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Pushback against mass surveillance is growing\u2014and it’s going beyond Flock. <\/span>Barry Chin\/Boston Globe\/Getty<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIf you want to get in your car and you want to go down to Buc-ee\u2019s in St. Augustine, it\u2019s really none of the government\u2019s damn business if you\u2019re doing that, right?\u201d Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Monday at a news conference. He announced that Florida will revoke all law enforcement license-plate-recognition camera permits<\/a> on state highways, with all such cameras to be removed by the end of September.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhat we don\u2019t want in the state of Florida is to have a digital AI surveillance state where everything we\u2019re doing is being tracked at all times,\u201d DeSantis added<\/a>, referring to the recent expansion of ALPRs\u2014automated license plate reader cameras\u2014across the country. The cameras are supposed to catch people committing crimes, and sometimes they do. But they\u2019re also ripe for abuse. Each camera forms part of a nationwide network, and by sharing vehicle information between and within police departments, ALPRs can enable officers to track what are called \u201cpatterns of life\u201d: where a person is likely to be, who they spend time with, and what they\u2019re doing in a given moment.\u00a0<\/p>\n Police officers nationwide are taking advantage of that surveillance ability. In dozens of cases, officers have lost their jobs or faced criminal charges for doing things like searching an ex-girlfriend\u2019s license plate information 2,000 times,<\/a> searching an estranged wife\u2019s license plates 700 times<\/a>, or tracking an abortion-seeker across state lines<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Florida is not alone in cancelling Flock contracts. Texas, last week, ordered state agencies to stop funding Flock cameras. The Oakland-based advocacy group Secure Justice, which tracks automated license plate reader use on the municipal level, says that in the month of August more towns and cities cancelled their Flock contracts than ever before<\/a>: of the 214 cities that have dropped Flock since 2021, 90 did so in August 2026.<\/a>\u00a0 (At least<\/a> three towns<\/a> have reported<\/a> that Flock reinstalled or reactivated their cameras after local officials ended their contracts.)\u00a0<\/p>\n Strictly regulating data retention might be one solution. A police department can\u2019t do as much to share data with ICE, for example, if state laws mandate that the data be deleted quickly. In New Hampshire, ALPRs must delete all data after three minutes; Flock\u2019s current default retention period is seven days.\u00a0<\/p>\n Corinne Worthington works as the advocacy manager with the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a nonprofit focused on litigation and research on discriminatory surveillance technology. To Worthington, the backlash against Flock is \u201cputting a name to people\u2019s fears.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI think that because of how public Flock has been, people have woken up to the harms of ALPRs in a way that maybe, previously, they weren\u2019t aware of,\u201d Worthington said. While Flock has over 120,000 license plate readers across the country, it is far from the only ALPR company. Motorola, the AI roadway safety firm Rekor, and Axon, the police tech firm behind Tasers, all sell similar cameras to police. Those companies aren\u2019t household names in the way that Flock is, nor have they been subject to the same backlash.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s the problem with targeting specifically the vendor, not the technology as a whole,\u201d Worthington said. When states and cities cancel their contracts with Flock, they\u2019re likely to end up replacing those cameras with ones made by one of the other ALPR companies. And those other companies are certainly aware of the backlash. Rekor, another company that sells ALPRs, is calling for national regulations on the cameras<\/a> to \u201cpreserve ALPR\u2019s public safety value.\u201d Those regulations would include \u201canonymizing non-hotlist plate data\u201d which could then be re-identified with a valid warrant or court order.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe fight over whether ALPR should exist has stopped being useful to anyone,\u201d Rekor vice president Charlie Degliomini told me. \u201cThe rules are the real argument.\u201d As far as he is aware, Degliomini added, his company is the only ALPR vendor calling for a warrant requirement on at least some plate searches.<\/p>\n But Rekor\u2019s cameras can be abused, too: <\/strong>activists <\/strong>in New York are suing the Westchester County Police Department<\/a> for allegedly using Rekor\u2019s tools to log their locations thousands of times. And the CEO of Axon, another camera manufacturer, floated the possibility of changing the shape of Axon cameras so they look less similar to the Flock cameras Americans are lately so fond<\/a> of destroying.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve had some people say they\u2019d like to see us make just a different camera, because our ALPR camera looks like an ALPR camera,\u201d Axon CEO Rick Smith said in a now-deleted webinar,<\/a> as 404 Media first reported.\u00a0<\/p>\n Whether cameras that look different, but perform the same surveillance function, will eventually inspire the same backlash remains to be seen.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n