Asheville Cancelled Flock, Kept 137 Plate Readers

Our Take

Credit to Verified Privacy VPN for digging past the headline on this one. "City cancels Flock" sounds like a win, and local press will probably run with it that way. But as the video lays out, Asheville's council didn't ban license plate surveillance — they just swapped vendors. The 137 Axon readers mounted on patrol cars never went anywhere, the moratorium that would have paused mass plate tracking failed to pass, and the retention terms on the new setup are apparently worse than what Flock offered. That's not abolition, that's a rebrand.

This is the pattern we keep seeing nationwide: councils treat "Flock" as the villain rather than the underlying practice of vacuuming up every plate that passes a fixed point and storing it for weeks or months. Kill the brand name, keep the dragnet, and you've solved a PR problem, not a privacy one. Throw in the 86 HOA and school-district cameras that were never even part of the public conversation, and you've got a city with more plate-reading eyes than residents realize, none of it slowed down by this vote.

If you live in Asheville or anywhere else, don't assume a contract cancellation means the cameras are dark — check our map to see what's actually deployed near you, and use our take-action resources to push your council for real retention limits and audits, not just a different logo on the pole.