Flock Exposed - Don't Just Switch Vendors
When a town gets fed up with Flock, the instinct is often to fire Flock and hire a different ALPR company instead. The American Civil Liberties Union warns this doesn't fix anything - it just swaps one fox for another in the same hen house. The problem was never one brand's logo. It's the business of building a permanent, searchable record of where everyone drives, every day, forever.
Source: ACLU, "Beware of Other License Plate Surveillance Companies Besides Flock"
Motorola's Vigilant Solutions Runs Its Own Nationwide Network
Motorola's Vigilant Solutions, one of Flock's biggest competitors, operates the National Vehicle Location Service, or NVLS - a nationwide pooled database that functions the same way Flock's national lookup does. Trading Flock for Motorola just means a different company holds the same kind of permanent movement record.
Source: ACLU, "Beware of Other License Plate Surveillance Companies Besides Flock"
Rekor Offers the Same Nationwide Sharing Model
Rekor also runs a nationwide data sharing program comparable to Flock and Motorola's, though smaller in scale for now. The one meaningful difference is that Rekor allows local software installation and data processing by its clients, unlike Flock and Motorola.
Source: ACLU, "Beware of Other License Plate Surveillance Companies Besides Flock"
Flock's Own Investors Have a Surveillance Track Record
Unlike its biggest competitors, which are public companies, Flock is privately funded - and its investors include venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which also backs other surveillance companies like Anduril and Skydio, and which explicitly aims to invest in building domestic law enforcement surveillance capabilities. That funding history is itself a legitimate reason to be wary of the company, separate from any single product feature.
Source: ACLU, "Beware of Other License Plate Surveillance Companies Besides Flock"
The Real Question Isn't Which Vendor - It's Whether to Build the System at All
Communities can't assume residents will be better off, from a privacy and civil liberties standpoint, just by dropping Flock and replacing it with another ALPR provider - some towns have already tried exactly that. The ACLU's advice is to ask hard questions about whether a town wants to build this kind of surveillance system in the first place, and if it does, to make sure it doesn't function as a mass surveillance system regardless of which company's name is on the camera.
Source: ACLU, "Beware of Other License Plate Surveillance Companies Besides Flock"
Questions to Ask Your Town
If your town is considering "switching" ALPR vendors instead of dropping the technology entirely: does the new vendor also operate or participate in a nationwide data-sharing network?
How long is data retained, and who can access it outside your town?
Does the new contract actually fix the problems that led residents to object to Flock, or does it just change the company name?
Who funds this company, and what else does that investor fund?
This page will be updated as more factual sources become available.