Flock cameras have become such attractive targets for destruction that some police have become protective of information about where they’re mounted. A local news story Friday in Louisville, Kentucky detailed the Louisville police’s effort to keep the locations secret.
The story also mentions that when the locations of some of the cameras were released, they were almost immediately destroyed.
On Saturday, Brian Merchant of the tech criticism newsletter Blood in the Machine catalogued a wider trend regarding Flock, the company famous for its networked, AI-enhanced, solar-powered license plate readers, video cameras, gunshot detectors, and “drone as first responder” tech: vandalism against Flock equipment is happening all over the country, seemingly without coordination.
Most recently, on February 16 in La Mesa, California, a city in the San Diego metro area, a local news outlet reported two destroyed Flock cameras—one smashed, the other sabotaged.
But most entertainingly (that is if you’re the kind of sicko who is entertained by acts of vandalism) in October of last year in Eugene and Springfield, Oregon, six Flock cameras were apparently cut down from poles and destroyed. A sticker with the note, “Hahaha get wrecked ya surveilling f***s” was applied to one of the poles below the spot where it was cut.
In and around Suffolk, Virginia, last December, an arrest was made after 13 cameras were destroyed. 41-year-old Jefferey S. Sovern, acknowledged, according to the local news, that “he used vice grips to help him disassemble the two-piece mounting poles,” and that he had kept things like wires, batteries and solar panels from the camera assemblies.
Sovern started a gofundme, where he wrote: “I appreciate a quiet life and am not looking forward to this process, but I will take the silver lining that this can be a catalyst in a bigger movement to roll-back intrusive surveillance.” He also links to an activist site called deflock.org.
Last month in Lisbon, Connecticut, police said they were investigating a destroyed Flock camera.
The Sheriff’s department in Greenview, Illinois said last month that two of its Flock cameras were cut down and destroyed.
But if you’ve heard only one thing about Flock lately, it probably has something to do with Ring’s eerie Super Bowl commercial involving its since-aborted partnership with Flock.
When reached for comment, Holly Beilin, chief of staff to Flock’s chief communications officer providedsixlinkstonewsstories and the following statement:
“We respect and value concerns and feedback raised about our technology, and building trust is important to us. We are regularly on the ground in communities across the country answering questions and providing education on what our technology does and does not do.”
CHICAGO — Amazon’s smart doorbell maker Ring has terminated a partnership with police surveillance tech company Flock Safety.
The announcement follows a backlash that erupted after 30-second Ring ad that aired during the Super Bowl featuring a lost dog that is found through a network of cameras, sparking fears of a dystopian surveillance society.
But that feature, called Search Party, was not related to Flock. And Ring’s announcement doesn’t cite the ad as a reason for the “joint decision” for the cancellation.
Ring and Flock said last year they were planning on working together to give Ring camera owners the option to share their video footage in response to law enforcement requests made through a Ring feature known as Community Requests.
“Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated,” Ring’s statement said.
“The integration never launched, so no Ring customer videos were ever sent to Flock Safety.”
Beyond the Flock partnership, Ring has faced other surveillance concerns.
In the Super Bowl ad, a lost dog is found with Ring’s Search Party feature, which the company says can “reunite lost dogs with their families and track wildfires threatening your community.” The clip depicts the dog being tracked by cameras throughout a neighborhood using artificial intelligence.
And viewers took to social media to criticize it for being sinister, leaving many wondering if it would be used to track humans and saying they would turn the feature off.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that focus on civil liberties related to digital technology, said this week that Americans should feel unsettled over the potential loss of privacy.
“Amazon Ring already integrates biometric identification, like face recognition, into its products via features like “Familiar Faces,” which depends on scanning the faces of those in sight of the camera and matching it against a list of pre-saved, pre-approved faces,” the Foundation wrote Tuesday. “It doesn’t take much to imagine Ring eventually combining these two features: face recognition and neighborhood searches.”
