Flock
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Flock Safety is one of the private surveillance companies that sells ALPRS to police departments, HOAs, and private businesses. Captured data is uploaded to Flock’s cloud system, where it is made available to participating agencies across the country.

The Flock and other ALPR cameras installed in Mesa County use AI to build a profile of your vehicle- taking into account make, model, color, bumper stickers, dents, and other distinguishing features, along with a timestamp. This data is logged into a massive nationwide database that can be searched by any Flock-connected agency. In addition to recording vehicles and license plates, recent reporting from 404 Media has revealed that Flock cameras explicitly track people and bicycles. Regular Flock cameras can be modified at any time to start recording video.

Additionally, Flock recently introduced a Pan-Tilt-Zoom (PTZ) camera model that captures live video, tracks specific individuals, and can zoom in far enough to clearly read individual’s phone screens. PTZ cameras have been seen in Lincoln Park in Grand Junction.

Any person or agency with a Flock account, by default. That's thousands of police departments, sheriff's offices, federal agencies, flock employees, and university PDs. Searches happen without warrants, without notification, and without reasons.

An officer enters a plate, a partial plate, or a vehicle description. Flock returns every camera that's seen a matching vehicle, plotted on a map with timestamps. Repeat searches build movement histories: where someone goes, when, and how often. Officers can also perform “FreeForm” searches of the Flock database, where images of specific people are returned using searches such as “heavy-set male with a black and white hat” or “person on skateboard”.

ALPRs track your movements and store your data for long periods of time, creating a detailed record of your location history. The question isn't whether you have something to hide, it's who gets to decide what counts as worth looking at, and when. A location history is a record of which doctor you see, which church or union hall you attend, whose house you stayed at overnight, and which protest you parked near. All of that information is made available to outside agencies by default.

Data from ALPRs has led to wrongful arrests, profiling, watching children, and stalking ex-partners by police officers. List of known misuse cases
Your information is just one bad actor away from being misused, and one data leak away from becoming public.

There's no substantial evidence that ALPRs effectively prevent crime, despite Flock's attempts to prove otherwise. Flock has known accuracy issues: in one California town, Flock misread license plates in 71% of the alerts it sent to police. Innocent people caught in the Flock surveillance dragnet have found it difficult to prove their innocence, and these encounters with police can turn violent.

While the Mesa County Sheriff's Office says the camera systems have contributed greatly to producing solid leads or solved cases, there is no evidence that the cameras have prevented crime or actually increased clearance rates. In fact, in Atlanta where they have an astounding 28,000 cameras, of which ~5,000 are Flock, there has been no discernable change in their clearance rates.