Flock Safety Blog

The cameras in your small town are probably https://www.flocksafety.com/ , which are definitely ALPRs. The NYC traffic cameras are to a great extent an anomaly from a bygone era; cameras installed at an exact point in time where real-time monitoring sans analysis or recording made sense.

I've never browsed the Flock Safety website [1]. >1:58pm Police coordinate takedown >2:00pm Suspect apprehended What a complete joke, lol. 1: https://www.flocksafety.com/

The State of Illinois forced Flock to tighten its data sharing controls after this was reported by 404media, as Flock was violating state law. If your state is not heavily regulating ALPRs, consider calling your state reps and secretary of state. https://www.ilsos.gov/content/dam/news/2025/august/250825d1.pdf https://www.sj-r.com/story/news/state/2025/06/12/texas-law-enforcement… Flock's PR response was, and continues to be as of this comment, factually inaccurate based on reporting that has been done, as mentioned in this piece by the EFF. https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/statement-network-sharing-use-cases-f… It would be great if Gary Tan, as YC's primary partner for Flock, could reach out to have Flock's PR misinformation corrected. https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety

This suit in part deals with the surveillance technology company Flock Safety (https://www.flocksafety.com/)

Looks like it is license plate reader cameras. https://www.flocksafety.com/

The best part is they're willing to grift people to shill it to their local homeowners association to deploy them privately! for a whole $50. https://www.flocksafety.com/refer-hoa-board

I work in the public safety domain. You don’t even need a tracker on vehicles. There are several camera startups in this space, such as Flock Safety, which can scan for plates and particular vehicle descriptions and alert law enforcement. These devices are more common than you’d think. Agencies can also enter data sharing agreements. I work on the consuming end of data from systems like this. [1]https://www.flocksafety.com/ [2]https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2024/02/27/flock-safety-su…

Fully managed security camera solution with LTE. They'll repair or service it if there's vandalism or any issues. https://www.flocksafety.com/

If that disturbs you, see Flock Safety (YC ??). Making the world safer one camera at a time: https://www.flocksafety.com/

I'm a Ring customer. The Ring Portal is optional and opt-in. People want this. This is similar but not the same as Yc's Flock https://www.flocksafety.com/ but it doesn't require a home owner's association to set up and it's inexpensive. (Flock focuses on storing license plates.) Stuff like this helps police do something about robberies and burglaries. It's harder to ignore and file away when there's video evidence. Megapixel IP cameras are getting cheaper and cheaper every day. We already live in a mass surveillance society with microphones and cameras in almost all of our rooms, with some people even installing Echos in their bathrooms. Instead of bad Big Brother, we get helpful Little Sister (Alexa, Siri, Kortana, ...). imo The only real way to completely escape it, is to avoid technology and live outside of large metros; away from civilization

The company in question: https://www.flocksafety.com/

My ex-neighborhood (Magnolia in Seattle) has had Flock Safety install 6 "AI" camera systems, two at each of the three entry/exit point of the neighborhood. Each installation has a camera overseeing entering traffic and one overseeing exiting traffic. The cameras have license-plate recognition and object detection for car color/make/model, pedestrians, bicyclists and even animals. Flock Safety charges $2,000 per year per camera. Magnolia is one of about 10 Seattle-area neighborhoods with Flock Safety cameras installed. The Magnolia residents themselves pay for the cameras and service. They all can log in to a web service and see the footage and ALPR lists, timestamps, etc. Friends I have who live there are thrilled with the system although the Seattle police seem to have little interest in the system telling the residents that they are only interested in seeing footage that shows suspicious activities or is directly related to a crime. https://www.flocksafety.com/ Porch pirates are so bad in my new neighborhood that I admit to wanting one of these on my dead-end culdesac and have investigated what it would take to build such a system myself.

Found them http://www.flocksafety.com/

Just a friendly reminder that Flock, a foreign and domestic enemy of the Constitution, i.e., the USA, aka, traitors, were incubated and funded by YCombinator and Andreessen Horowitz [1] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety [2] https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/flock-safety-secures-major-funding

It is institutional in the sense that Flock and the individual PDs have not put steps in place (either post auditing or pre not allowing bad queries) that prevent the abuse. Post auditing is obviously not taken seriously by these departments, and Flock could build tools to do this out of the box (identify weird search patterns) if they wanted to. Edit -- I see Flock does have some audit tools, https://www.flocksafety.com/trust/compliance-tools. If those work as they should, it is more on PDs to use them properly.

