Flock Is Cancelled—And Their Competitors Are Profiting

Pushback against mass surveillance is growing—and it's going beyond Flock. Barry Chin/Boston Globe/Getty Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. “If you want to get in your car and you want to go down to Buc-ee’s in St. Augustine, it’s really none of the government’s damn business if you’re doing that, right?” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Monday at a news conference. He announced that Florida will revoke all law enforcement license-plate-recognition camera permits on state highways, with all such cameras to be removed by the end of September. “What we don’t want in the state of Florida is to have a digital AI surveillance state where everything we’re doing is being tracked at all times,” DeSantis added, referring to the recent expansion of ALPRs—automated license plate reader cameras—across the country. The cameras are supposed to catch people committing crimes, and sometimes they do. But they’re also ripe for abuse. Each camera forms part of a nationwide network, and by sharing vehicle information between and within police departments, ALPRs can enable officers to track what are called “patterns of life”: where a person is likely to be, who they spend time with, and what they’re doing in a given moment. Police officers nationwide are taking advantage of that surveillance ability. In dozens of cases, officers have lost their jobs or faced criminal charges for doing things like searching an ex-girlfriend’s license plate information 2,000 times, searching an estranged wife’s license plates 700 times, or tracking an abortion-seeker across state lines. Florida is not alone in cancelling Flock contracts. Texas, last week, ordered state agencies to stop funding Flock cameras. The Oakland-based advocacy group Secure Justice, which tracks automated license plate reader use on the municipal level, says that in the month of August more towns and cities cancelled their Flock contracts than ever before: of the 214 cities that have dropped Flock since 2021, 90 did so in August 2026. (At least three towns have reported that Flock reinstalled or reactivated their cameras after local officials ended their contracts.) Strictly regulating data retention might be one solution. A police department can’t do as much to share data with ICE, for example, if state laws mandate that the data be deleted quickly. In New Hampshire, ALPRs must delete all data after three minutes; Flock’s current default retention period is seven days. Corinne Worthington works as the advocacy manager with the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a nonprofit focused on litigation and research on discriminatory surveillance technology. To Worthington, the backlash against Flock is “putting a name to people’s fears.” “I think that because of how public Flock has been, people have woken up to the harms of ALPRs in a way that maybe, previously, they weren’t aware of,” Worthington said. While Flock has over 120,000 license plate readers across the country, it is far from the only ALPR company. Motorola, the AI roadway safety firm Rekor, and Axon, the police tech firm behind Tasers, all sell similar cameras to police. Those companies aren’t household names in the way that Flock is, nor have they been subject to the same backlash. “That’s the problem with targeting specifically the vendor, not the technology as a whole,” Worthington said. When states and cities cancel their contracts with Flock, they’re likely to end up replacing those cameras with ones made by one of the other ALPR companies. And those other companies are certainly aware of the backlash. Rekor, another company that sells ALPRs, is calling for national regulations on the cameras to “preserve ALPR’s public safety value.” Those regulations would include “anonymizing non-hotlist plate data” which could then be re-identified with a valid warrant or court order. “The fight over whether ALPR should exist has stopped being useful to anyone,” Rekor vice president Charlie Degliomini told me. “The rules are the real argument.” As far as he is aware, Degliomini added, his company is the only ALPR vendor calling for a warrant requirement on at least some plate searches. But Rekor’s cameras can be abused, too: activists in New York are suing the Westchester County Police Department for allegedly using Rekor’s tools to log their locations thousands of times. And the CEO of Axon, another camera manufacturer, floated the possibility of changing the shape of Axon cameras so they look less similar to the Flock cameras Americans are lately so fond of destroying. “We’ve had some people say they’d like to see us make just a different camera, because our ALPR camera looks like an ALPR camera,” Axon CEO Rick Smith said in a now-deleted webinar, as 404 Media first reported. Whether cameras that look different, but perform the same surveillance function, will eventually inspire the same backlash remains to be seen.