Flock Exposed - National Data Sharing

Your town's council may only vote to approve cameras for your own streets. But once those cameras are on Flock's network, the data they collect does not stay local by default - it can be searched by thousands of agencies across the country, in ways many local officials did not realize they had approved.

The network is enormous, and still growing

Flock says its technology is used in more than 6,000 communities across 49 states, in partnership with thousands of law enforcement agencies nationwide. Independent counts put the network at roughly 90,000 to over 100,000 cameras, spanning nearly 7,000 separate camera networks, with the DeFlock mapping project putting Flock's share of all mapped license plate readers nationwide at 83 percent of about 119,000 total devices. Texas alone reportedly has more than 10,000 of these cameras running.

Source: Stateline, "Flock Safety tightens safeguards as states, cities question surveillance network," 2026; ACLU of Massachusetts Data for Justice Project, "Flock Gives Law Enforcement All Over the Country Access to Your Location," 2025; Fox News, "119,000 Flock license plate cameras track drivers nationwide: map"; TechTimes, "Flock Safety Crosses 100,000 Cameras," 2026

How one search can reach across the country: the "National Lookup Tool"

Each Flock customer agency can choose whether to keep its camera data private, share it within its own state, or opt into Flock's "National Lookup Tool," which works like a switch: turn it on, and your agency's data becomes searchable by every other agency in the network, while your own officers gain the ability to search every plate captured by every other participating camera in the country. According to Flock's own disclosure to Senator Ron Wyden, fully 75 percent of Flock's law enforcement customers nationwide have enrolled in this tool. A separate, narrower "Nationwide Lookup" feature lets an officer search for one specific, complete plate number across any cameras whose agencies have opted to share with that network - meaning a town's cameras can end up part of a search initiated by a department the town has never heard of, in a state it has no relationship with.

Source: ACLU, "Flock Can Share Driver-Surveillance Data Even When Police Departments Opt Out, And Other Flock Developments"; State of Surveillance, "Flock Safety's Private Surveillance State: 80 Cities Are Pulling Out," 2026; Flock Safety, "Flock's National LPR Network: How Agencies Share Leads"; Flock Safety, "Statement on Network Sharing and Federal Cooperation"

Mountain View, California: 250 outside agencies searched the city's cameras without permission

An investigation by the Mountain View Voice found that a "statewide" search function was, contrary to the city's own configuration, allowing outside agencies it had never approved to search its camera data. Over the twelve months ending December 2025, more than 250 agencies that had never signed a data-sharing agreement with Mountain View conducted an estimated 600,000 searches of the city's plate records. The city's own audit found the statewide search function had opened 29 of the city's 30 cameras to California agencies the police department had never approved, and the access was only shut off after the city discovered it. Mountain View subsequently terminated its Flock contract entirely. A similar audit in San Francisco found searches conducted on behalf of federal and out-of-state agencies; Flock said those specific searches were traced to a California state agency whose use was later found inconsistent with the state's own data-sharing law, not a flaw in Flock's system.

Source: Mountain View Voice, "Amid immigration crackdown, Mountain View discovers unauthorized access to license plate data," 2026; Mountain View Voice, "City Council terminates Mountain View's license plate camera contract," 2026; KTVU, "SFPD audit shows Flock cameras accessed on behalf of federal, out-of-state agencies"

Palo Alto, California: searched by all 50 states, after city leaders said it wasn't possible

Palo Alto had publicly assured residents that out-of-state agencies could not access its license plate data - but records requests revealed the city's data had been searched by law enforcement agencies in all 50 states over an 18-month period, after Flock quietly enabled a nationwide lookup feature without notifying the city. Flock later told Palo Alto it had disabled the nationwide search for the city in October 2024 and across the entire state of California in March 2025, but the disclosure only came after reporters started asking questions. The fallout pushed the police department to begin publishing its search logs online, and by August 2026 the City Council signaled it would likely drop Flock as a vendor entirely, directing staff to evaluate alternatives as part of a 90-day audit.