Whether or not Flock employees are child predators or not, the crux of the issue lies in the third parties Flock allows access to these cameras. For a link to their actual blog post where they make this comment: https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/understanding-flocks-testing-and-deve… (The terrorist allegations are from an interview December of last year https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46357850 )

AFAIK Flock owns the cameras and leases them out [0]. [0] https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/flock-safety-does-my-neighborhood-nee…

Flock has put out a report claiming 10% crime in the US is solved using their technology. There are of course counter argument, that claim this is not valid. https://www.flocksafety.com/customers/how-many-crimes-do-automated-lic…

No, two completely separate players. There was a partnership agreement a while ago, but that got severed a while back https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/axon-plans-to-sever-apis-with-flock

It's more like, "computer, search the entire flock database, which in partnership with ring also includes everybody's doorbell and security cameras[0], for this person and plot a map of their whereabouts over time[1]" 0: https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/flock-safety-and-ring-partner-to-help… 1: https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/flock-nova-smarter-investigations-fas…

HN is the malice in this instance. > The financing was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with backing from Greenoaks Capital, Bedrock Capital. Meritech Capital, Matrix Partners, Sands Capital, Founders Fund, Kleiner Perkins, Tiger Global, and Y Combinator also participated. https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/flock-safety-secures-major-funding

> Ring cameras and other cameras still require warrant. Same for the data that Flock collects That data is now one and the same though: https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/flock-safety-and-ring-partner-to-help…

Directly from the serpent's mouth: "No more gaps – just evidence. A license plate is just a start. Flock’s Vehicle Fingerprint® tech turns footage into evidence that solves cases by pinpointing vehicles by make, color, type, and unique characteristics like decals, bumper stickers, and accessories. This capability proved to be instrumental in a recent case in Catoosa, OK where police were able to track down the suspect connected to a mass murder after their vehicle was spotted by a Flock camera." https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/6-benefits-of-lpr-for-law-enforcement

Flock has a series of bizarre, obviously LLM-generated blog posts trying to convince the public that they are working "toward a future where compliance and community trust walk hand in hand".... [1] https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/policy-pulse-compliance-doesnt-have-t… [2] https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/policy-pulse-the-work-already-underwa… [3] https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/policy-pulse-transparency-control-and…

There's no need to partisanize this. Why would you immediately turn off half of your possible audience when speaking about an issue that affects everyone equally? San Francisco is covered in Flock cameras just like the ones pictured top-right in the article, and you won't find a more-Democrat-leaning place. One cannot analyze and act on data that does not exist: https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/sf-takes-historic-step-to-solve-crime…

have you seen this? https://www.flocksafety.com/products/flock-dfr much much more dystopian...

They don’t have a public list, but this blog post conveniently has a map of their locations: https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/introducing-law-enforcement-network Judging by the places they advertise, it’s mostly smaller cities/towns. I think the larger cities in the US tend to run their own cameras.

It's not just license plates. > Turn Partial Details Into Leads Start with a vague description and surface real evidence from LPR and video. > Search With Natural Language Just type what you’re looking for, like “man in blue shirt and cowboy hat,” and get visual matches instantly. http://flocksafety.com/products/flock-freeform

Between this and the abortion story [1] (CEO deflected blame and took zero ownership [2]), it looks like Flock leans into enabling this sort of lawlessness. They should be torn out of our cities. Do we have a list of their clients? EDIT: Apparently my town installed them in 2023 [3]. Inciting a couple council members over for dinner this week. [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/she-got-abortion-so-texas-cop-us… [2] https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/statement-network-sharing-use-cases-f… [3] https://atlasofsurveillance.org/search?vendor=Flock+Safety

Could be, I'm skeptical as well, but as I said they already added the caveat of 'solved' in their claim. Anyways here's their own post about how they came to that conclusion for anyone who cares to read. https://www.flocksafety.com/resources/how-many-crimes-do-automated-lic…