90,000 Flock cameras have quietly gone up in the US: What they track and how to check your city
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ZDNet
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By the time I learned that towns all around me in upstate New York had installed Flock "Falcon" cameras, they were already tracking every passing vehicle, including mine. In most of those communities, there had been little warning and no public discussion.
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I first noticed them because of what happened in Saranac Lake, a village near me. Residents protested last spring, officials were forced to reconsider, and the village ultimately voted to cancel its contract with Flock Safety. Soon after, the cameras came down.
The same can't be said for many other US towns, where Flock's AI-enabled cameras actively surveil residents without clear consent.
My small town, with a population of about 11,000, has several Flock cameras. I've spotted them on utility poles beside roads and intersections I regularly drive through, but they're admittedly easy to overlook or mistake for ordinary traffic cameras. Most look like small black boxes powered by batteries or solar panels, and they're connected through cellular service rather than Wi-Fi.
Flock says more than 12,000 customers use its products , while public estimates suggest roughly 90,000 Flock-branded cameras may operate in the US. Police aren't the only users. Businesses, schools, and homeowners associations can install them, too.
Flock Safety software can also be integrated with cameras from partner manufacturers , such as Motorola. While those cameras don't natively run Flock OS, the software integrates through platforms like Motorola's CommandCentral Aware and shared APIs.
This allows law enforcement to view data from both networks. In my town, both Flock Falcon cameras and Motorola cameras are installed.
Motorola cameras integrated with Flock and installed in Malone.
Falcon cameras don't detect speed. Instead, the cameras take roughly six to 12 still images each time a vehicle passes. Flock then uses automated license plate recognition software and machine learning to analyze those images. The cameras can capture a vehicle's plate, make, model, color, body type, direction of travel, damage, aftermarket wheels, bumper stickers, and other details.
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"The software analyzes images of vehicles and extracts characteristics such as license plates . . . and other distinguishing features," Trevor Horwitz, co-founder and chief information security officer of the cybersecurity firm TrustNet , told ZDNET in an interview. "Those become searchable, allowing investigators to look for a vehicle even if they don't have a complete license plate number."
Those records aren't stored inside the roadside cameras. According to Flock's site , all images and related data are sent over a cellular network to its cloud system, where authorized users can search them through the Flock Safety dashboard. Police can also receive alerts when a camera detects a plate tied to a stolen vehicle, a missing person, an arrest warrant, or another database entry.
So one Flock camera might help police identify a vehicle connected to a crime, but when many Flock cameras across different towns and states feed records into the same searchable network, they can be used to trace the movements of just about anyone.
"A single plate hit reveals nothing more than what an ordinary person could see unaided, that a car is at a particular place at a particular time," Catherine Crump, a clinical professor of technology law and director of the Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley , told ZDNET in an interview. "A network is different, particularly when it involves lots of cameras, because over time it will become a comprehensive record of someone's movements."
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In other words, I might pass one camera near a store, another near my daughter's school, and another on the road home. Each image reveals only one moment, but add them up, and they can show where I went, when I was there, and which routes I frequently take.
"Together a person's movements can tell you a lot about them -- where they work, live, worship, what they do in their spare time, who they associate with," Crump said. "And unlike traditional surveillance that has to be done in real time, it can be used to reconstruct someone's past movements."
Footage taken from a Flock Condor using Guardian Mode.
Keep in mind that Flock sells many products with different technologies and capabilities. Although Flock says its Falcon cameras don't track people, the company does offer a pan-tilt-zoom camera called Condor , which detects and follows humans. Flock maintains that none of its cameras use facial recognition. Still, InvestigateTV shared a video showing a Condor panning to keep its reporter in frame.
Like the Falcon, Flock's Condor camera can send video and alerts back to an operator, which may be a police department or another authorized customer. Flock described its person-tracking capability as an object-detection feature called Guardian Mode , which the company admitted could be set up to detect people, follow their movements, zoom in, and capture high-resolution video of them.
Flock Falcon versus Flock Condor cameras.
A large camera network isn't the only concern. There are other questions to consider: how AI is used to interpret records, how securely that information is stored in the cloud, and who can access or share it.
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First, there's the AI part. It undoubtedly makes Flock Falcon records much easier to search. Instead of manually reviewing images one by one, operators can search across multiple cameras for a plate, partial plate, vehicle description, or broader pattern. But that also creates risks. AI could be used to search for activity that appears suspicious even when it isn't connected to a reported crime.
"When ALPR (Automated License Plate Reader) data had to be searched by an individual officer for a particular investigation, that limited its use and generally funneled it towards legitimate law enforcement investigations," Crump said.
"But when AI can be used to, for example, proactively look for suspicious activities untied to a known criminal act, that raises a whole host of risks, particularly of profiling and drawing inaccurate conclusions."
For example, police could ask the AI system to flag vehicles that appear near a protest, even when no crime has been reported.
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The next concern is where all of Flock's records are stored. Flock says images and vehicle details are hosted by Amazon Web Services, encrypted, and generally deleted after 30 days. Cloud storage isn't automatically insecure, but placing large amounts of location data in one searchable system makes strong security and oversight especially important.
The system could become a target for hackers and other bad actors, including insiders with authorized access.
