(Credit: Zain bin Awais/PCMag/Getty Images)
Did you know that all those cameras you see on street corners in your neighborhood aren’t owned (and in some cases, aren’t monitored) by your local government or police department? Instead, the cameras are leased from and operated by Flock Safety, a private company. People in communities around the country are calling for the cameras to come down, so I asked Benn Jordan, a YouTuber who recently worked with security researchers and journalists at 404 Media to uncover vulnerabilities in those camera systems, about what the company and its cameras really do.
How Flock Put Cameras on Thousands of Street Corners
The most well-known of the current crop of public safety cameras belongs to Flock Safety, a company that creates and sells access to highly connected video hardware and software. You might remember hearing about the company following online backlash after Ring’s Super Bowl ad for Search Party. While Flock wasn't actually involved with Search Party, the company planned to support Ring Community Requests, which allow law enforcement and other public agencies to access video recordings from Ring's network of outdoor cameras if their owners allow it. The partnership was canceled in February, but Flock found new clients: local governments.
The Flock Safety cameras you’ve probably seen most often are automated license plate readers (ALPR) that capture 6 to 12 images of each vehicle that passes by. The cameras use a combination of AI and machine learning to record data such as license plate numbers and a car’s color, make, and model, along with extras like bumper stickers, body damage, roof racks, and temporary paper tags. Flock’s ALPR cameras can also identify vehicles with missing license plates or obscured tags.
While looking for information about the different kinds of cameras and who’s viewing the video feeds, I found Benn Jordan’s YouTube videos about Flock cameras. I contacted him for a video interview, and the musician spoke to me from a workroom littered with synths.
“I figured they were just emergency cameras for accidents or maybe to see what traffic's doing. I finally just Googled it and found out [they were owned] by a third-party company, looked further into that third-party company, and then the rabbit hole opened. That was over a year ago,” Jordan told me.
“They have drones!” he said. “They have pan-tilt- zoom cameras that recognize people and zoom into their faces. You can even see what they're doing on their phone. Their ALPR cameras can recognize people. They do store pictures of people. I know this because I've accessed the footage and found pictures of myself. I'm not a car or a license plate.”
Why Was a Flock Employee Watching Kids on Camera?
At one point, it was possible for random strangers, stalkers, and creeps of all kinds to track your movements around your city or town using misconfigured cameras connected to Flock’s network. According to a resident in a leafy Atlanta suburb, the stranger danger problem with Flock persists because some Flock employees can view camera feeds at any time.
Jason Hunyar lives in Dunwoody, GA, and attended several city council meetings over a period of months, while filing dozens of public records requests to learn more about the city’s contracts with Flock Safety. In a Substack post, Hunyar identified a Flock employee who accessed cameras in a children’s gymnastics room at the nearby Jewish community center.
In the days since the post went live, Flock responded by saying the sales employee accessed the camera in a children’s gymnastics room because he was demonstrating the camera’s content moderation features to a potential client:
“In Dunwoody, a Flock employee performed a demo of this content moderation policy by searching for both “Star of David”, which our search moderation tool blocked, and “Cowboy hat,” which the search moderation tool allowed.”
The statement is part of a blog post that also alleges “claims of inappropriate conduct by our employees are false,” and frames Hunyar’s concerns as “accusations used to win a political argument.”
Benn Jordan’s response: “If I owned a business, and a company was trying to sell me a surveillance camera, and they just showed me little girls working out in a gymnastics center, I would be like, ‘Call the police!’ ‘Get out of my office.’”
Sales demonstration or not, it’s doubtful that most parents would be OK with a stranger accessing a live video feed of their kids without expressed consent. Flock employees aren’t the only ones accessing live feeds, either. Hunyar’s public records requests revealed that Dunwoody police department employees were accessing live video at baseball fields, gyms, libraries, playgrounds, and pools.
What Researchers Found Inside Flock Safety’s System
In a February blog post, Flock pushed back against being labeled a mass surveillance tool, stating that misuse of its cameras accounted for a “small fraction” of overall network activity. It’s worth noting that Flock’s US patent describes it as a “system and method for object-based query of video content captured by a dynamic surveillance network.”
(Credit: US Patent Office/PCMag)The Flock Safety patent also states that it will use neural networks to identify and track humans, and then filter them into searchable databases using a person’s age, clothing type, gait/posture, gender, height, race, and weight.
We’ve also seen some significant security concerns regarding Flock cameras. I mentioned it earlier, but while conducting research, Jordan’s team successfully accessed misconfigured Flock cameras via the open web. He told me he found 70 cameras accessible without a username or password, and browsed the video feeds for a month.
Thirty days’ worth of video is more than enough time to learn someone’s daily habits, and that’s what Jordan did while watching.
