Since this summer, more than ten U.S. municipalities and police departments—including Asheville, Richmond, Lansing, Monroe, and League City—have voted to end, restrict, or phase out contracts with Flock Safety's license plate readers and other surveillance tools. The moves follow local pushback over privacy, data-sharing practices, and procurement concerns, with Flock cameras currently deployed in over 100,000 locations nationwide.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-11-06
The city of Dayton, Minnesota says Flock Safety installed and activated two license-plate cameras despite being told on September 18 that the program was on hold and no work orders should proceed. City staff later found a second reinstalled camera and have asked Flock to remove both. Separately, police departments in Crystal and St. Paul, Minnesota removed Flock cameras themselves after council votes ended their contracts, and are still waiting for Flock to retrieve the equipment.
yro.slashdot.org
· 2026-10-31
Dayton, Minnesota's government says Flock reinstalled two surveillance cameras and put them back into service despite being told a day earlier that the city's work order program was on hold. Residents noticed the cameras and alerted police, who removed them; Dayton had already voted in August to cancel its Flock contract, and city officials say the company took five days to acknowledge the cancellation and said removal would take 60 days.
techspot.com
· 2026-10-30
Dayton's city council voted on August 25 to suspend Flock's license plate reader program amid privacy concerns, and the city told Flock on September 18 that no work orders should proceed. Despite this, Flock submitted a work order on September 17 and later reinstalled two cameras without city authorization, prompting Dayton's local government to post on Facebook on September 29 confirming residents had spotted the cameras and that police were ordered to remove them.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-10-29
MapQuest has introduced a new toggleable map layer that displays locations of outdoor surveillance cameras and license plate readers, including devices from Flock, Motorola Solutions, Genetec, Axis Communications, Axon and several other manufacturers. The feature sits alongside existing traffic and incident layers in the app.
engadget.com
· 2026-10-16
Elgin Community College installed six Flock Safety surveillance cameras in April 2025, but asked the company to remove them in October after learning Flock had shared Illinois camera data with federal immigration authorities and after ICE detained a student on campus. Flock rejected the removal request, and when the college offered in December to pay out the remaining five months of the contract just to have the cameras taken down, the company did not respond.
news.slashdot.org
· 2026-10-11
Elgin Community College sought to end its contract with Flock Safety and began covering the company's surveillance cameras with trash bags and zip ties to stop them recording. According to facilities director Heinrich, unmarked vehicles believed to belong to Flock repeatedly removed the coverings during routine servicing visits, leading to a prolonged standoff between the school and the vendor.
theverge.com
· 2026-10-11
Surveillance company Flock Safety is reducing its workforce by roughly 18%, or about 270 employees, with departures effective at the end of October, according to Reuters. Flock says the reductions came through a voluntary separation program rather than layoffs, though Wired reported last month the company had asked some staff to leave to avoid mandatory cuts.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-10-09
Officials in St. Lucie County, Florida discovered 11 license-plate reader cameras installed along roads without any permits or links to local or state agencies. Authorities say they have not determined who installed the devices or where the collected data has been going.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-10-02
Cybersecurity researcher Joshua Michael published a map based on Flock Security's own leaked location data, identifying more than 170,000 cameras and 130,000 related devices, including 27,000 acoustic sensors, across the US. That total roughly triples the 120,000-camera figure Flock had publicly cited this summer, and the findings were referenced during a Senate Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism hearing on the company.
theintercept.com
· 2026-09-28
MIT has installed hundreds of small camera units across campus over the summer, including more than 500 documented by The Tech, with some positioned near faculty offices and bathroom entrances. At the May 2026 Institute Faculty Meeting, administrators acknowledged testing AI-based search capabilities from Ambient.ai on campus footage without prior notice or consent from the community.
fnl.mit.edu
· 2026-09-25
A hacker collective called stegan0gram physically removed a Flock Safety roadside camera, extracted its stored data, and recovered an on-device encryption key meant to protect it. They shared the material with 404 Media and Distributed Denial of Secrets, which passed it to WIRED for joint analysis showing the camera logged roughly 50,200 vehicles and 1.6 million images over about 21 days.
yro.slashdot.org
· 2026-09-17
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