Overview
- A growing number of municipalities have disabled, paused, or ended contracts with Flock Safety following recent audits and public‑records disclosures that revealed broad outside access to stored vehicle‑movement data.
- Pflugerville officials voted to terminate their agreement and disabled all 28 cameras after records reviewed by the city showed roughly 459 outside organizations conducted nearly 1.6 million searches of the city’s camera network over six months.
- Reporting and local audits have documented repeated law enforcement misuse of ALPR systems, including officers tracking spouses or ex‑partners, which has prompted internal probes, arrests in some cases, and demands for independent oversight.
- Flock has rolled out mandatory changes that shorten default data retention from 30 days to seven, require case‑code entry for searches, and force use of an audit tool that flags abnormal queries, while a Senate investigation into the company’s data practices is now under way.
- The backlash has produced vandalism, bipartisan political pressure and a shift in public opinion against license‑plate surveillance, raising questions about data sharing, legal limits on location tracking, and likely new local and federal rules for ALPR use.