Flock Safety is a private company headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, that builds and operates a nationwide network of AI-powered cameras designed to read license plates and identify vehicles. It was founded in February 2017 by three Georgia Tech graduates — Garrett Langley, Matt Feury, and Paige Todd — who built their first prototypes by hand to address unsolved property crime in their own neighborhood. Confirmed
What started as a small home-owners'-association security product has become one of the largest privately operated surveillance networks in the United States. As of 2025, Flock cameras are active in over 5,000 communities across 49 states — every state except Alaska — and the system logs more than 20 billion vehicle scans every month. Confirmed
It's Not Just a License Plate Camera
Traditional traffic cameras capture a plate number and not much else. Flock's cameras do something different: they use computer vision to build what the company calls a "Vehicle Fingerprint."Instead of relying only on the plate, the system identifies a car's make, model, body type, color, and unique features — a roof rack, a bumper sticker, a cracked taillight, a temporary tag. Confirmed
This matters because it means police can search for a vehicle even when they don't have a plate number at all. A query like "blue pickup truck with a roof rack" is enough to pull matching vehicles out of the database. Confirmed
The Hardware
A typical Flock camera unit is solar-powered and connects over cellular LTE rather than a wired internet or power connection. That design choice is deliberate — it means a camera can be installed almost anywhere, on almost any pole, without needing permission to dig up a power line or run cable. Every image and the metadata extracted from it is uploaded automatically to Flock's cloud platform, hosted on Amazon Web Services' GovCloud. Confirmed
Who Actually Owns the Cameras
This is one of the most misunderstood parts of the system. Not all Flock cameras belong to police departments. Roughly 40% of Flock's revenue comes from private customers — homeowners' associations and businesses — while the remaining 60% comes from public safety agencies. Confirmed
The important part is what happens next: private camera owners can choose to share their camera feeds with local police. When they do, a camera that a gated community paid for, on a private road, installed with zero public process or oversight, becomes part of the same searchable law enforcement network as a camera the city council approved and paid for with tax dollars. The public never voted on the private ones, and in many cases never knew they existed. Confirmed
The Network Is the Point
A single camera watching a single intersection isn't especially powerful on its own. What makes Flock different from old-school municipal traffic cameras is the network layer sitting on top of all of them. Most cameras are connected to a feature called the National Lookup Tool. When an agency enables it, their officers can search camera data not just from their own jurisdiction, but from any other participating agency across the country. Confirmed
In practice, this means a sheriff's deputy in rural Texas can run a search that scans tens of thousands of camera networks and hundreds of thousands of individual cameras spread across multiple states — all from one search box, with no warrant required. Confirmed We cover exactly how that search capability has been used in our documented misuse cases.
What Happens to the Data
By default, Flock retains captured images and metadata for 30 days before automatic deletion, unless local law requires something shorter (Maine requires 21 days; Minnesota requires a 60-day retention ceiling) or an officer flags a specific scan as evidence in an active case, in which case it can be preserved indefinitely. Confirmed We go deeper on retention, access controls, and oversight in how the system actually works.
Where This Site Goes From Here
Understanding what Flock is and how it works is the foundation. From here, you can explore:
- The Scale — exactly how big this network is, and what it costs taxpayers
- Documented Misuse — specific, sourced cases where this system was used to track protesters, immigrants, and people seeking reproductive healthcare
- The Other Side — the strongest case law enforcement makes for why this technology exists in the first place
- Tools — find cameras near you and check if your own plate has shown up in a leaked search log