Hackers breach Flock camera data, share findings with media

Our Take

Credit to 13WHAM ABC News for covering this one, because it cuts right through Flock Safety's marketing. The company sells these cameras as a secure, professional-grade surveillance network for police. Yet here we have a group that found a vandalized unit, cracked it open, and pulled data straight off the hardware — then handed it to journalists. That's not a sophisticated nation-state hack. That's a camera sitting on a pole with your plate, your location, and your travel patterns inside it, apparently protected by less rigor than your home Wi-Fi router.

This matters because the entire pitch for ALPR networks rests on trust: trust that the data is tightly controlled, access-logged, and only used for legitimate investigations. Every breach, leak, or hacked unit chips away at that premise and reminds us that mass license plate surveillance isn't just a privacy trade-off — it's also a growing attack surface. When a vandalized, presumably decommissioned camera can still cough up real data, it raises hard questions about how many working units are protected, who can access them, and what happens to the data trail of millions of innocent drivers if a bigger breach happens.

If you want to see how exposed your own neighborhood already is, check our camera map and then head to our take-action page to push back on this rollout before more of this ends up unaccounted for.