City of Pflugerville cancels contract with Flock Safety cameras

Our Take

Credit to KVUE for digging into what should be a bigger story than it is: a city council actually hit the brakes on Flock Safety after finding a hole in the system that let other law enforcement agencies reach into Pflugerville's plate-reader data. This is the exact scenario privacy advocates have been warning about for years — once a city flips on the cameras, the data doesn't stay local. It flows into a national network, and "who can see it" becomes a question nobody in the original contract negotiation fully answered.

What makes Pflugerville notable isn't that the problem existed — audits and leaked search logs have shown similar overreach in dozens of cities — it's that local leaders actually acted on it instead of shrugging it off as a vendor glitch to patch quietly. Most councils find out about this kind of cross-agency access after a scandal breaks, not before. Canceling the contract is a rare moment of a city saying the risk outweighed the convenience.

It's a reminder that these systems are sold as local tools but built as shared infrastructure, and the guardrails are only as good as the fine print nobody reads until it's too late. If you want to see whether your own city has Flock cameras feeding into that same network, check our map, and if you'd rather not wait for your council to stumble onto the problem themselves, our take-action page has steps for pushing back now.