Category: abuse
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EFF: Police use Flock against protestors and activists
On November 20, 2025, the Electronic Frontier Foundation published a report that it had identified, through public records requests, hundreds of searches by more than 50 federal, state, and local police agencies across the country (archive link), containing terms like “protest” or “no kings”. These searches coincided with multiple political protests throughout the year, despite
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Police officer terminated after abusing Flock access to… train a competitor?
Well, at least this is a form of Flock abuse we hadn’t heard of before. On October 10, 2025, Appen Media reported that a police officer in Sandy Springs, Georgia, had resigned after a whistleblower said that he had used Flock data to try to help a potential Flock competitor improve their software (archive link).
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Evansville, Indiana Provides Federal Agencies With Access To Their Flock Surveillance Network
The Courier & Press, on July 22, 2025, published an article about its town’s use of Flock and the data that Vanderburgh County Sheriff’s Office has been sharing with federal agencies (archive link). Evansville is located in southern Indiana and has a population of about 120,000. Houston Harwood, the journalist at Courier & Press that
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Oakland and San Francisco Police Get Caught Sharing Flock Data With Feds
In yet another case of law enforcement personnel sharing Flock data with federal agencies, in violation of state laws explicitly prohibiting it, the San Francisco Standard on July 14, 2025, revealed that officers in Oakland and San Francisco had been performing Flock lookups on behalf of federal agencies (archive link), including ICE. This is a
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Five Virginia Counties Found To Be Sharing Flock Data With Federal Agencies
The Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO published an excellent article, “Fed’s hidden immigration weapon: Virginia’s surveillance network“, on July 3, 2025 (archive link). The article exposes data sharing between five county police departments in Virginia and federal authorities on a variety of cases, including immigration. The journalists’ investigation was based upon earlier data
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California Police Get Caught Searching Flock Data For “Immigration Protest”
404Media on June 17 published findings from a public records request to the Redlands Police Department, in California, that revealed yet more instances of abuse of Flock’s data sharing features (archive link). On February 3, the Escondido Police Department was able to search Redlands’ Flock surveillance network, and provided their search reason as “immigration protest”,
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Oregon Law Enforcement Gets Caught Sharing Back Door Access With Feds
On June 16, 2025, 404Media once again broke Flock-related news, this time with the results of an extensive public records request that revealed the existence of the Southern Oregon Analyst Group (archive link). The Southern Oregon Analyst Group is apparently a coalition of members of several different police agencies who are casually sharing data over
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Florida Highway Patrol Routinely and Openly Uses Flock For Immigration Enforcement
On June 15, 2025, the Orlando Sentinel reported on data showing that Florida’s highway patrol had used Flock Safety’s surveillance network for immigration-related purposes over 250 times (archive link) between March 13 and May 5. The Orlando Sentinel quoted reporting from 404Media, which said that the searches had been done “either at the behest of
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Southern California Law Enforcement Gets Caught Sharing Flock Data With ICE
On June 13, 2025, CalMatters broke the news that multiple law enforcement agencies in southern California had been ignoring state law and sharing data collected by ALPRs (archive link) with federal agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). CalMatters writes that, “state law enforcement agencies are barred from sharing license plate reader data with out-of-state
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Texas law enforcement uses Flock in national search of woman who had an abortion
This Dallas Morning News article reports on a Texas sheriff using Flock to perform a national search for a woman who had an abortion.