FOIA your own plate. Flock data gets expensive.

Our Take

The folks at Verified Privacy VPN (vp.net) are onto something we like here at DeFlock: you don't need a lawsuit to make ALPR surveillance costly, you just need paperwork. If someone has to manually pull every camera hit on your plate to answer a public records request, that's real labor hours spent on a system agencies love to call "automated" and hands-off. Multiply that by ten, fifty, a hundred requesters in the same county, and suddenly the hidden cost of running a Flock network isn't hidden anymore.

This matters because the Flock business model depends on cameras being invisible and frictionless — cheap to deploy, cheap to query, easy to ignore. A flood of individual FOIA requests flips that script. It doesn't delete a single data point, but it does force transparency agencies would rather skip, and it puts a price tag on blanket tracking that taxpayers and county boards might start asking about.

It's not a fix for mass surveillance, but it's a legitimate pressure tactic anyone can use today. Find out if your sheriff's department is even running these cameras in the first place on our map, then check take-action for records-request templates and other ways to push back.