A 2017 movie, “The Circle,” is the story of a charismatic technology leader who touts constant surveillance as a public good. More cameras and more data, he argued, would make everyone safer. A decade later, we are close to this reality.
There is a good chance a camera recorded your car today. Not a red-light camera or toll reader, but an automated license plate reader that logged your plate, make, model, color and details such as a roof rack or bumper sticker, then filed the sighting in a searchable database.
The ACLU estimates Flock Safety, an automatic license plate reader company, has installed 80,000 to 100,000 cameras nationwide. Police departments, businesses and homeowners associations use them to find stolen cars, missing people and criminal suspects.
The case for safety is easy to understand. Few people would complain if the system helped catch a serial killer. The harder question is what happens when the same network is used to track someone who is not a threat.
What makes Flock different
License plate readers are not new. Scale, artificial intelligence and connectivity change what they can reveal. Thousands of connected cameras can show where a plate appeared before and where it went next. Police can search by plate number or vehicle description without manually reviewing hours of footage.
Federal prosecutors say Flock cameras helped identify a vehicle linked to a series of armed robberies in Ohio, leading officers to a suspect carrying a pistol and wearing clothing that matched descriptions from the crimes.
However, the same network that helps police find a killer can also be used to trace a spouse, a patient or a political opponent, which would seem to be a clear breach of privacy.
A privacy step too far
The privacy risk grows when a local camera stops being local. A system approved to help protect one community can become searchable by agencies residents never knew had access.
Mountain View, California, operated 30 Flock cameras and believed it had privacy protections in place. An audit found that state and national settings had allowed agencies the city had not approved to search its data. Police Chief Mike Canfield shut down every camera in February 2026. The City Council later terminated the contract.
A Texas abortion investigation showed how far a search could reach. Public records obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation showed that an officer searched 6,809 Flock networks containing more than 83,000 cameras while looking for a woman suspected of self-managing an abortion.
The search extended into states where abortion remained legal. The reason entered into the system was blunt: “had an abortion, search for female.”
Local officials may approve cameras for stolen cars and violent crime, but a connected network can be searched for purposes residents never considered.
Is your data safe?
Flock says that the police department, business or homeowners association operating a camera owns the data and controls who can search it. Its privacy policy states that records are stored on Amazon Web Services and are generally deleted after 30 days, although applicable laws or customer policies may require a different retention period.
The person being recorded has little control. Drivers cannot opt out, and Flock says it generally cannot provide or delete individual sightings because it cannot verify someone’s identity from a license plate image.
That makes security more important.
In December 2025, 404 Media found at least 60 Flock Condor video cameras exposed to the open internet. Outsiders could reportedly view live feeds and access archived footage or administrative controls. Although those were video cameras, not the license plate database, the incident illustrates the hidden risk of computerized surveillance: Information collected to protect the public can become dangerous when access controls fail.
Protect your identity
Surveillance data creates another target for thieves if security fails. Americans reported losing more than $12.5 billion to fraud in 2024, according to FTC data. A vehicle sighting alone is unlikely to enable identity theft, but exposed location records can add to the personal information criminals already collect.
With Coveron, your identity is monitored 24/7. You’ll instantly see if your personal data is on the dark web, which accounts may be compromised, and what steps you should take to secure your digital identity before it turns into a real problem.
With Coveron, you get:
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