In a striking strategic pivot, Amazon’s Ring has officially called off its planned partnership with police surveillance provider Flock Safety.
The decision marks a sudden retreat from a collaboration that would have significantly expanded law enforcement access to private doorbell footage.
While Ring officially claims the integration was scrapped because it required “significantly more time and resources than anticipated,” the move follows a week of intense public scrutiny and a high-profile marketing blunder.
The primary catalyst for the backlash was a 30-second advertisement aired during the Super Bowl. The ad touted Ring’s “Search Party” feature, demonstrating how the company’s AI can “surveil” a neighbourhood to help locate a lost dog.
While intended to showcase a helpful community tool, the imagery of a co-ordinated, AI-powered neighbourhood sweep struck a nerve. In today’s political climate, critics quickly voiced fears that technology designed to identify pets could effortlessly be repurposed to track humans, effectively turning suburban streets into a dragnet for state surveillance.
Public anxiety was further heightened by Ring’s recent rollout of facial recognition capabilities. To many, the “Search Party” ad felt like a short leap toward a permanent surveillance infrastructure. This outcry led many users to begin disabling the feature entirely, signalling a breakdown in trust.
The partnership with Flock Safety, a company best known for automatic licence plate readers and a centralized database used by agencies like ICE, only amplified these concerns, as it would have allowed police to bypass certain warrants by requesting footage directly through Ring’s platform.
Ring had previously faced criticism for sharing videos with law enforcement without court orders, a practice it appeared to drop in 2024. The Flock alliance was seen by many as a quiet return to those police-friendly policies.
By calling off the deal, Ring and Flock have avoided a deepening controversy, though the “Search Party” backlash highlights a growing tension between consumer convenience and the encroaching reality of neighbourhood surveillance. For now, Ring insists the decision was mutual and that no customer footage was ever shared with Flock.
Ring has canceled its partnership with Flock Safety, after receiving backlash for running a Super Bowl ad touting its Search Party feature. If you’ll recall, Ring revealed back in October 2025 that it was entering a partnership with the surveillance company, which would make it possible for law enforcement to ask smart doorbell owners for videos captured by their devices. In its announcement, the company said that the “planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated.” The decision to call off the partnership was mutual, Ring added, and Flock Safety’s integration was never launched. Apparently, no Ring customer footage was ever sent to Flock.
Under the partnership, law enforcement agencies using Flock’s Nova platform or FlockOS would have been able to use Ring’s Community Requests to ask for doorbell videos from users. They would have been asked to specify the location and timeframe of the incident, as well as provide a unique investigation code and the details about what is being investigated. Their requests would then be forwarded to relevant users, who could choose to share footage from their doorbell. Ring said the whole process would have been anonymous and optional.
Ring was known to have shared security cam videos to law enforcement without a court order or the device owner’s consent at least 11 times in the past. In 2024, however, it seemed to have walked back its police-friendly stance and said that it would stop sharing videos with the police without a warrant. This alliance with Flock would have marked a return to police collaboration after the company distanced itself from law enforcement. Flock is known for its automatic license plate readers and for centralizing the information it collects into a database that police can search without a warrant. While law enforcement says the system can help them solve crimes like kidnapping. 404Media reported last year that ICE has been using the database, citing immigration-related reasons.
While Ring’s official reason was that the Flock partnership would need more resources than expected, it’s worth noting that the company recently got flak for its Super Bowl Search Party ad. Ring touted it as a way to find lost dogs by using its cameras’ AI to identify pets running across their field of vision and then pooling feeds together to identify missing pets. While Search Party isn’t new and was announced last year, the ad sparked concerns about surveillance and how the tech could be misused, leading users to disable the feature for their cameras altogether.
There are just 16 Flock Safety cameras in Thornton.
But those electronic eyes, mounted to poles at intersections throughout this city of nearly 150,000, brought out dozens of people to the Thornton Community Center for a discussion on how the controversial license plate-reading cameras are being used — and whether they should be used at all.