"Organizations need strong controls around who can access that data, how long it's retained, how it's monitored, and how it's protected from unauthorized access," Horwitz said. But even strong cloud security can't prevent every form of misuse.
"The quieter danger is access," Noam Birnbaum, founder and CEO of the cybersecurity firm Ignition , told ZDNET in an interview. "The scariest part of the risk is often those who are already in the system."
Access to Flock data can extend beyond the agency that installed the cameras. The cameras near me may belong to one police department, but other authorized users could still search or download the records if an administrator grants them access. Once the data is shared, my town's local rules, if there are any, may no longer dictate how it's used or how long it's kept.
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"It undermines rules some cities have made to protect this sensitive information," Crump said. "A local ordinance saying data can only be used for a particular purpose or kept for a particular length of time if people elsewhere download it and use it for whatever."
Press image of a Flock Falcon camera and its license plate-reading capabilities.
The privacy concerns around Flock may seem distant until the AI system gets something wrong and a person is falsely accused.
Joel Feder, director of content and product at The Drive , experienced that recently while driving a Range Rover with a manufacturer plate. Unbeknownst to him, Flock's Falcon cameras began tracking his SUV and recording its plate, which looked similar to one reported missing in California. But it wasn't the same. Police still surrounded Feder and his wife in a Minnesota parking lot.
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"Initially the officers were prepared and had their hands on their holsters," Feder told ZDNET in an interview. "My immediate thought, and I kid you not, was 'I wasn't even speeding.'... We were both mostly just confused as to why we were surrounded by the police."
The problem was that police had entered part of a plate tied to a stolen vehicle into their database, and Falcon cameras had captured a partial reading of Feder's Range Rover plate. The AI then incorrectly connected the two bits of data, leading police directly to Feder.
"If a Flock, or any camera whether it be an Axon or Leonardo setup, reads a plate and sees anything on the plate beyond an exact match, it should be alerting police with that notification that there's other characters on the plate," Feder told ZDNET when asked how such a situation could've been avoided in the first place. He said that'd also indicate to the human officer that they need to "dig deeper and see what the situation is before moving forward."
He added: "We need regulations and guardrails beyond what's happening today. Flock itself and the other companies that sell/operate automatic license plate readers need to take responsibility for their LLMs and the internal guardrails that are in place enabling situations like this."
Horwitz agreed and said the system should also "support human decision-making rather than replace it."
Feder's ordeal shows how a false alert from a Flock camera can have an immediate, real-world impact.
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But he believes a larger problem is that rules haven't kept pace with the technology. "It's clear to me that technology has advanced much faster than the regulations that place guardrails around it," Feder said. "New laws, rules, and regulations absolutely need to be enacted and enforced about how technology like this is used, implemented, who has access, what can be done with it, and more."
Joel Feder surrendering to police after being tracked by Flock.
Former Rhode Island police officer Noel Pichardo recently drew widespread attention after claiming his seven-year law enforcement career abruptly ended because he raised concerns about Flock cameras and testified before state lawmakers. In short videos he shared about his departure , Pichardo said he was suspended, passed over for a detective promotion, and pressured to resign.
The Rhode Island Police Chiefs' Association disputed his account in a written rebuttal . It said parts of his testimony were inaccurate and argued that he was disciplined for insubordination and allegedly false statements, not for criticizing the cameras.
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When asked what he hoped to accomplish by speaking out against the Flock cameras installed in his town of Pawtucket, Pichardo said, "To have these cameras taken down or have an intelligent conversation about them at the very least, which wasn't afforded to us before. We were just assumed to submit and go along with whatever our local governments decided."
He added: "I just want you, the public, to know these cameras exist, and that they were put up without your consent."
Pichardo's dispute brings me back to Saranac Lake. In both cases, the debate wasn't about whether Flock cameras could help solve or prevent crimes. It was about who had the power to approve them and whether the public had any say.
I've been using DeFlock.org , a volunteer-run map, to look for Flock cameras near me. You can search by town or address, view reported locations, and often see a photo, camera model, and the direction it's facing. Its route tool can also estimate how many license plate readers you may pass on a trip. Because volunteers maintain the map, some entries may be missing or outdated.
For example, Saranac Lake still appears to have Flock cameras on the map even though the village removed them.
DeFlock.org map showing Flock cameras near Malone, NY.
After finding a camera, residents can ask their local police department, town or village office, nearby business, or homeowners association about who owns and operates it. Once the operator is identified, residents can request the contract, retention rules, data-sharing agreements, audit records, false-alert procedures, and a list of outside agencies allowed to search the system.
Residents can then raise concerns at a public meeting, contact elected officials, file a public records request, or demand a hearing before more cameras are installed.
"There should be at minimum robust public discussion and debate to determine Flock policies as it relates to the sharing of the information they gather and who has access to that data," civil rights attorney Adanté Pointer told ZDNET in an interview.
Saranac Lake shows what can happen when residents are given a chance to weigh in and express their concerns. Three Flock Falcon cameras had already been installed before the public pushed back, and the village canceled its contract.
People deserve to learn about plans for Flock cameras early enough to ask questions, demand answers, and have a say before they go up. I didn't know Flock Safety was operating near me until its cameras were already installed and tracking my movements.
I contacted Flock Safety before writing this story. A spokesperson asked about my deadline and indicated the company would respond, but I hadn't received a statement or answers to my questions by the time of publication.
