Flock Exposed - Private Sector Use
Worth knowing up front: Flock's newer Condor camera system has real facial recognition capability, despite the company's "we only read license plates" pitch. In a private-sector setting like a retail parking lot, that capability could most likely be used to identify and track individual repeat shoppers over time, flag and profile people as "persons of interest" before any crime has occurred, or link a shopper's face to their vehicle and, in turn, to a shared nationwide database searchable by police. See the "Facial Recognition" section below for the documentation behind this.
The license plate reader is the gimmick. But Flock isn't just a police tool anymore - it's being sold directly to retailers, homeowners associations, and private businesses, who can then choose to share what they collect with law enforcement.
Major Retailers Using Flock
Home Depot and Lowe's
If you've noticed security cameras in parking lots at Home Depot or Lowe's - whether on streetlights or standalone trailers with solar panels on them - it's because both companies have deals with a company called Flock Safety.
Source: SlashGear / Yahoo Tech
The records are the latest to shed light on how expansive Flock's surveillance network has become, and highlight that it includes cameras that are operated by both police and private businesses.
Source: 404 Media
Records obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation show that one Texas sheriff's office could access data from more than 170 Lowe's locations, many outside Texas, along with dozens of Home Depot sites in the state.
Source: EFF, reported by Spreely News
The Johnson County Sheriff's Office has access to ALPR data from 173 Lowe's locations and multiple Home Depot stores.
Source: Dave Maass, Electronic Frontier Foundation, via Ban The Cams
In an April 1 letter addressed to Lowe's CEO Marvin Ellison and other executives, 38 organizations including Fight for the Future, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the American Federation of Teachers demanded the company drop its contract with Flock, stating the country is "at a serious inflection point" where the "repercussions of mass surveillance have life-altering consequences for the life and liberty of everyday people."
Source: Fast Company, reported by TheStreet
When Flock Safety cameras are deployed by private businesses, the data is owned and controlled by the business or organization using the system, and the company says data sharing is off by default.
Source: Fox News
Home Depot's California Class Action Lawsuit
A class action lawsuit filed May 1, 2026 alleges Home Depot installed Flock ALPR cameras at the entrances of all 233 of its California stores without giving shoppers adequate notice or maintaining a legally compliant privacy policy.
Source: ClaimDepot; Snopes
The lawsuit alleges these cameras capture the license plate number, make, model, color, and distinguishing features of every vehicle entering the lots, log that data with precise timestamps and location, and feed it into a centralized, searchable network.
Source: OpenClassActions
The complaint alleges Home Depot violated California's License Plate Recognition Privacy Act, including by failing to identify the title of the official custodian responsible for the ALPR system and failing to set a defined retention period for the data.
Source: ClassAction.org
Separately, reporting on the case states Home Depot shared plate data with the ATF, ICE, and Air Force investigators, and describes the surveillance as feeding a network with no retention limits and no restrictions on immigration enforcement access.
Source: State of Surveillance; MyPrivacy.Blog
Target, Walmart, and Costco
Flock, a leading maker of ALPRs, says it has 1,000 business partnerships, and surveys have found that major retail companies are considering deploying plate readers around their properties.
Source: Dayton Daily News / Cox Media Ohio
Lowe's, Costco, Home Depot, Target, and Walmart say they may use ALPRs to help prevent, detect, investigate, and prosecute theft, fraud, and other illegal activities.
Source: Dayton Daily News / Cox Media Ohio
Walmart's published policy says its ALPR technology is used for security, theft and fraud prevention, parking enforcement, and maintaining the safety of individuals and property, and that authorized employees receive training on responsible and ethical use of personal information.
Source: Scioto Post
The Walmart Funding Question
Reporting has raised a separate and distinct question from Walmart's own private camera use: whether Walmart has financially supported police department Flock deployments directly. A journalist investigating this contacted Walmart for comment regarding its financial support of Flock deployments and whether the company has assessed how those systems may be accessed by federal immigration authorities; Walmart's spokesperson declined to comment on the record and referred further questions about grants to the specific police departments that received them, while adding on background that Walmart does not collaborate with ICE.