Law enforcement agencies cite the automatic license-plate readers, or ALPRs, as a powerful tool that bolsters their ability to locate and stop suspects who may be on their way to committing their next assault or robbery.
But Meg Moore, a six-year resident of the city who is helping spearhead opposition to Flock cameras, said she worries about how the rapidly spreading surveillance system is impacting residents’ privacy and Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. Thornton’s Flock camera data can be seen by more than 1,600 other law enforcement agencies across the country.
“We want to make sure this is truly safe and effective,” she said in an interview.
The debate over Atlanta-based Flock Safety’s cameras, which not only can record license plate numbers but can search for the specific characteristics of a vehicle linked to an alleged crime, has been picking up steam in recent years. The discussions have largely played out in metro Denver and Front Range cities in recent months, but this year they reached the state Capitol, where lawmakers are pitching a couple of bills to tighten up rules around surveillance.
In Denver, Mayor Mike Johnston has been butting heads with the City Council over the issue. Johnston is so convinced of Flock’s value in combating crime that in October, he extended the contract with the company against the wishes of much of the council. Denver has 111 Flock cameras.
In Longmont, elected leaders took a different approach. Its City Council voted in December to pause all sharing of Flock Safety data with other municipalities, declined an expansion of its contract with the company and began searching for an alternative.
Louisville beat its Boulder County neighbor to the punch by several months, disabling its Flock cameras at the end of June and removing them by the start of October. City spokesman Derek Cosson said privacy concerns from residents largely drove the city’s decision.
Steve Mathias, a Thornton resident for nearly a decade, would like to see Flock’s cameras gone from his city. Short of that, he said, reliable controls on how the streetside data is collected, stored and shared are paramount.
“In our rush to make our community safe, we’re not getting the full picture of the risks we’re facing,” he said. “We’re making ourselves safe in some ways by making ourselves less safe in others.”
The hot-button debate in Thornton played out at last month’s community meeting and continued at a City Council meeting last week, where the city’s Police Department gave a presentation on the Flock system.
Cmdr. Chad Parker laid out several examples of Flock’s cameras being instrumental in apprehending bad actors — in cases ranging from homicide to sex assault to child exploitation to a $5,700 theft at a Nike store.
As recently as Monday, Thornton police announced on X that investigators had tracked down a man suspected of hitting and killing a 14-year-old boy who was riding a small motorized bike over the weekend. The agency said a Flock camera in Thornton gave officers a “strong lead” in identifying the hit-and-run suspect within 24 hours.
At the Feb. 3 council study session, police Chief Jim Baird described Flock’s camera system as “one of the best tools I’ve seen in 32 years of law enforcement.”
But that doesn’t sway those in Thornton who are wary of the camera network.
“I’m not a fan of building toward a surveillance state,” Mathias said.
The hazards of a system like Flock, he said, lie not just in the pervasive data-collection methods the company uses but also in who eventually might get to see and use that data — be it a rogue law enforcement officer or a hacker who manages to break into Flock’s database.
“A person who wants us to do us harm with this system will have as much capability as the police have to do good,” he said.
A Flock Safety license plate recognition camera is seen on a street light post on Ken Pratt Boulevard near the intersection with U.S. 287 in Longmont on Dec. 10, 2025. (Matthew Jonas/Daily Camera)
Crime-fighting tool or prone to misuse?
In November, a Columbine Valley police officer was disciplined after he accused a Denver woman of theft based in large part on evidence from Flock cameras, according to reporting from Fox31. The officer mistakenly claimed the woman had stolen a $25 package in a nearby town and said he’d used Flock cameras to track her car.
“It’s putting too much trust in the hands of people who don’t know what they’re doing,” DeFlock’s Will Freeman said of so many police agencies’ adoption of the technology.
