Flock Turned On Nationwide Sharing. The Police Didn't Even Know
The short version: Mountain View locked down its Flock cameras with strict rules, but a nationwide sharing default got flipped on anyway, exposing local data to hundreds of unapproved agencies.
Our Take
Credit to Ellen at The Owner's Report for digging into a story that should worry anyone who's been told 'don't worry, your local ALPR data stays local.' Mountain View, California did everything a cautious city is supposed to do: no federal access, no sharing without a signed agreement. And still, according to the reporting, a nationwide search toggle got switched on without the department's knowledge, letting federal agencies and roughly 250 unapproved California agencies run an estimated 600,000 searches against the city's own cameras.
This is the part of the surveillance debate that rarely gets attention: it's not just about whether a city council approves ALPRs, it's about whether the vendor's default settings, dashboards, and 'network' features quietly override whatever local policy was promised. When the city asked for logs to figure out who accessed what, the vendor reportedly said it didn't keep them. That's not a technical glitch, that's an accountability black hole. And when the city says the company flipped the switch, and the company says agencies control their own settings, somebody is not telling the truth — and the people whose plates got scanned have no way to know which.
This is exactly why we built our camera map — because you can't audit what you don't know exists, and apparently sometimes even the agency that installed the cameras can't audit it either. If your town has Flock cameras, don't take 'local control' at face value. Check our take-action page and start asking your council for the actual sharing settings, not just the sales pitch.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Ellen | The Owner's Report, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.