Source: Palo Alto Ledger, "All 50 States Searched Palo Alto Plate Data Without City Knowing"; Palo Alto Online, "Palo Alto license plate data searched by hundreds of out-of-state agencies"; San Jose Spotlight, "Palo Alto set to begin Flock audit amid growing public backlash"

Three ways federal immigration agents have reached local camera data

Researchers at the University of Washington Center for Human Rights described three distinct pathways by which federal immigration enforcement has obtained ALPR data collected by local police: a "front door," where a local agency directly signs a 1:1 data-sharing agreement with Border Patrol or another federal agency; a "back door," where federal agencies reach local data indirectly through Flock's nationwide network; and a "side door," where a local officer runs a search on the network at a federal agent's request, using the local officer's own authorized access. 404 Media reported that more than 4,000 lookups had reportedly been conducted at the request of the federal government for immigration purposes this way, and separately found that ICE, the Secret Service, and even the Navy have all had access to Flock's nationwide camera network at various points. Flock's own public position states plainly that it does not partner with ICE and that sharing with federal agencies is disabled by default - but the side-door pathway means a federal agency does not need its own account if a local officer is willing to run the search on its behalf.

Source: University of Washington Center for Human Rights, "Leaving the Door Wide Open: Flock Surveillance Systems Expose Washington Data to Immigration Enforcement," 2025; 404 Media, "ICE Taps into Nationwide AI-Enabled Camera Network, Data Shows"; 404 Media, "ICE, Secret Service, Navy All Had Access to Flock's Nationwide Network of Cameras"; Flock Safety, "Does Flock Share Data With ICE? Here's Flock's Answer"

Even private businesses can feed data into the same network police search

Flock's customers are not limited to police departments. Homeowners' associations, neighborhood groups, and major businesses use Flock cameras too, and according to the University of Washington researchers, many of these private customers - including major retailers like Home Depot and Lowe's, and Simon Properties, the country's largest operator of shopping malls - opt to have their camera data automatically shared with law enforcement. Flock says private customers cannot search the data generated by police cameras in return, but the flow of information still runs in one direction: private, commercial camera networks feeding location data into the same searchable pool that law enforcement, and in some documented cases, federal agencies, can draw from.

Source: University of Washington Center for Human Rights, "Leaving the Door Wide Open: Flock Surveillance Systems Expose Washington Data to Immigration Enforcement," 2025

Flock has begun walking some of this back - after it was already exposed

In the wake of the reporting on ICE searches and the Texas abortion-tracking case covered elsewhere on this site, 404 Media found that Flock removed Illinois, California, and Virginia from its national lookup tool, stopping agencies across the country from searching cameras inside those states. Flock has also announced it reduced its recommended default data retention from 30 days to 7, made multi-factor authentication mandatory, and expanded audit and monitoring requirements. Those are real changes - but they came only after journalists and lawmakers had already documented the exposures, not before, and Senator Wyden has told Flock directly that "abuses of your product are not only likely but inevitable" and that the company is "unable and uninterested" in fully controlling how its own network gets used.

Source: 404 Media, "Flock Removes States From National Lookup Tool After ICE and Abortion Searches Revealed"; 404 Media, "ICE, Secret Service, Navy All Had Access to Flock's Nationwide Network of Cameras"; Flock Safety, homepage safeguards statement

At least 53 cities across 20 states have now walked away over this exact issue

By mid-2026, the Electronic Frontier Foundation had documented at least 53 cities across 20 states that had terminated or rejected Flock contracts, citing unauthorized federal data access, false alerts, and mass surveillance of innocent drivers - communities ranging from Austin to Evanston to Eugene. The pattern is consistent enough that it has become its own industry story: several of the cities dropping Flock are now turning to a competing vendor, Axon, to install similar camera systems, meaning the underlying data-sharing risk facing a town is often a question about the industry as a whole, not just one company's practices.

Source: TechTimes, "Flock Safety Crosses 100,000 Cameras as 53 Cities Cancel Over Unauthorized Federal Data Access"; The Daily Bell, "Flock Safety's Billion-Dollar Surveillance Machine Caught Sharing Your Data With The Feds" (citing EFF); Yahoo News / Gadget Review, "Cities Are Ditching Flock Safety Cameras - Then Hiring Axon to Do the Same Job"

The bottom line: a town does not get to keep its own camera data local just by deciding to. Unless every sharing setting is checked, audited, and re-checked, a single camera approved for one intersection can end up part of a nationwide search network involving thousands of agencies, some of them federal, most of them entirely unknown to the town council that approved the purchase.

This page will be updated as more factual sources become available.