When Flock’s Own Pitch Doesn’t Match the Product

According to the video above, a city council in Oshkosh was told by Flock Safety that its automated license plate readers don’t build a “heat map” tracking where a car has been. Then the local police chief looked into it himself—and found that the system does exactly that.

Why this matters even if you’ve never heard of Oshkosh

This isn’t really a story about one council meeting. It’s a story about the gap between how ALPR vendors describe their systems to the public officials who vote on them, and what those systems actually do once they’re installed. Local governments are being asked to approve contracts, budgets, and data-sharing policies based on representations made in a boardroom—often by the same company selling the technology.

License plate readers work by photographing every passing vehicle, tagging each capture with a timestamp and GPS location, and storing that data for a set retention period. String enough of those data points together for a single plate and you get a timeline of where that car—and by extension, the person driving it—has been. Whether a company calls that a “heat map,” a “pattern of life,” or something more neutral doesn’t change what the underlying data can do.

Trust, but verify—literally

What stands out here is that it took a skeptical local official actually testing the claim to surface the discrepancy. Most residents don’t have the access, time, or technical background to do that kind of verification themselves. If elected bodies are relying on vendor assurances alone, without independent audits or plain-language technical documentation, communities are essentially taking surveillance capabilities on faith.

What residents can do

If your city is considering or already using ALPR cameras, ask specifically: what data is retained, for how long, who can query it, and can queries be run across multiple plates or time windows to reconstruct movement patterns? Don’t accept a vendor’s summary as the final word—push for contract language and independent technical review. You can look up whether cameras have already been deployed near you using our interactive map, get background on how these systems work at Learn, and find concrete steps for engaging your local council at Take Action.

Transparency claims from surveillance vendors deserve the same scrutiny as the surveillance itself.