Flock Safety, the AI surveillance camera company, is losing city contracts faster than at any point in its history. According to Ars Technica, watchdog group Secure Justice now counts 93 jurisdictions that ended their Flock contracts in August alone, a number it revised up from 90 on August 28. That’s a record pace, and it’s happening while the political pressure on the company keeps climbing from both parties.
What stands out here is how fast this turned bipartisan. This isn’t a fringe privacy fight anymore. It’s a mainstream backlash.
What’s happening
Flock builds automated license plate readers (ALPRs) that cities mount at intersections and along roads. The cameras log plates, and Flock lets police search that data. The problem isn’t the hardware. It’s what people are doing with it, and who’s watching now.
The recent flashpoints, as reported by Ars Technica:
- Federal investigation: Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said he’s investigating Flock’s “collection, retention, and dissemination” of data from its AI cameras.
- A Republican governor turns on it: After two Florida police officers were arrested for misusing Flock, Gov. Ron DeSantis called the cameras “out of control” in his state. He described seeing “a police officer using this to track, like, an ex-girlfriend.”
- Documented abuse: A Texas sheriff’s office used Flock to search for a woman who’d had an abortion, and federal agents floated using it outside gun shows, per accounts cited by Ars Technica.
- Company response: Flock’s top lawyer says newly modified terms now “expressly prohibit” customers from using the service to “mislead, harass, stalk, or otherwise impose upon or violate the legal rights of another person.”
Why it matters
The terms-of-use update hasn’t cooled anything down. When a company rewrites its policy on a Friday and a senator opens an investigation the same week, the rules aren’t the story. The trust is.
This is significant because ALPR technology predates Flock by years, and even longtime critics say AI changed the stakes. “Maybe in the past it didn’t feel like every red light cam really meant a pair of eyes was watching you, but with AI, that’s increasingly becoming the reality,” Jake Laperruque of the Center for Democracy and Technology told Ars Technica. He warned that AI can “morph ALPRs into a mass surveillance dragnet,” pointing to keyword and people searches, real-time facial recognition, and Border Patrol using AI to flag “suspicious” driving patterns.
The layer that flips an ordinary plate reader into a search engine for human movement is the AI. Once you can query a camera network by keyword or face, a passive log becomes an active tracking tool. That’s the shift cities are now reacting to.
The bigger picture
Catherine Crump, a UC Berkeley law professor, put the sentiment bluntly to Ars Technica: “It definitely does not help that this is yet another Silicon Valley product that no one asked for that threatens to reshape people’s lives.”
For the AI industry, the Flock story is a preview of a broader reckoning. Surveillance and biometrics vendors have spent years selling capability first and worrying about governance later. That order is now getting reversed by city councils, state officials, and federal investigators at the same time.
What to watch next
- More cancellations: The August count kept rising through the month. Expect the tally to keep moving as more councils vote.
- Regulation, not just contracts: Hawley’s probe could set the template for how AI surveillance data gets governed at the federal level.
- A vendor test case: How Flock handles this determines whether “we updated our terms” is enough, or whether the market now demands hard technical limits on who can search what.
If you build or deploy AI systems that touch personal data, the lesson lands cleanly: capability without guardrails is now a business risk, not just an ethics footnote. Full reporting and the incident details are available at the original Ars Technica article.