How often is your car being tracked? One man wanted answers.
The short version: A Georgia dad's records requests revealed Dunwoody's Flock cameras fed 17 million searches by agencies across the country, exposing how little oversight exists.
Our Take
Credit to WSB-TV and to Jason Hunyar, the Georgia father who did what more of us should be doing: filing open records requests instead of just taking Flock Safety's word for it. What he found in Dunwoody's logs — 17 million searches, dozens of agencies, some from well outside Georgia — is exactly the pattern we keep seeing nationwide. A single town's cameras become a node in a sprawling, largely invisible network that anyone with a login and a flimsy justification can query.
The crime-solving anecdotes are real, and nobody's pretending ALPRs can't help close cases. But 'it helped catch someone once' is not an oversight policy. It's not an audit trail, a retention limit, or a law preventing an out-of-state agency from running plates to track someone exercising a constitutional right. One dad's public records request shouldn't be the only thing standing between 'crime-fighting tool' and 'nationwide tracking database nobody consented to.' Lawmakers forming a task force is a start, but tasks forces have a way of studying problems into irrelevance.
If you want to know whether your own town is feeding this network, check our map and see how many cameras are near you — then use our action resources to push your local council for the same kind of transparency Hunyar had to fight for.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of WSB-TV, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.