The man who built America’s biggest camera network reportedly hides from it. Can Flock survive?
Flock’s cameras scan more than 20 billion license plates a month, and they’ve found kidnapped kids and closed murder cases. They’ve also tracked police officers’ ex-girlfriends, shown up in a Virginia woman’s front yard uninvited and nearly ended up on 350,000 Ubers. Now, 30-plus cities have pulled the plug, the company is scrambling to add rules and its own CEO reportedly keeps his plates out of the system. Here’s the whole story, plus the free map that shows every camera near you.
🤯 WOW! Flock’s cameras scan more than 20 billion license plates a month across 5,000-plus American communities. Your grocery runs are in there. And the CEO who built the network? He reportedly keeps his own plates out of the lookup tools.
📖 Read time: 2 minutes
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Flock started in 2017 with one idea: Cameras read license plates and call the police when a stolen car rolls by. Nine years later, it’s a $7.5 billion company with 120,000-plus cameras, and your commute is a search result.
Let me be fair, because this part is real.
The system finds bad guys. Colorado police cleared two AMBER Alerts and a homicide in one week using Flock hits. The company says it’s helped reunite more than 1,000 missing people with their families, and it works with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
Ask a detective working a kidnapping, they’ll tell you: Find the car, find the kid. Cops didn’t build this network. They used the tool they were handed, and plenty used it to bring people home.
🪶 Ruffled feathers
Then came the tool’s year from you-know-where.
In June, a Roanoke, Va., woman left for the park and came home to a Flock Raven listening device planted in her yard. No warning. After backlash over other devices showing up in unauthorized places, the city removed them all.
The Washington Post found 46 cases of officers using plate cameras to track exes and romantic partners. That’s not police work. That’s personal business on a government network, and good cops hate the abuse, too.
404 Media revealed a pitch to put scanners on 350,000 Uber, Lyft and delivery cars. (Never launched, Flock swears.) And defense contractor Leonardo is shopping SignalTrace, tech that matches the Bluetooth in your earbuds and smartwatch to your license plate. Your AirPods, snitching.
🦅 Flight risk
So can Flock survive? More than 30 cities have canceled, and the LAPD won’t renew. Investors handed Flock $950 million. Every canceled city is that cash driving away.
Flock put up some guardrails: a case number required for every search, automatic audits and a recommendation to keep data seven days instead of 30. Denver kept its cameras but banned immigration lookups.
That’s the real fight. Not cameras vs. cops. Cameras with rules vs. cameras without them.
🕊️ Fly the coop
Want to see your neighborhood? DeFlock.org is a free, open-source map of every plate reader volunteers have spotted. More than 336,000 pinned and counting.
Want to drive around them? A free app with in-app purchases called FlockHopper plots two routes: the fastest one and the one that dodges every mapped camera. It even shows the camera count on each route. Grab it at dontgetflocked.com or search FlockHopper in your app store. One caveat: It only knows the cameras volunteers reported. Treat it as fewer eyes on you, not zero.
Flock’s CEO Garrett Langley reportedly blocks his plates and varies his routes. When the guy who built the fishbowl won’t swim in it, you’re allowed to ask why. Birds of a feather flock together. The guy who named the company apparently prefers to fly solo.
Fall is the most beautiful time in Florida. All the license plates start changing colors.
🎯 Send this to someone who waves at every camera like it’s a toll booth. It’s counting, not waving back.
📱 Text-worthy: Wild: Flock’s cameras scan 20 BILLION license plates a month. They’ve solved AMBER Alerts, but officers also got caught tracking exes, and 30+ cities canceled. See the cameras near you: deflock.org. Route around them: FlockHopper, free at dontgetflocked.com.
