Flock Exposed - The Tracking Web Flock Plugs Into
Flock's license plate cameras do not operate in isolation. Federal agencies, other surveillance vendors, and data-fusion platforms increasingly connect to or run alongside Flock's network, and two companies come up again and again in that story: Palantir Technologies and Clearview AI. Neither one is Flock, and Flock disputes any direct relationship with one of them - but understanding what they do, and how their data can end up touching the same investigations as license plate reads, is part of understanding the full surveillance picture.
Palantir's ImmigrationOS
In April 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement awarded Palantir Technologies a 30 million dollar contract to build "ImmigrationOS," officially called the Immigration Lifecycle Operating System - an AI-enabled platform intended to give ICE "near real-time visibility" into a person's entire immigration case history.
Source: New Jersey State Investment Council letter, February 17, 2026; American Immigration Council
ICE's own contract justification describes ImmigrationOS as an upgrade to Palantir's existing Immigration Case Management system, aggregating data from private and public sources to track people through every stage of the immigration process - including prioritizing deportation cases and monitoring self-deportations.
Source: American Civil Liberties Union, "All the Ways Palantir is Assisting Trump's Abusive Removal Campaign"
A prototype of the platform was due by September 25, 2025, with the underlying contract running through September 2027. Reporting on the buildout describes it as pulling together IRS tax filings, Social Security data, and other federal records into one searchable system.
Source: American Immigration Council, "ICE to Use ImmigrationOS by Palantir, a New AI System, to Track Immigrants' Movements"
Palantir has held contracts with ICE since at least 2011, and in late 2025 expanded further, landing a new contract with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services believed to focus on detecting marriage and benefits fraud - deepening its footprint across the immigration enforcement system beyond ICE alone.
Source: Fortune, "New contract shows Palantir is working on a tech platform for another federal agency that works with ICE"
Does Flock Data Reach Palantir?
Flock Safety has stated publicly and directly that it does not work with Palantir, that Palantir has no relationship with Flock, and that Palantir has no access to Flock customer data.
Source: Flock Safety, "Does Flock Share Data With ICE? Here's Flock's Answer"
That said, independent reporting has documented a separate but related problem: federal agencies including ICE and Customs and Border Protection have gained access to Flock's camera network anyway, not through a corporate partnership with Palantir, but through local police departments sharing their own Flock network access. One investigation found CBP had access to more than 80,000 Flock cameras nationwide, and one police department told reporters it did not even realize it was sharing its data with CBP.
Source: 404 Media, "CBP Had Access to More than 80,000 Flock AI Cameras Nationwide"
A separate audit-log review found searches run through Flock's network by the FBI, ICE, CBP, ATF, DEA, and even the Department of Veterans Affairs police at a VA hospital - with search justifications in some logs listed as simply "CBP" or "ICE," with no case number or warrant attached.
Source: San Jose Police Department audit findings, as reported by The Gateway Pundit
Public records also show that at least eight Washington state law enforcement agencies enabled direct, one-to-one network sharing with U.S. Border Patrol at some point during 2025, opening what one tracking organization called a "front door" for searches potentially tied to civil immigration enforcement, even where local or state law restricts that kind of sharing.
Source: Immigration Policy Tracking Project, "Reported: ICE using automated license-plate-reader cameras for immigration enforcement via state/local police"
So while Flock's statement that it has no corporate relationship with Palantir appears accurate, the practical effect for a resident can look similar either way: data collected by a local Flock camera network can still end up in the hands of the same federal immigration enforcement apparatus that Palantir's ImmigrationOS is built to serve - just by a different route.
Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation, "Flock Safety's Feature Updates Cannot Make Automated License Plate Readers Safe"
Clearview AI: The Facial Recognition Half of the Puzzle
Clearview AI is a facial recognition company that built its identification database by scraping billions of photos from public websites and social media, without the knowledge or consent of the people pictured - a database some counts put at more than 50 billion images.
Source: Wikipedia, "Clearview AI"; regulatoryoversight.com, "$51.75M Settlement in Clearview AI Biometric Privacy Litigation"
Flock's own marketing states plainly that its ALPR system does not recognize faces and cannot identify a person that way - plate reading and face recognition are, in Flock's telling, two separate things. But in practice, agencies are increasingly combining the two kinds of tools in the same investigative facilities. A crime center in Baldwin County, Georgia, for example, brought both Clearview AI and Flock Safety tools into the same facility for combined use.
Source: Flock Safety, "Civil Liberties & Rights Safeguards"; ID Tech Wire, "Missouri Order Bars Facial Recognition Integration With License Plate Readers"
Clearview AI has faced significant legal exposure over how it built its database. A long-running class action under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act - the toughest biometric privacy law in the country - resulted in a March 2025 settlement valued at 51.75 million dollars, structured as a 23 percent equity stake in the company for class members rather than a cash payout.
Source: Humanoid Liability Law, "Clearview AI BIPA Settlement"; National Law Review, "A First in BIPA Litigation: Class Members Receive Equity in Clearview AI"
A separate 2020 lawsuit brought by the ACLU and ACLU of Illinois resulted in a 2022 consent order permanently banning Clearview from selling access to its faceprint database to most private businesses and individuals nationwide - though the restriction does not extend to federal agencies.
Source: American Civil Liberties Union, "ACLU v. Clearview AI"
That carve-out matters: reporting indicates ICE itself has purchased access to Clearview's facial recognition database, meaning a settlement designed to rein in the company's reach still leaves the federal government as a customer.
Source: stateofsurveillance.org, "ICE Just Bought Access to 60 Billion Stolen Faces"
One Integrated Web, Not Three Separate Stories
Advocacy researchers who track this space describe Flock, Palantir, and Clearview as three legs of the same stool: Palantir's data fusion tools, Clearview's face-scraping database, and Flock's license-plate dragnet together underpin a broad swath of everyday policing - and, increasingly, federal immigration enforcement specifically.
Source: Campaign Zero, "The Private Companies Quietly Building a Police State"
Even sources sympathetic to Flock's own framing acknowledge that its cameras are one piece of a rapidly expanding, AI-powered surveillance infrastructure that also includes facial recognition systems like Clearview - suggesting the boundary lines companies draw around their own products matter less to a person being tracked than the combined result once the data starts moving between systems.
Source: explainx.ai, "Flock Safety ALPRs: AI Surveillance, Civil Liberties, and the Legal Debate (2026)"
Questions to Ask Your Town
Has our town verified, in writing, whether any federal agency - including ICE, CBP, or the FBI - has ever accessed our Flock camera network, directly or through another agency's shared access?
Does our town's Flock contract or audit log show any searches conducted on behalf of, or shared with, federal immigration enforcement?
Does any local agency in our area use facial recognition tools like Clearview AI alongside license plate camera data, and if so, under what policy?
What state or local laws, if any, restrict sharing our residents' data with federal immigration authorities, and how does our town verify compliance?
This page will be updated as more factual sources become available.