About ALPRs — Flock Finder

📸 What Are ALPRs?

Video explanation of modern LPRs by Christophe

Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs or LPRs) are AI-powered cameras that capture and analyze images of all passing vehicles, storing details like your car's location, date, and time. They also capture your car's make, model, color, and identifying features such as dents, roof racks, and bumper stickers, often turning these into searchable data points.

These cameras collect data on millions of vehicles regardless of whether the driver is suspected of a crime. These systems are marketed as indispensable tools to fight crime, but they ignore the powerful tools police already have to track criminals, such as cell phone location data, creating a loophole that doesn't require a warrant.

For a detailed explanation of how ALPRs are a threat to privacy, see this ACLU article as well as this EFF article on ALPRs.

🚨 Why Should You Be Concerned?

ALPRs invade your privacy and violate your civil liberties. Here's how:

📊 Unproven Effectiveness

No independent research proves ALPRs reduce crime. Studies claiming otherwise are often produced by the companies selling them and the agencies buying them.

🔓 Security Failures

ALPR vendors have a history of poor security — leaked credentials, exposed live feeds, and misconfigured systems putting your data at risk.

👁️ Mass Surveillance

Less than 0.3% of ALPR scans result in useful leads. The other 99.7% is bulk surveillance of innocent people's movements stored indefinitely.

⚖️ Discrimination

ALPRs disproportionately surveil communities of color. In Oak Park, IL, 84% of Flock-triggered stops targeted Black drivers in the first 10 months.

ALPRs Do Not Reduce Crime

Flock Safety claims that 10% of Reported Crime in the U.S. Is Solved Using Flock Technology. The study that Flock cites was conducted by two Flock employees and "given legitimacy with the 'oversight' of two academic researchers whose names are also on the paper" according to a report by 404 Media. Flock Safety is using the veneer of an academic study as part of its sales pitch.

Our findings indicate that, when small numbers of LPR patrols are used in crime hot spots in the way we have tested them here, they do not seem to generate either a general or offense-specific deterrent effect. — Journal of Experimental Criminology

There is not even a moderate degree of correlation between ALPRs and stolen vehicle recoveries, let alone any apparent causality. — Automated License Plate Readers: A Study in Failure

ALPRs Are a Major Security Risk

Companies that make ALPRs have a history of poor security practices, which can lead to data breaches and unauthorized access to sensitive information:

Nov 2025: A security researcher found Flock logins for sale on Russian hacking forums, since Flock negligently doesn't require multifactor authentication — an alleged violation of federal law and industry standard security practices.
Jan 2025: Motorola Solutions' ALPR system was found to have a critical security flaw that allowed anyone to access live data from their cameras. Data includes license plate numbers, make, model, color, and timestamps. A live feed of both cameras (color and infrared) was also available to stream using a web browser.
Jul 2025: Flock Safety exposed a misconfigured demo site that included their internal search interface and source code revealing confidence score calculations, plus a live ArcGIS admin API key with access to over 50 private data layers.

ALPRs Are Dragnet Surveillance

See Dragnet (Policing) on Wikipedia.

A study of ALPRs in Piedmont, CA found that less than 0.3% of ALPR hits might translate into a useful investigative lead. Most license plates recorded were not on any hot list, yet police still logged information on people's movements throughout the day.

You can verify this yourself through Flock's own transparency portals:

📊 Oak Park, IL Transparency Portal
📊 Vallejo, CA Transparency Portal

⚠️ Documented Misuse & Harm

There are many documented cases where police have knowingly used ALPRs to commit crimes and put people in danger. It's often only after harm is done that an officer is caught and punished, if at all.

Stalking & Abuse of Power

Dangerous Police Encounters from ALPR Errors

The negligent use of ALPRs has led to dangerous police encounters, including pulling guns on innocent drivers:

San Francisco woman pulled out of car at gunpoint because of license plate reader error
Cops terrorize Black family but blame license plate reader for misidentifying 'stolen' vehicle
Deputies sued after false ALPR hit leads to guns-out traffic stop of California privacy activist
Privacy advocate sues CoCo sheriff's deputies after license plate readers target his car stolen
A Denver woman had to prove her innocence after incompetent detectives relied on Flock cameras to pin a $25 package theft on her.

