Flock Safety surveillance technology faces criticism amid university expansion

Our Take

WTVO/WQRF's MyStateline newsroom is doing the work here, flagging that nearly half of Illinois' public universities have quietly signed on with Flock Safety. Campuses get sold this gear as a safety upgrade, but what actually shows up is a network of cameras logging every car that drives through, building a searchable record of who goes where and when — students, faculty, visitors, everyone.

This is the pattern we track constantly: a vendor pitches ALPRs as a narrow tool for stolen cars or Amber Alerts, and it ends up as blanket location tracking with almost no independent oversight, no public vote, and vague data-sharing rules. Universities are supposed to be places where people can move around without a corporate surveillance vendor building a movement profile on them. Once that infrastructure is normalized on a handful of campuses, it becomes the default everywhere else.

Credit to the MyStateline team for surfacing this before it spreads further. If you want to see whether Flock or similar systems are already watching your streets or your local campus, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not just watch this happen, our take-action page has concrete steps for pushing back at the local level.