Updated 2025.11.17
Across the United States, automated license plate readers (ALPRs)—particularly those operated by Flock Safety—have quietly created a privatized surveillance infrastructure that tracks the movements of virtually every driver. Marketed as tools for public safety, these systems are in fact the backbone of a massive data-brokerage scheme, where police departments, retailers, schools, hospitals, and even homeowner associations rent cameras while Flock and its investors retain practical control of the data.
On the ground, this system is not hypothetical and it is not harmless. A woman driving a green Rivian truck was wrongly accused of stealing a $25 package after Flock data showed her car passing through a Colorado town and an officer decided the blonde woman in a doorbell video “had to be her.” She was served with a summons by a sergeant who insisted, on camera, that there was “zero doubt” and refused to show her the footage. She was only cleared because she had a Rivian camera system, GPS logs, and corroborating witnesses—tools most people do not have. In another case, an AI-powered license plate reader misread a plate, and officers responded by forcing a six-year-old and other children out of a car at gunpoint, face-down on hot pavement. These are not edge cases; they are the natural result of treating machine “hits” as gospel and people as disposable.
ALPR networks function like warrantless GPS trackers, logging vehicles’ locations in ways the Supreme Court in Carpenter v. United States (2018) has already recognized as a Fourth Amendment problem when the government does it directly without judicial oversight. But Flock has sidestepped Carpenter by inserting itself as a for-profit intermediary: a private corporation collects, stores, and analyzes the data, which police and corporate clients simply purchase or query. The constitutional protection is hollowed out by privatization.
Meanwhile, misuse is not a future risk; it is present reality. Corrupt officers have used ALPR systems to stalk ex-partners, run their plates hundreds of times, and track their movements in real time. Others use these databases to snoop on people they’re curious about, celebrities, or political targets. Internal “policies” and after-the-fact audits have proven to be little more than PR. Law enforcement agencies have shown, again and again, that they cannot or will not police themselves when powerful surveillance tools are involved.
This data does not stay in police hands. Major retailers like Walmart, Home Depot, and Lowe’s integrate ALPR logs with shoppers’ personal and behavioral profiles—everything from credit card numbers to purchasing patterns and inferred traits—then share or sell this to law enforcement and immigration authorities. Flock’s own contracts disclaim liability for inaccurate or corrupted data, even as false hits lead to wrongful arrests, traumatized children, racial profiling, and multi-million-dollar settlements. The corporation keeps the revenue; taxpayers pay for the mistakes.
The deeper reality is that corporate greed has stalled meaningful reform. Flock is valued higher than many legacy security giants, buoyed by venture capital and aggressive lobbying. Their strategy is to entrench dependence: police departments, strapped for budgets, pour tax dollars into recurring subscriptions while being locked out of ownership, repair, or transparency. The product pipeline—like “Flock Nova”—promises even more invasive integration, pulling in 911 logs, commercial data, and even previously hacked datasets to build totalizing dossiers and social graphs around individual people.
All of this is happening in a legal environment where the Supreme Court is consistently 10–15 years behind the technology that law enforcement and their vendors deploy against residents. Even if Carpenter is eventually extended to ALPRs and similar systems, there will be no real remedy for those whose rights were violated in the meantime—the children held at gunpoint, the workers who lost jobs or housing after an arrest based on a bad “hit,” the people quietly surveilled and cataloged for years. And any city that has sunk millions into these tools will have spent public money on infrastructure that may be deemed unconstitutional on its face, leaving taxpayers to eat the loss.
This is the architecture of a surveillance state built by private corporations, not legislatures. It is being normalized through contracts instead of laws, and funded by communities who were never meaningfully asked. Because it is driven by profit, not public safety, its expansion is relentless. The result: every American motorist is tracked, their movements stored, cross-referenced, and monetized. The Fourth Amendment is being bypassed not through democratic debate, but through commerce—and unless residents intervene at the local and state level, the damage done in the “gap years” before the courts catch up will be permanent.