ALPRs Result in Racist Policing

ALPRs are more likely to surveil communities with a higher density of Black and brown people, reinforcing systemic racism in policing.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation reviewed the use of ALPRs by the Oakland Police Department and found that ALPR cameras were more likely to scan license plates in communities with a higher density of Black and brown people.

A report by The Associated Press shows that after 9/11, the NYPD used ALPRs to monitor Muslims visiting mosques.

A study of Flock Safety's impact in Oak Park, IL found:

In the first 10 months of their use, 84% of the drivers stopped by Oak Park police because of Flock were Black. — Freedom to Thrive Oak Park

ALPRs Put Undocumented People at Risk

Police agencies frequently share ALPR data with ICE, putting undocumented people at risk, even in states where this is legally prohibited:

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

Are ALPRs a necessary tool for police?

No. Police have always had methods to obtain location information for suspects of crimes. These methods used to require establishing probable cause and obtaining a search warrant, which provides oversight and accountability as required by the 4th Amendment. ALPRs, on the other hand, collect location data on all of us, and they are searched without any warrants or oversight.

Why should I care if I have nothing to hide?

1. You don't get to decide what looks suspicious tomorrow.

Just because you're not doing anything wrong today doesn't mean you won't be watched tomorrow. License plate cameras don't know your intentions — only your movements. A trip to a protest, a friend's house in a "high-crime" area, or even a misread plate can flag you as "suspicious."

As history has shown, when governments gain unchecked surveillance powers, they're eventually used against people who weren't doing anything wrong — until someone decided they were. For example, until early in 2025, ALPRs weren't used for tracking immigrants, legal or otherwise, but now they are, despite policies prohibiting it.

2. Mistakes happen, and you're the one who pays for them.

ALPRs are not always accurate. People have been pulled over at gunpoint, arrested, or detained because a camera misread a plate or flagged the wrong car. If you "have nothing to hide," you also have nothing to correct the record with when a machine error points the finger at you.

Do these cameras only record vehicles involved in crimes?

No, ALPRs record all vehicles that pass by, not just those involved in crimes. They capture license plates, unique identifying features, locations, dates, and times of every vehicle, regardless of whether the driver is suspected of wrongdoing. This means even if you're not doing anything wrong, your movements are still being tracked and stored, often for long periods of time.

Additionally, the data can be shared with other law enforcement agencies and third parties, further extending the reach of this surveillance.

Do police need a warrant to search these cameras?

No, police do not need a warrant to search these cameras. The data collected by ALPRs is owned by the police department, and law enforcement agencies can access it without a warrant. There is often no oversight at all on how these searches are conducted, raising concerns about their constitutionality under the Fourth Amendment.

Some agencies have implemented policies, but these policies are meaningless, as most agencies have opted into an extensive data sharing network that allows other agencies to access their data without the same restrictions, with tens of thousands of national searches occurring daily.

What oversight is there for these systems?

There is little to no oversight for these systems. While some police departments have implemented policies regarding ALPR use, they are often weak and poorly enforced. Many agencies have no policies at all.

While Flock offers a transparency portal for their customers, they allow customers to cherry-pick what information is included or excluded. They also lack meaningful data, often underreporting the number of agencies with access.

Can Flock be trusted to keep our data safe?

Absolutely not. In November 2025, Flock logins were found for sale on Russian hacking forums since Flock negligently doesn't require multifactor authentication.

Flock has also been caught lying on the record. Their CEO claimed Flock had no federal contracts, but weeks later, 9News discovered that Border Patrol actually had access to Flock's systems.

How can I get these cameras out of my city/town?

Several cities have killed ALPR contracts, such as Denver and Austin. An effective strategy is to raise concerns in your community, build a group of advocates, and petition the city council not to extend the contract.

Check DeFlock for local groups and upcoming meetings near you.

🔬 How Flock Finder Works

Flock Safety ALPR cameras have WiFi transceivers that periodically wake to upload captured license plate data. These transmissions use MAC addresses with identifiable OUI (Organizationally Unique Identifier) prefixes.

@NitekryDPaul discovered 30 of these OUI prefixes through promiscuous-mode 2.4 GHz analysis. A 31st was contributed by Michael / DeFlockJoplin during field testing in Joplin, MO.

This project takes those 31 known OUI prefixes, queries the WiGLE crowdsourced WiFi database for matching networks, and displays camera locations on an interactive map.