Last summer, 9News reported that the Loveland Police Department had shared access to its Flock camera system with U.S. Border Patrol. That came two months after the station reported that the department gave the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives access to its account, which ATF agents then used to conduct searches for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Parker, the Thornton police commander, said any searches connected to immigration cases or to women from out of state who are seeking an abortion in Colorado — another scenario that’s been raised — “won’t ever touch our system.” State laws restrict cooperation with federal immigration authorities and with other states’ abortion-related investigations.
“Any situation I feel uncomfortable about or that might be in conflict with our policies or with Colorado law, I will revoke their access — no problem,” he said.
Thornton deputy city attorney Adam Stephens said motorists’ Fourth Amendment rights are not being violated by the city’s Flock camera network. During last week’s meeting, he cited several recent court cases that, in essence, determined that there is no right to privacy while driving down a public roadway.
In an interview, Stephens said Thornton was “in compliance with the law.”
Flock spokesman Paris Lewbel wrote in an email that the company was “proud to partner with the Thornton Police Department to provide technology used to investigate and solve crimes and to help locate missing persons.”
Lewbel provided links to two news stories about minor children who were abducted and then found with the help of Flock’s cameras in Thornton and elsewhere.
At the council’s study session last week, Parker provided more examples of Flock’s role in fighting crime and finding missing people in Thornton. They included police nabbing a suspect who had hit and killed a pedestrian, locating a burglar who was suspected of robbing several dispensaries, and tracking down an 89-year-old man with dementia who had gotten into his car and gotten lost.
“It allows us to find vehicles in a manner we weren’t able to previously,” Parker said of the camera network.
Thornton installed its first 10 Flock cameras in 2022 and then added five more — plus a mobile unit — two years later. The initial deployment was in response to a spike in auto thefts in the city, which peaked at 1,205 in 2022 (amid an overall surge in Colorado). Thornton recorded 536 auto thefts last year.
The city says Flock cameras have been involved in 200 cases that resulted in an arrest or a warrant application in Thornton over the last three years.
Thornton police have access to nearly 2,200 other agencies’ Flock systems across the United States, while nearly 1,650 law enforcement agencies can access Thornton’s Flock data, according to data provided by the city.
For Anaya Robinson, the public policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, the networked nature of Flock cameras across wide geographies is a big part of the problem. By linking one police agency’s Flock technology with that of thousands of other police departments, it “creates a surveillance environment that could violate the Fourth Amendment.”
The sweeping nature of Flock’s surveillance is also worrisome, Robinson said.
“You’re not just collecting the data of vehicles that ping (a police department’s) hot list (of suspicious vehicles), you’re collecting the data of every vehicle that is caught on a Flock camera,” he said.
And because the technology is relatively inexpensive — Thornton pays $48,500 to Flock annually for its system — it’s an affordable crime-fighting tool for most communities. But that doesn’t mean it should be deployed, DeFlock’s Freeman said.
Fight remains a largely local one
State lawmakers are crafting bills this session to limit the reach of surveillance technologies like Flock’s.
Senate Bill 70 would put limits on access to databases and the sharing of information. It would prohibit a government from accessing a database that reveals an individual’s or a vehicle’s historical location information, and it would prohibit sharing that information with third parties or with government agencies outside the controlling entity’s jurisdiction. Certain exceptions would apply.
Senate Bill 71 would direct a “law enforcement agency to use surveillance technology only for lawful purposes directly related to public safety or for an active investigation.” It also would forbid the use of facial-recognition technology without a warrant and would place limits on the amount of time data can be retained.
Both bills await their first committee hearings.
Thornton says it doesn’t use facial recognition technology. Its Flock data is retained for 30 days.
Regardless of what passes at the state Capitol, the real fight over license plate readers of any type will likely continue to happen at the local level. Thornton’s council plans further discussions on Flock next month.
For Moore, the resident who is leading the charge against the cameras, potential surveillance of the immigrant community is what troubles her the most.
