One Private Company Scans One Billion License Plates Every Month

Our Take

Shadow Profit's breakdown is a solid gut-check on just how far Flock Safety's network has spread: four thousand-plus cities, a billion plate scans a month, and a searchable log of where your car has been that isn't limited to the department that installed the camera. That last part is the crux of the problem. A patrol car in one town can query plate hits from a camera three states away, and depending on data-sharing agreements, so can ICE or DHS. This was never really about local traffic enforcement, it's a national tracking layer that grew one contract at a time with almost no public debate.

The examples the video points to, cops running plates to find women who'd had abortions, activists getting tracked, innocent drivers flagged on bad matches, aren't edge cases. They're the predictable result of building a system that ingests location data on effectively everyone and lets thousands of agencies decide for themselves how loosely to use it. Massachusetts and Oregon pushing back with legislation shows it's possible to slow this down, but most of the country still has zero guardrails, and plenty of departments sign contracts that dodge public records requests entirely. That opacity is the point: it's hard to organize against a system you can't see or verify.

If you want to know whether this is already running in your neighborhood, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back locally, our take-action page has concrete steps for challenging these contracts before they get renewed.