Flock Decides Cops Can't Be Trusted with Cop Data

Ah, Christmas. This year, Flock brings us the gift of contractual liability, and, if our elected officials and state auditors are starting 2026 with fresh energy, a whole lot of canceled mass surveillance contracts. Thanks, FloSanta!

Only a week ago, I wrote a post titled “Flock is altering the deal. Pray it does not alter it further.”

It has altered it further.

Flock already removed useful information from its ironically-named Transparency Portals to deal with what the company termed “the burden of compliance.”

Then, as the new info box added to the haveibeenflocked.com name resolution page has noted since earlier this month:

Our ability to identify officers was clearly effective. In a direct attempt to stop us from providing transparency, Flock and police departments have dropped the unique IDs (UUIDs) in the transparency portals entirely. They now simply replace them with the word “redacted” in the public audit logs, effectively preventing oversight and individual accountability.

Now, Flock has extended that “functionality” to its own customers.

We learned from the company’s new, nonsensical takedown notice that it considers audit logs to “pose an immediate threat to public safety and expose law enforcement officers to danger.”

Apparently, that threat is also posed by Flock’s customers — the police officers themselves.

The vendor — still a privately-owned corporation — has decided it no longer trusts police with information about who has searched “their data.”

“Don’t worry,” Flock tells cops, “it’s for your own good.”

At least, that’s what we hear from an officer responding to an open records request:

Flock Safety updated the system on 12/11/2025 to protect officer safety and active investigations, Network Audit Logs no longer include officer names, license plate, or vehicle fingerprint information. This is a system update from Flock Safety not [Local] Police.^[1] With recent concerns about Flock [Local] Police conducted a review of shared networks and removed all out of state access to our system.

This, of course, comes on the heels of Flock’s announcement that the reason field is now a dropdown, from which you may select one of Flock’s expertly curated pre-approved reasons.

Which followed shortly after the announcement that Flock does not log searches that are flagged as problematic. Select another justification and try again.

If you’re a cop or a city, you no longer get to know who searched the data collected in your town. You don’t even get to know what was being searched for. If the company feels like it, you may get one of a handful of pre-approved reasons.

But only if the anonymous other party feels like making a selection — simply clicking something that will be accepted by the system is also an option … it’s not like anyone is logging your name.

Here are log entries from three different agencies (from before the dropdown was implemented):

Name, Org Name, Total Networks Searched, Total Devices Searched, Time Frame, License Plate, Reason, Case #, Filters, Search Time, Search Type, Text Prompt, Moderation
"REDACTED","Shelby Township MI PD",4341,"4341","03/31/2024, 07:22:46 PM UTC
22:46 PM UTC","REDACTED","COM-13-24","","REDACTED","04/01/2024, 07:22:59 PM UTC","lookup","",""
...
"REDACTED","Houston TX PD",5888,"5888","09/27/2024, 05:00:45 AM UTC
10/04/2024, 05:00:45 AM UTC","REDACTED","INV","","","10/04/2024, 05:00:47 AM UTC","lookup","",""
...
REDACTED,[Federal] US Postal Inspection Service,3241,54164,"11/10/2025, 11:00:24 PM UTC
11/17/2025, 11:00:24 PM UTC",REDACTED,4238996,4238996,REDACTED,"11/17/2025, 10:30:32 PM UTC",lookup,,

Newly missing:

• Name (“Operator name” as it’s referred to on this site)
• License plate^[2]
• Filters

Whether the “Text Prompt” and “Moderation” fields are empty because they’re unredacted, or because they’re simply empty and haven’t been replaced with the word redacted is unclear.

Anyway — it’s almost becoming a predictable pattern, but bear with me once again as I quote Flock’s CEO and then tell you he lied:

Why Auditing is Crucial: To underscore accountability, every single search conducted in the Flock LPR system is saved in an audit report. Every time a search is run on the Flock system, that search and search reason is preserved permanently in the audit trail of every agency whose camera was included in the search.

Actually, to change it up a little, let me also cite the section “Flock’s privacy-by-design and accountability” from the company’s November 11, 2025, impossibly boringly-titled blog post, “Automated License Plate Readers and the Fourth Amendment: A Public‑Safety‑by‑Design Perspective from Flock”:

Immutable accountability: Every user action and search reason is recorded in an indefinitely available audit trail.

And, because it’s Christmas, let’s throw in the company’s “Ethical Creed,” which it actually publishes on its webpage:

1. Transparency and accountability build trust between communities, government, and law enforcement – making communities safer and more equitable.
2. Democratic decision making and local autonomy should be encouraged and respected.
3. With the right technical and policy safeguards, public safety technology will not infringe on constitutionally protected rights.

In this case, the “immutable record” that is supposed to “build trust” has been altered (again).

Not through “democratic decision-making” or “local autonomy,” but through a decision to modify the service contracted for—a decision made unilaterally by Flock, without consulting its customers, while they are probably spending time with their families.

Because, apparently, what Flock wants now trumps “safer” and “more equitable” communities, and even if it causes a little light infringement on constitutional rights, if we can drop those annoying safeguards that keep exposing the company’s poor practices, maybe it’s worth it. For Shareholder vaOfficer Safety.

All that is to say: Flock has expunged the “permanent record.”

If Flock was talking about your city council when whoever they pay to write blogposts wrote:

Every search made within the Flock platform is logged and auditable, creating a tamper-proof trail of accountability. Agencies can trace back who accessed what information, when, and why. This audit feature is a critical deterrent against misuse and is often cited in public hearings as a reason for community support.

Then now is the time to let them know that Flock has committed a material breach of the contract — it reneged on the democratically-approved deal (however tenuous that approval might be sometimes).

Your city council may have even said, “I trust our local police department.”

Flock does not.

The company lied to you about data security, about compliance, about transparency, and even about finding missing children.

They took your city’s data and are now selling it.

Just like they said they wouldn’t.

For your safety.

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PS: Flock chose not to redact case numbers (yet). Naturally, even while importing a heavily redacted dataset, the importer called out an instance where someone pasted an entire LINX entry about a fatal hit-and-run into the case number field—officer name, defendant name, date of birth, charges, and all. The haveibeenflocked system truncated and partially redacted the entry for privacy, which is more than Flock managed. This is exactly the kind of reckless incompetence Flock is trying to hide. Unfortunately, they can’t even do that right.

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1. Although I generally have no issues naming officers and agencies acting in their official capacity, I am concerned this officer or agency could face backlash from Flock and its partners for doing something decent—I am therefore choosing not to publish names at this time. For officer safety. ↩︎

2. If you’re thinking about getting “REDACTED” as a plate: New York, New Mexico, Ohio, and possibly Indiana appear to permit 8 characters on their vanity plates. Send me a picture. ↩︎