“We want to make sure we’re operating this so that it’s safe for all of our residents,” she said. “Getting rid of the cameras altogether is a tough sell. But there needs to be a conversation about guardrails.”
Mayor Pro Tem Roberta Ayala, a Thornton native, said she has heard a wide array of opinions from her constituents about the advantages and potential downsides of the technology.
“Could it be misused? Yes. Do we want to stop that? Yes,” she said.
But as a victim of crime herself, Ayala also knows the immense damage and disruption that crime causes victims and their families, be it a stolen vehicle or something much worse. And as a teacher, Ayala is concerned about achieving justice for the families of children who are harmed or abused.
“If it can save even five kids,” she said, “I want the cameras.”
FLOCK GROUP INC has had some explaining to do this year. Billed as an intelligent platform that “unites communities, businesses, schools and law enforcement, combining their power to solve and deter crime together,” the vendor of automated license plate reader (ALPR) data has, in actuality, been accused of using data points from 83,000 cameras to help a sheriff’s deputy in Texas track one of the state’s citizens as she fled to Illinois — a state where the right to end a pregnancy is protected — following a self-administered abortion in the Lone Star State.
The Ohio State Highway Patrol has a contract to give the company $90,000 per year.
Considering the current lax attitude toward ALPR data sharing by Ohio’s state government, that’s too much, says Gary Daniels, a legislative director at the Ohio chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
“Given [the lack of regulation], we think it is irresponsible of our state and local governments to be purchasing, obtaining, or using these types of mass surveillance devices and technologies with no adequate statutory safeguards in place governing their use,” Daniels told Scene in an October 8 email.
The highway patrol is not alone among Ohio entities in giving the firm business. The Cleveland Division of Police signed its most recent contract with Flock, for $250,000, on the 1st of May of this year, and the division of police in the state capital, Columbus, signed a $228,000 contract covering 2 years of service in late 2023. (Cincinnati signed a 90-day trial agreement with the company in 2024; it was allowed to expire.)
But the state highway patrol contract is particularly relevant because it flies in the face of Ohio voters’ 2023 passage of constitutional protections for abortions, says Sarah T. Hamid, associate director of activism at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
“When Ohio voters constitutionally protected the right to make reproductive decisions and travel for healthcare, they didn’t intend for their state to subsidize the very surveillance tools that can criminalize those choices.” — Sarah T. Hamid, Electronic Frontier Foundation
“Ohio’s $90,000 annual expenditure on Flock Safety’s surveillance network directly contradicts the state’s constitutional commitment to reproductive freedom,” Hamid wrote in an October 10 email to Scene.
“The recent Johnson County, Texas case — where a sheriff’s deputy used Flock’s network to search over 83,000 cameras across multiple states to track an individual who had a self-managed abortion — demonstrates exactly how this surveillance infrastructure can be weaponized against people exercising their reproductive rights. When Ohio voters constitutionally protected the right to make reproductive decisions and travel for healthcare, they didn’t intend for their state to subsidize the very surveillance tools that can criminalize those choices.”
The EFF has written about the case in detail on its website, bringing significant national attention to the issue.
In 2023, Ohio voters approved Issue 1, a ballot measure which added protections for abortion rights to the state constitution. The move was widely viewed as a response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case, which effectively overturned the federal abortion protections enforced since the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973. Ballot measures have become a popular way for residents of states with gerrymandered legislatures to work around the more hidebound members of their state assemblies, which do not necessarily reflect the views of their constituents. Ohio Issue 1 is often cited as an example of the trend.
An OSHP spokesperson, Sgt. Tyler Ross, was asked via email whether the state policing organization was looking at dropping its contract with Flock in light of the Texas incident and Ohio’s constitutional abortion protections. Ross sent back the the following statement:
“The Ohio State Highway Patrol uses Flock Safety as a tool to help improve public safety and support our mission of protecting the community. These cameras assist the Patrol to identify and locate stolen vehicles, identify suspects in criminal investigations, and respond more quickly to alerts about missing or endangered persons.”
