Supreme Court decision raises questions about Flock Safety cameras

Our Take

Credit to News 5 Cleveland for connecting dots a lot of local coverage skips: the Supreme Court's 2018 Carpenter v. United States decision found that police accessing weeks of cell-site location data without a warrant violated the Fourth Amendment, because that kind of long-term tracking reveals the "privacies of life" no single data point can. Flock's camera networks are built to do exactly that kind of aggregation — just with plates instead of phones.

The legal question is whether a patchwork of ALPR cameras logging every vehicle that passes, timestamped and stored, amounts to the same kind of mosaic tracking Carpenter was worried about. Individually, one snapshot of a plate at one intersection looks trivial. Stitch together thousands of those snapshots across a city or a state, and you get a detailed record of where someone goes, when, and how often — without a warrant, often without any suspicion at all. Courts haven't fully settled whether that crosses the same line, but the fact that a mainstream news outlet is even raising it signals the legal ground under Flock's business model is shakier than the company likes to admit.

This is exactly why we track where these cameras are and push for real oversight before the case law catches up. Check our map to see what's watching your streets, and hit take action if you want to push back on unchecked deployment in your city.