Source: Nick Valencia Live
When cameras are mounted in the parking lots of everyday retail stores where families visit weekly, the boundary between commerce and state power blurs.
Source: Nick Valencia Live
Apartment Communities and Multifamily Housing
Flock markets its cameras directly to apartment complexes and property managers as a security tool, alongside its neighborhood, business, and law enforcement customers.
Source: Flock Safety website
Flock's own marketing points to a Detroit-area apartment complex, Warren Manor, which had recorded eight robberies, 110 assaults and domestic incidents, 41 burglaries, 16 weapon offenses, and upwards of 1,000 calls to 911 over an eighteen-month period before installing Flock cameras.
Source: Flock Safety company blog
Flock's cameras use its patented "Vehicle Fingerprint" technology to capture details of every car entering an apartment complex, including make, model, color, aftermarket alterations, and whether a plate is paper or missing entirely - logged on every resident's and visitor's vehicle, not just those suspected of anything.
Source: Flock Safety company blog
On the more troubling end, tenant advocates have raised concerns that camera systems installed at private apartment complexes for stated "license plate reading" purposes have been positioned in locations - such as pointed at a pool - where they cannot realistically be reading plates at all, raising questions about what they are actually monitoring.
Source: DeFlock BCS
That concern became a legal case in Concord, New Hampshire: on September 2, 2026, the ACLU, ACLU of New Hampshire, and New Hampshire Legal Assistance brought a class action lawsuit against the Concord Housing and Redevelopment Authority over surveillance devices installed and operated in tenants' own housing complex.
Source: ACLU
Private Contractors Installing and Servicing Flock's Cameras
Flock doesn't just sell software - it relies on a nationwide web of private installation and maintenance contractors to physically put its cameras up and keep them running, and that layer of private industry has its own track record of operating outside any city's actual control.
DISH Network's Installers Were Quietly Putting Up Flock Cameras Nationwide
DISH Network's installation arm, OnTech Smart Services, was among the contractors involved in installing Flock Safety cameras nationwide. OnTech is among the largest smart home service providers in the U.S., with prior contracts that included ADT smart home security installs, and was reportedly picked as a partner because it already had a large national force of outdoor technicians - meaning a familiar satellite-TV company's van showing up on a residential street could just as easily be there to install a police surveillance camera as a satellite dish. After the arrangement went viral and drew public backlash, DISH ended its contract to install Flock cameras; field technicians were told to uninstall the Flock app from their work devices and return any Flock hardware still stored in their trucks.
Source: Yahoo News, "That DISH Van on Your Block? It Might Be Installing a Police Surveillance Camera"; Cord Cutters News, "DISH Ends Its Contract To Install Flock Cameras After Backlash"
Grass Valley, California - a Contractor Reinstalled Cameras After the City Had Already Canceled
The private maintenance side of the business raises the same problem in reverse: it can keep installing cameras even after a city has already said no. In Grass Valley, California, police took down all of the city's Flock cameras in August 2026 after formally ending its contract, sending termination notices by both email and certified mail - only for residents to spot a utility truck reinstalling cameras at several locations weeks later. Officers disconnected at least two reinstalled cameras and had to keep monitoring other sites in case more went back up. Flock's own explanation was that an automated maintenance system mistakenly triggered the reinstallation, and the company said its contractor was simply following the maintenance provisions of the very contract the city had already canceled in writing - a private vendor's routine servicing work overriding a city's own decision to get out of the Flock business entirely.
Source: Fox40, "Flock cameras reinstalled in Grass Valley after police took them down"; CBS Sacramento, "Grass Valley police remove Flock cameras again after unexpected reinstallations"; TechSpot, "California city canceled Flock, removed its cameras, then found the company had put some of them back"
Flock's Broader Private-Sector Push
Flock permits private entities - from neighborhood HOAs to corporate retail centers - to purchase unvetted access to its surveillance infrastructure.