A lucrative business
The list of financial backers who have a stake in Flock, which is headquartered in Atlanta, reads like a who’s-who of Silicon Valley giants, with funders including Y Combinator, Bedrock Capital, Tiger Global Management and Andreessen Horowitz, according to the corporate relationships database LittleSis.
And when it comes to the firm’s corporate ties, tracking the movements of women’s bodies is hardly outside of the tone struck in the past: Flock’s flagship ALPR product is designed to be easily integrated with the offerings of Palintir, a surveillance vendor whose founder has been described as possibly the “most influential right-wing intellectual of the last 20 years” and is the one of the leading advocates for the dark enlightenment movement that hopes for an American absolute monarchy.
(Marc Andreessen of Flock funder Andreessen Horowitz is also said to be a dark enlightenment fan.)
Flock’s databases have access not only to cameras erected by law enforcement organizations, but to resources including corporate images from parking lots at places like Lowe’s and Home Depot, according to 404media.
In the case of the Texas/Illinois tracking incident, the outlet writes, the way authorities behaved “shows in stark terms how police in one state are able to take the ALPR technology … and turn it into a tool for finding people who have had abortions.”
The ALPR firm has agreements with more than 5,000 policing agencies across the U.S., according to company materials.
The list includes large conservative communities like Gilbert, AZ and Huntsville, AL, but it also covers many communities in California, a state often cited as being a stronghold for those defending abortion rights. That even includes Berkeley, which many Americans consider to be the template for a leftist university town. And at the state level, the California Highway Patrol has a multi-year contract with the company worth up to $3 million, according to documents obtained by Scene through a public records request. California governor Gavin Newsom recently vetoed a bill that would have regulated ALPR use in his state.
“This technology is ungovernable, given the number of agencies, interests, and impossibility of true compliance enforcement,” UC San Diego associate professor Lilly Irani told CalMatters in response to the veto. According to the outlet, law enforcement agencies in California have been caught recently breaking the law by sharing ALPR data with ICE and the border patrol. Similarly, an October study from the University of Washington Center for Human Rights came to the conclusion that there appeared to have been backdoor access by U.S. Border Patrol to the networks of at least 10 Washington-State police departments which did not explicitly authorize Border Patrol searches of their network data.
The discovery process for a September lawsuit found that a Virginia man had been tracked by the company’s cameras 526 times in four months.
Regarding the Texas abortion patient-tracking incident, Flock spokesperson Josh Thomas told Scene in August that the issue “has been well-covered as a clear missing person case, and not enforcement of abortion laws.”
“Our CEO Garrett responded here, and he also laid out many of the additional steps we’re taking to ensure Flock is used in compliance with local laws and statutes.”
But he also stated that Flock “is just one tool in the toolbox for police, as we don’t monitor or regulate other investigative techniques of law enforcement.”
That hands-off approach bit the company hard when in October, it was revealed in Texas media that the investigation had been focused on the abortion from day one, and that authorities had spoken falsely about finding “a large amount of blood” at the woman’s home.
The process of weaponizing legal action against women before packaging actions as a shepherding of their welfare has a history, says former Ohio state representative Jessica Miranda. Miranda was active in the passage of Issue 1 in 2023.
“Historically, policies intended to oppress women have been passed under the guise of protecting women,” Miranda wrote to Scene in October.
“The idea that Texas authorities would pretend to be helping a woman, when trying to prosecute her for using her right to choose, is morally appalling. As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, I can say that it is stories like these which lead to women feeling distrusting of the systems meant to protect and safeguard them.”
Ohio state senator Beth Liston, who has also been active on the issue of abortion, says Issue 1 showed what Ohioans care about.
