Flock Safety Dragnet Lawsuit: 360 Million Alleged Fourth Amendment Violations in San Jose in 2024

Our Take

Verified Privacy VPN's rundown of the San Jose class action puts a number on something we've been saying for years: dragnet license plate surveillance isn't a handful of scans here and there, it's hundreds of millions of data points on ordinary drivers who were never suspected of anything. When a city's camera network can rack up 360 million alleged Fourth Amendment violations in a single year, that's not targeted policing, that's a permanent log of where everyone goes, stored and searchable indefinitely.

This lawsuit matters because it tests the legal theory that courts have been slow to catch up on: does the sheer scale and duration of automated tracking turn a "public road" observation into an unreasonable search? San Jose is just one city. Flock's cameras are spreading into thousands of jurisdictions with almost no public debate about retention limits, audits, or who gets access to the data. Credit to Verified Privacy VPN for laying out the numbers plainly, because cases like this are how the public finally gets a look at what these networks actually collect.

If you want to see how close this kind of dragnet is to your own neighborhood, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back locally, our take-action page has steps for getting your city council to answer for its Flock contract before it becomes the next lawsuit.