Flock Safety adds new safeguards after concerns over misuse

Our Take

CBS Texas dug into a story that keeps repeating across the country: officers using Flock Safety's ALPR network for reasons that have nothing to do with public safety, prompting the company to roll out new privacy 'guardrails.' Credit to CBS Texas for pressing on this, because the pattern matters more than any single company statement. Flock has spent years selling itself as a neutral tool for solving crimes, but every time misuse surfaces, the response is another policy tweak bolted onto a system that was never built with real oversight in mind.

The uncomfortable truth is that these 'safeguards' almost always arrive after the damage is done — after a plate lookup was used to track an ex-partner, a journalist, or someone who simply annoyed the wrong cop. Audit logs and use-policies sound reassuring in a press release, but they rely on departments actually enforcing them, and on the public trusting a for-profit surveillance vendor to police itself. That's a lot of trust for a network that's already blanketing thousands of communities with cameras nobody voted to install.

If you want to know how close this technology already is to your own street, check our camera map, and if your city is considering a Flock contract — or already has one with no public audit trail — see our take-action resources for how to push back before the next 'safeguard' becomes necessary.