“Regarding Issue 1, people spoke loud and clear,” she wrote to Scene. “I was a part of the Physician lead initiative to fight for women’s health. However, much of the work was grassroots health providers who felt strongly about protecting patients, so I played a part but was just a small piece in a large movement of people. “
Thomas, the Flock spokesperson, did not respond to multiple additional requests for comment over the course of more than 2 months.
A beneficial tool
A spokesperson for Cleveland’s department of public safety stated in an email to Cleveland Scene that the Division of Police “uses Flock solely for crime-fighting purposes. As you have correctly pointed out, the State of Ohio has constitutional protections for abortion rights as Ohioans passed an amendment in November 2023 enshrining those rights in the State’s constitution. As such, we have not — nor will we ever — utilize this technology to track down anyone who has had an abortion like they did in Texas.”
That, of course, fixes only situations in which law enforcement officers in other jurisdictions do not lie about what they are doing when requesting data. In the Texas case, Johnson County Sheriff Adam King denied that the hunt was an abortion investigation, right up until the moment that EFF released documents showing the true nature of the undertaking.
In Cleveland, Flock is used by police for a variety of legitimate purposes. Police along the Cuyahoga arrested 10 young people in October after a spree of car thefts — a result that Flock data “played a pivotal role” in, according to press materials from the company.
The city is happy enough with Flock as a company that it is considering switching from ShotSpotter to a Flock product.
Miranda, the former state representative, says the company has a duty to make sure its products are used responsibly — a duty it is currently shirking.
“Private companies should be held accountable for their products,” Miranda stated. “Surveillance tools should be used to stop dangerous criminals, not women seeking reproductive healthcare.”
Overall, states Liston, the state senator, “women have the right to keep their reproductive health private. People in Ohio have said this loudly and clearly. The state should have no business tracking women down for personal health information.”
Daniels, of the ACLU of Ohio, states that the organization’s primary interest in the issue is “the passage of statewide laws to regulate the use of numerous types of surveillance technologies used by government, including Flock cameras/devices. Currently, there are no laws of that type here in Ohio. Inadequate, but still much better than nothing, would be local laws in those areas of Ohio where this type of technology used.”
However, he says, almost no regulations exist at the local levels, either.
For Hamid, of EFF, regulation is not sufficient: She says the camera networks simply cannot be used responsibly and must be disbanded.
“True protection of reproductive freedom requires recognizing that abortion access and mass surveillance are fundamentally incompatible,” Hamid stated.
“The strongest safeguard is not collecting this invasive data in the first place.”
Patrick Maynard’s freelance reporting has appeared in more than a dozen publications, including VICE News, Truthout, Sludge and The Independent. Public documents related to this article can be found here.
Amazon’s Ring brand is entering into a new partnership with surveillance company Flock Safety to make it possible for law enforcement to request footage from smart doorbell owners. The move is part of a pivot back to collaborating with police, after Ring spent several years distancing itself and its products from law enforcement agencies.
As part of the partnership, “public safety agencies” using Flock’s Nova platform or FlockOS will be able to use Ring’s previously announced “Community Requests” program to receive footage captured by the camera of a Ring customer. Agencies investigating an event that might have been captured on camera will have to provide details like the “specific location and timeframe of the incident, a unique investigation code, and details about what is being investigated” before the request is passed on to relevant users. Throughout the process, the identity of Ring users is kept anonymous, as is whether they agree to share footage. The entire process is also entirely optional.
Amazon and Ring’s approach to working with law enforcement has varied over the years. While Ring reportedly removed the ability for police to make warrantless video requests in 2024, there were documented cases of the company providing access to law enforcement in years prior. This pivot back towards a more police-friendly stance might have been prompted by Ring founder Jamie Siminoff returning to the Amazon-subsidiary in April 2025. Now Amazon is reportedly pitching its cloud and AI services to law enforcement agencies and Ring is looking to work with Flock and other surveillance companies.
