Frequently Asked Questions
Frequently Asked Questions
Flock Group, Inc. (dba "Flock Safety"), a for-profit Delaware corporation and tech company, provides a large-scale "surveillance as a service" system marketed to police agencies and private communities.
Its network of cameras, mainly placed on public roadways, captures images of passing vehicles. These images are sent to Flock's servers, where an AI platform scans license plates and analyzes images to index vehicle characteristics like make, model, and color.
This data is then compiled into a vast, searchable database shared among Flock's network of customers.
These results are records of searches performed by Flock's customers. The license plates and search reasons are what someone manually entered into the system.
The results don't show when or if your vehicle passed one of Flock's estimated 120,000+ cameras
No. This website does not save, store, or log the license plate numbers or search terms you enter. The search is performed and the data is immediately discarded by the application itself.
The data consists of "audit logs" tracking searches made within the Flock system. To satisfy public oversight requirements, some local governments make these logs available to the public upon request, and others publish heavily redacted versions on a Flock-provided "Transparency portal."
This website aggregates audit logs that have been released via open records (FOIA) requests. The dataset is incomplete; few governments provide easy access to these logs, and the records we obtain are often redacted.
You can find more information on the following pages:
A search result means an operator on the Flock system queried the database for your license plate using the Flock application/website.
This user is not necessarily a police officer, and a search does not imply you were stopped or investigated. Search policies vary, but many police agencies do not require a warrant or even suspicion to perform a search.
Flock's audit logs often contain partial names like "K. Zac". It is unclear why Flock truncates names or how this practice allows for a reliable audit of system usage.
To facilitate better auditing, haveibeenflocked.com correlates these names and redacted names with public records to provide a full name. The resolution process and data sources are described in detail in the "About" section.
The data's freshness depends entirely on when we receive audit logs from public records requests or transparency portals. There can be a significant delay—months or even years—between when a search occurs and when it appears on this website.
This is not a real-time monitoring tool.
This website aggregates and reformats already-public information. This information represents a fraction of what's being shared with Flock and its government, commercial, and private partners on a daily basis.
Policies exist to prevent the release of this information—they are not adhered to. Laws and regulations exist to enforce the policies—they go unenforced. Police, Flock, and politicians have been ignoring these problems for years while your private movements continue to be collected, catalogued, sold and traded.
This website exposes the problem because, as the old saying goes, sunlight is the best disinfectant. Law enforcement and legislation are needed to address the cause of the problem, and we highly encourage you to bring this site to the attention of your legislators.
We believe mass surveillance has no place in a free society, and this data should not be collected to begin with. If it is collected, warrants should be used, lookups should be rare, and police and private parties, like Flock and HaveIBeenFlocked.com, should not be permitted to act without functional restraints or oversight.
For information on any specific search, file an open records (FOIA) request with the police agency that conducted the search. If you believe you have been the subject of unwarranted searches or surveillance, we strongly recommend you seek legal counsel.
This website only displays information from records that are already in the public domain. We do not control or access the underlying Flock database.
To correct a factual error in our presentation of a public record, please contact us. If sensitive information about you is visible, please visit the Privacy page for more information on the redaction process, and how to request redaction.