Source: Ardently Grant
Flock has built what the ACLU calls the country's first true nationwide mass-surveillance network out of consumer-owned cameras now numbering close to 90,000 across roughly 5,000 communities, according to ACLU tracking, producing more than 20 billion vehicle scans every month. Any property, HOA, or business that opts into data sharing can make its footage searchable by thousands of police agencies on Flock's network, not just the police department down the street.
Source: Knock LA
Flock has launched a formal "Flock Business Network," extending the same shared-network model long used by police departments to the private sector - letting companies opt into private, permission-controlled data partnerships with other businesses, not just with law enforcement.
Source: Flock Safety company blog
Flock markets directly to HOAs and residential communities, places of worship, healthcare, retail banking, hospitality, logistics, corporate security, and property management, in addition to its public-sector law enforcement business.
Source: Flock Safety website
Facial Recognition: The Truth Behind the "We Only Read License Plates" Pitch
Flock's standard sales pitch and public messaging insist the company does not use facial recognition: Flock cameras do not use facial recognition technology, and searches are based on vehicle characteristics, and not identity.
Source: Flock Safety Trust Center
But that messaging applies specifically to Flock's original ALPR product - and pointedly sidesteps its newer Condor camera line. Flock Safety's Condor camera is designed to track human movement in real time, despite the company's public denial; reporting found Flock's Condor camera can zoom in on faces and read phone screens of passersby.
Source: InvestigateTV, via Yahoo News
Flock's Condor cameras are PTZ (pan-tilt-zoom) surveillance cameras that can automatically zoom in on cars, people, faces, and phone screens - going well beyond simple license-plate reading.
Source: Wikipedia, Flock Safety
404 Media separately found more than 60 exposed Condor camera feeds visible on the open internet, watching them zoom in on people and children, including one feed close enough to read a passerby's phone screen.
Source: 404 Media, via DeFlock ILM
In short: "we only read license plates" is true of Flock's original product, but Flock now sells a camera add-on with real-time facial and person-tracking capability to the same customers, law enforcement and private businesses alike, while continuing to lead with the license-plates-only message.
Walmart's Own Facial Recognition: Reading Your Face to Categorize Your Spending
Separately from any Flock relationship, Walmart has pursued its own facial recognition technology aimed directly at customer spending behavior. A Walmart patent filing describes a system that, to analyze purchasing behavior, links customers' facial expressions, or "biometric data" as the patent filing calls it, to their transaction data - meaning how much they are spending and what they are buying.
Source: Business Insider, via Gra.world
The stated purpose is customer service: the technology uses video cameras at checkout lines that monitor customers' facial expressions and movements to identify varying levels of dissatisfaction, notifying employees to intervene with upset customers.
Source: Progressive Grocer / Chain Store Age
Walmart has a history with this technology. The company previously tested a separate facial-recognition system for loss prevention and shut it down after several months, after telling Fortune it had surreptitiously used facial-recognition software to try to identify shoppers.
Source: IPVM, citing Fortune
Walmart's current published Customer Privacy Notice states the company does not engage in profiling in furtherance of decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects concerning consumers, though it does acknowledge combining personal information collected or inferred about customers across online and in-store channels.
Source: Walmart Customer Privacy Notice
This is a separate system from Walmart's parking-lot Flock ALPR deal covered above - there is no confirmed evidence the two are technically linked - but it shows Walmart pursuing face-to-spending profiling through its own technology, independent of Flock.
Why This Matters
The core problem isn't just that police are watching - it's that thousands of private cameras, installed for ordinary retail security, can quietly become part of the same searchable nationwide network as police cameras, once a business opts in to sharing. As one civil liberties advocate put it, the real issue is not just whether a store is watching, but who can follow the trail after the fact.
Source: Spreely News
This page will be updated as further documented cases and reporting on private-sector Flock deployments come to light.