That might not bother the average Ring customer who already planned to opt out of sharing, but there’s reasons to be concerned that Amazon is budding up with Flock. 404 Media reports the company’s surveillance tools have been used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to find and detain people, without a formal contract. Navy and Secret Service employees also reportedly had access to Flock’s network. That doesn’t implicate Ring in anything, but it does make the connection between the two camera networks feel more fraught.
Forbes has published an into Amazon’s efforts to court law enforcement clients for artificial intelligence and surveillance services. The article reveals that not only is the company promoting Amazon Web Services as a potential police tool, but it has been partnering with other businesses in that sector to use its cloud infrastructure. According to the Forbes report, Amazon’s partners that are pitching police departments include car tracking tools and license plate readers from Flock Safety, gun detection by ZeroEyes, real-time crime center apps from C3 AI and Revir Technologies, and AI that helps compose police reports from Abel Police and Mark43. The piece estimated that the police tech business is worth $11 billion. Based on emails sent by members of Amazon’s law enforcement and safety team, the company is working awfully hard to get a share of those billions.
The company’s aggressive sales work has raised outcry for privacy issues around how police officers might use these tools, which is unsurprising given that AI tools can and easily . Regulation is still a affair and some law enforcement departments have failed to .
“It’s dismaying to see one of the largest and most powerful companies pushing authoritarian surveillance tech in this way,” ACLU Senior Policy Analyst Jay Stanley told Forbes. “I didn’t realize Amazon was serving as a midwife for AI law enforcement technologies.”
As if we weren’t already tracked enough, malls and stores across the U.S. might soon deploy drones to catch shoplifters.
Controversial surveillance company Flock Safety, which supplies drones and other invasive tech to police departments, announced on Thursday that it is now offering its drones to private security firms.
Drone use in policing is on the rise, and this move makes it likely that private companies will soon adopt the same tech. But as drones become normalized for public and private security, privacy advocates warn they could push the U.S. closer to a surveillance state.
“Security leaders are being asked to protect more with less across bigger footprints, tighter budgets, and real staffing constraints,” Rahul Sidhu, Flock Safety’s VP of Aviation, said in a press release.
The company says each drone dock can cover roughly a 3.5-mile radius with flight times up to 45 minutes, providing rapid response for warehouses, rail yards, hospitals, ports, malls, and business centers.
In its press release, Flock Safety pitched its drones specifically to retail stores, arguing that organized retail crime remains high. It cited an industry report showing that retailers saw a 93% increase in shoplifting incidents in 2024, and said the drones’ quick response could help reduce related costs over time. Of course, it’s worth noting that retailers’ claims of a shoplifting epidemic were largely debunked in 2024, but that didn’t stop police departments from going on a shopping spree for new toys.
Keith Kauffman, Flock’s drone program director, told the MIT Technology Review how the drones could work in practice.
When a store’s security team spots shoplifters leaving the scene, they can activate the drone, which is docked on the roof. Equipped with video and thermal cameras, the drone can track thieves escaping on foot or in a vehicle. Its video feed can then be sent to the company’s security team and transmitted directly to local police.
But not everyone is thrilled with the company’s tech. The city of Evanston, Illinois, ordered Flock Safety this week to uninstall 18 license plate readers after Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias discovered that Flock had given U.S. Customs and Border Protection access to the readers’ data. And in August, Congress launched an investigation into what one member called Flock’s “role in enabling invasive surveillance practices that threaten the privacy, safety, and civil liberties of women, immigrants, and other vulnerable Americans.”
ACLU Senior Policy Analyst Jay Stanley has warned in recent years that the expanding use of drones in policing and private security requires strict privacy guardrails, including limits on when and where drones can be used and how video and other sensor data are handled.
“We don’t want to end up in a nightmare scenario where drones are used for mass surveillance and the experience of having police flying cameras buzzing overhead becomes routine in people’s daily lives,” Stanley wrote in a recent blog post.