US cities cancel Flock AI license plate reader contracts, but the data stays

Cities pull the plug

Local governments across the United States, from Florida to Washington state, are canceling their contracts with Flock, the company behind widely deployed AI license plate readers, according to The Verge. The cancellations follow mounting public pressure over privacy, harassment, and mass surveillance, and the backlash has cut across party lines.

But the report makes clear that walking away from Flock is not the same as undoing its footprint. Canceling a contract does not necessarily bring cameras down right away, and data already collected may remain searchable long after a city leaves.

Flock was founded in 2017 and pitched its cameras as a low-friction public safety tool. It sells to governments, private businesses, and individual residents, and has installed more than 120,000 cameras across the US. In its early years, some cities even offered grants to homeowners associations that wanted the devices in their neighborhoods.

Where contracts have ended

In Sheboygan, Wisconsin, council members voted unanimously to end the city's contract after learning that Flock had reportedly tried to sell anonymized data collected locally back to the city's own public works department. Flock maintains it does not sell consumer data.

Stevens Point, Wisconsin went further: Mayor Mike Wiza not only terminated the contract but physically covered the town's ten cameras, saying there was no way to audit where Flock data went once collected and that the community was not comfortable using the cameras without assurances they matched authorized use.

In Bridgewater, Virginia, a town of fewer than 7,000 people, the council bagged its cameras after voting to cancel. Reporting by the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism found that, under the town's information-sharing agreement with Flock, law enforcement ran 7 million searches against Bridgewater data in twelve months.

The data outlives the deal

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has reviewed dozens of municipal Flock contracts and is suing San Jose over its use of the cameras, argues the sharing agreements violate Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure. EFF attorney Saira Hussain told The Verge that when a contract ends, what happens to the collected data and how long it stays searchable remain unresolved questions.

The searches themselves, she said, can reveal where people live and work, where they drop off children, who they associate with, and where they worship, seek reproductive care, or consult an immigration lawyer — in effect, a mass surveillance system designed to identify and track movement.

Flock tightens the rules

According to The Verge, Flock has responded with new controls. Case codes, once optional, are now required for every search, and a feature called Audit Assistance flags abnormal queries. CEO Garrett Langley framed mandatory case codes as an obvious way to curb abuse and conceded the company had gotten the issue wrong. Flock also cut its standard data retention window from 30 days to seven, though jurisdictions can extend it, and agencies can now limit what they share — for example, allowing homicide queries while blocking immigration-related ones.

Critics are unconvinced. The ACLU, which is suing San Jose alongside the EFF, said the changes target a perceived public-relations problem more than the harms the products create. A Texas case cited in the report shows why: deputies there used Flock to track a woman suspected of violating the state's abortion ban, with the sheriff describing the queries as a search for a missing person — nothing structurally prevents a search from being mislabeled.

Flock has repeatedly said Immigration and Customs Enforcement has no access to its cameras. But local agencies deputized under federal 287(g) agreements, which allow local officers to conduct immigration arrests, can and do use Flock for immigration enforcement. Public records obtained by 404 Media showed Florida's Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission using Flock to carry out ICE arrests and reportedly to surveil critics of the agency. Florida's Department of Transportation has since barred Flock cameras from state highways, though police can still query city, county, and private cameras — including those installed by Home Depot, Lowe's, shopping centers, and homeowners associations. Activists are now pressing beauty retailer Ulta to drop its Flock contracts.

Why it matters

The cancellations mark a genuine shift in how local governments treat AI surveillance, but The Verge's reporting shows the underlying problem is structural rather than contractual. Data collected under permissive sharing and retention terms can outlive the relationships that produced it, and departing cities have no guaranteed path to deletion. Meanwhile, some cities leaving Flock, including South Pasadena, California, and Durango, Colorado, are shopping for alternatives — a shift that has reportedly enriched Axon, whose plate readers stack with body cameras and other data streams into an arguably deeper surveillance system. As EFF's Hussain put it, moving to another vendor will not stop mass surveillance; the only real fix is not relying on this technology at all.