Every time you drive past an automatic license plate reader (ALPR), a camera photographs your plate, logs where you were, and stores it in a searchable database — whether or not you've done anything wrong. ALPRs just vacuum up data on everyone who drives past. Flock Safety is the largest company doing this in the United States.
FlockWatch exists to make that invisible surveillance visible — and to help people organize, peacefully and lawfully, to push back.
Flock Safety is the biggest ALPR provider in the country. The company says it has more than 12,000 clients across the U.S., including more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies, along with businesses and homeowners' associations. Its pole-mounted cameras use optical character recognition and machine learning to read plates and even flag vehicle details like bumper stickers and roof racks.
The scale is staggering. The ACLU estimates there are roughly 80,000 to 100,000 Flock cameras across the U.S. — on highways, in neighborhoods, and outside your local hardware store. Flock itself claims a network of more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states, though it does not publish the locations, so the figure can't be independently audited.
ALPRs were sold as a crime-fighting tool. But the accountability problems have become hard to ignore:
The data spreads far beyond your town. Mountain View disabled its Flock cameras after discovering that Flock had shared license plate data with hundreds of agencies, including federal entities, without permission — and that some lookup features had been activated without the city's knowledge.
It gets abused. The Institute for Justice has tracked over 100 incidents of ALPR abuse — including wrongful stops at gunpoint and officers using the data to stalk romantic interests.
It's been used against protesters. This is the part that matters most to us. Investigations by the EFF found that law enforcement used Flock's system to track people exercising their First Amendment rights — logging hundreds of searches tied to political demonstrations, and using the technology to target activists. A tool that tracks where cars go is a tool that can track who showed up to a protest.
Here's the encouraging part: ordinary people are pushing back, and it's working.
The Institute for Justice counts 157 local governments that have canceled or declined to renew ALPR contracts since the start of 2025. Between August 2021 and May 2026, 82 Flock contracts were terminated across 28 states. Cities from Santa Cruz to Mountain View to Chandler have voted to end their contracts. In August 2026, people marched to Flock Safety's offices in Boston.
None of this happened by accident. It happened because people learned where the cameras were, understood what they do, and organized.
FlockWatch's surveillance map is built on open data. Volunteers log cameras onto OpenStreetMap, and that crowdsourced registry has grown to hundreds of thousands of ALPR-tagged locations. Much of this movement was sparked by DeFlock, an open-source project started by software engineer Will Freeman that made the invisible visible — and which Flock tried (and failed) to shut down with a cease-and-desist that the EFF fought off pro bono.
We stand on the shoulders of that work. The map you see here reflects that shared, community-built picture of where the cameras are.
Seeing the cameras is the first step. Doing something about it, together, is the next one.
FlockWatch adds an organizing layer on top of the map: a place to find and coordinate lawful, peaceful action in your community — while protecting the privacy of the people doing the organizing. Because the same surveillance we're pushing back against is exactly what activists need protection from.
That's why we collect almost nothing about you, never show who's attending an event, and keep protest locations general until they need to be specific. How we protect you.
The cameras are already watching. It's time to watch back — and organize.