Flock Safety is the biggest player in a city-by-city scramble for surveillance

Scope of Flock and Related Surveillance Tech

• Flock license plate readers and similar systems are rapidly proliferating across cities, suburbs, HOAs, businesses, and shopping centers.
• Devices are cheap, solar-powered, cellular, and easy to deploy at scale; some users report heavy penetration in places like Atlanta suburbs.
• Private deployments (e.g., Walmart, Lowes, HOAs, shopping centers) can share data with police and others, often at no cost to government.

Privacy and Mass Surveillance Concerns

• Many see this as a qualitative shift: continuous, centralized tracking of movements, not just “someone might see you in public.”
• Concern that plate data + other sources (apps, period trackers, payment and phone data) form a detailed behavioral dossier that can be misused.
• Hypothetical and real scenarios raised: abortion travel tracking, outing visits to gay bars or mosques, and false-positive hits leading to armed stops.
• Some argue that recording in public is technically legal but should be restricted when it becomes pervasive, cross-referenced, and permanent.

Legal and Constitutional Debate

• Debate over whether mass plate tracking is an “unreasonable search,” or covered by “plain view” since plates are public by design.
• Some say current law largely permits this; others think precedents (e.g., limits on tech-enhanced surveillance) could be extended to ALPRs.
• Distinction raised between individual recording vs. industrial-scale monitoring and retroactive querying (“show me everywhere this car was”).

Support for Surveillance and Crime-Fighting Claims

• Proponents argue ALPRs help solve burglaries, car theft, and violent crime, and that higher chance of getting caught deters crime.
• Some are “huge fans” of public surveillance, preferring cameras plus regulation over bans, and even suggest national IDs or more cameras.
• Flock markets itself as contributing to solving ~10% of reported U.S. crime; several commenters are skeptical of methodology and definitions of “solved” or “helped.”

Governance, Activism, and Alternatives

• Suggestions include stronger privacy laws, warrant/standards for searches, limits on retention/sharing, and local surveillance ordinances (e.g., CCOPS-style review).
• FOIA is used to map camera locations and scrutinize deployments, with reports that ALPR hits often serve other jurisdictions or stale hotlists.
• Some advocate sousveillance (citizens monitoring authorities), drone-based vandalism of cameras, or routing tools to avoid surveilled roads.
• Others argue resources should go to social programs rather than expanding surveillance infrastructure.