“I was able to find out if somebody was jogging on a trail every morning at 7:00 in the morning at dawn. I was able to see that person, see their habit of what they're doing every single day.”
Jordan was doing it for research purposes, to be clear, but that’d be deeply creepy and invasive levels of monitoring in any other context. Before posting the video, the group shared its findings with Flock and the federal government, so rest easy, that specific problem has been fixed. That said, the team also uncovered several hardware and software vulnerabilities in Flock police cameras, as seen in this video.
The group’s most disturbing video, to me, addressed how Flock’s cameras can be used to track people through the company’s software. Jordan explained that if you’re a business owner, a law enforcement officer, or even a homeowner’s association representative with access to Flock’s network, you could search for a car’s characteristics and then find a wealth of information about the human driving it.
“It's basically like having a GPS tracker on your car that a complete stranger can access, but the person who can access it can't even tell you who else has access to it because it’s shared on a national network.”
Do the Stats Behind These Cameras Hold Up?
“[Flock’s sales team] shows up to the police and tells them a bunch of statistics that don't check out. The research that they most often point to is literally written by their own employees and not reviewed or anything”, said Jordan.
It sounds like Flock’s sales team could be taking a page from Shotspotter. On its website, the company claims the technology, which continuously monitors community spaces for noises that could be gunshots, “enhances overall responses to gunfire, improves speed of response, improves spatial accuracy of response, reduces transport time and saves lives, and improves evidence recovery” in addition to impacting gun violence levels. No hard numbers accompany these very broad claims. So does it work? Well, the city of Detroit spent $7 million to use ShotSpotter over a three-year period, and recent numbers show that ShotSpotter actually increased emergency response times and increased the odds of police falsely identifying suspects.
Flock Safety’s media kit contains vague statistics extolling the technology's efficacy, boasting that the company has cameras in more than 6,000 communities in 49 states, and that the technology helps solve 2,800 crimes each week. Flock’s website states that its ALPR technology solved 10% of reported crimes in the United States over an unspecified period, and that 700,000 crimes were solved annually using Flock.
(Credit: Flock Safety/PCMag)Flock’s website also links to a whitepaper written by a Flock employee and a team of researchers, based heavily on results from a 2023 three-month survey of Flock ALPR customers, described by the research team as a “preliminary, exploratory study.”
In the end, no matter what the marketing language says, Flock's real value to local officials comes from its vast network of public safety cameras, which are usually leased by cities and towns with a stated aim of assisting law enforcement agencies with investigative work, such as collecting crime scene evidence or tracking license plates. Flock’s software can tap into nearby internet-connected cameras, including private business owners’ security feeds, making it a powerful tool for tracking people over vast distances and for extended periods.
In November of 2025, the Electronic Frontier Foundation revealed that police used Flock’s ALPR network to track activists and protestors. Last May, Flock made headlines when a 404 Media investigation revealed that ICE agents accessed its data through local police departments.
Residents Are Starting to Fight Back
A quick glance at online discussions on local community forums in states where Flock has contracts shows that concerns around widespread video surveillance are rising. Many commenters say they didn’t know their local officials were signing expensive contracts with public safety camera companies until the poles started appearing on street corners.
“In my experiences here in Georgia, I would go as far as to call it corruption,” said Jordan.
“I've sat down with city council members and showed them vulnerabilities that haven't been reported yet that are really, really concerning, and then they've voted along with Flock anyway. It's like, OK, I don't know what else to do.”
Local news outlets are telling a similar tale, as reports of taxpayers questioning government officials about contracts with Flock Safety at city council meetings and other public forums are increasingly common. For example, the city council in Weston, MO, voted this week to remove Flock cameras following significant resident pushback. San Jose residents even sued their city over its Flock Safety camera contract, claiming the license plate-reading technology is a mass surveillance system.
Among these reports, there are also signs that frustrated residents are doing more than just talking about the cameras. In Oakland, CA, this week, drivers were greeted by purple paint-splattered camera poles dotting the city, after someone paint-bombed the Flock Safety cameras. The vandalism follows the city council’s decision to renew its contract for nearly 300 ALPRs and to approve the installation of 40 livestream-enabled Flock Condor cameras. Also this week, in Auburn, CA, local police are searching for at least one person who stole three Flock cameras and dumped two of them in a nearby canal.
I don’t recommend destroying or vandalizing anyone’s property for any reason. But I asked Jordan for advice for readers who don’t want to see more camera poles in their hometown. He said to get involved in city council discussions and to follow the money Flock spends to secure contracts.
“They bring city council members and police officers out to dinner," said Jordan. “Then, police departments recommend to city council members to keep increasing Flock cameras. They extend the contract, get better stuff, and the taxpayers foot the bill.”