion. Your driving history is rarely confined to the town or city where the cameras are installed – Vallejo shares it’s information with the entire state of California. Once the data is out of YOUR community, you have no control over how it’s used, or what rules apply, leading to instances of misuse. Once it’s out of Vallejo, it’s no longer in Vallejo’s hands. It can even be shared with thousands of other agencies nationwide in secret – while some police departments have implemented policies regarding the use of ALPRs, these policies are often weak and poorly enforced. Many agencies have no policies at all, and there is no requirement or accountability in how these systems are used. While Flock offers a transparency portal for their law enforcement customers, they allow their customers to cherry-pick what information is included or excluded from the portal. They also lack any meaningful data, often underreporting the number of agencies with access [link].
Data from ALPRS have been led to wrongful arrests [link], profiling, and stalking ex-partners by police officers [link]. There is no substantial evidence that ALPRs effectively prevent crime, despite Flock’s unethical attempts to prove otherwise [link].
While Vallejo has the Surveillance Oversight Board (SAB), this board doesn’t oversee the unincorporated areas, and it can be seen already in records pertaining to Flock that the City Council can and will overrule the SAB. Ultimately, there is little to no oversight for these systems.
Flock & Our Data
In November 2025, a security researcher discovered Flock logins for sale on Russian hacking forums [link], since Flock negligently doesn’t require multifactor authentication, an alleged violation of federal law and industry security practices. Additionally, Flock has been caught lying several times on record. Their CEO was interviewed by Denver 9News, and he claimed that Flock had no federal contracts [link]. However, a few weeks later, 9News discovered that Border Patrol did have access to Flock’s systems [link]. Flock described the data sharing agreement as “one-to-one”, meaning an agency would have to accept the data sharing request from Border Patrol (Border Patrol would need to request access from someone else’s system). Deflock.org filed a public records request regarding this claim with the Boulder Police Department in Colorado [link], and found that “U.S. Border Patrol” was searching over 6,000 agencies, consistent with the number of agencies on the national network at that time. Either every agency on the national network happily accepted Border Patrol’s request (including Vallejo), or Flock was lying on the record – and Border Patrol was secretly accessing the data.
DeFlock Vallejo 