Oct 26, 2020; Inglewood, California, USA; Detailed view of a personalized California license plate at SoFi Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports
San Diego, California – One of the country’s biggest operators of automated license-plate readers is pulling back from its federal partnerships after fresh concerns surfaced about how the technology is being used.
Flock Safety, a Georgia-based company whose cameras are mounted in more than 4,000 communities, confirmed Monday that it has paused pilot programs with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security Investigations. The decision comes after an Illinois audit found federal agents had accessed state data in apparent violation of a 2023 law that bars the sharing of plate data for investigations tied to abortion or immigration.
Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias said the audit made clear why lawmakers moved to strengthen privacy protections in the first place. “This sharing of license plate data of motorists who drive on Illinois roads is a clear violation of the state law,” he said. “This law… aimed to strengthen how data is shared and prevent this exact thing from happening.”
Flock’s cameras capture billions of images a month, but the company insists it doesn’t own that data — local police departments and municipalities do. Flock CEO Garrett Langley said the federal pilot programs were pitched as a way to fight fentanyl trafficking and human trafficking, not to conduct immigration enforcement. Still, he admitted the company failed to set clear boundaries. “We clearly communicated poorly. We also didn’t create distinct permissions and protocols in the Flock system to ensure local compliance for federal agency users,” he said.
The fallout has rippled beyond Illinois. Earlier this summer, privacy advocates criticized a police department outside Chicago for sharing Flock data with a Texas sheriff searching for a missing woman who had undergone a self-managed abortion. That case heightened concerns about how the technology could be repurposed in states with strict abortion bans.
In California, San Diego and several nearby cities rely heavily on Flock cameras, which law enforcement says are invaluable for solving crimes. But the company’s rapid growth has also drawn scrutiny from civil liberties groups. Seth Hall of the Trust SD Coalition, which campaigns for more oversight of surveillance technology, was skeptical of Flock’s pause. “The best bet on how this will go… is that they will claim to have fixed it, somehow they’ll claim to have changed their system and then they will resume the contracts,” Hall said. “Flock is a for-profit, mass surveillance company, and the federal government is very clearly in the market for mass surveillance technology.”
Flock says it is making changes. Federal users will now be clearly labeled in the system, and they will be blocked from statewide or nationwide searches. Instead, federal requests will have to go directly through individual local agencies.
Whether those measures will be enough to reassure critics — and keep cities from ending their contracts altogether — remains to be seen.
