Do Flock cameras track people?

Short answer: yes, and the company's denial is on the record next to the evidence contradicting it.

This question usually gets asked about the wrong device. Flock Safety is known for automated licence plate readers — fixed cameras that photograph passing vehicles. Those do track people, indirectly and at scale, because a record of where your car has been is a record of where you have been. But Flock also sells a camera pointed at people directly, and that is the part most coverage misses.

What the company says

In June 2026, Flock's chief communications officer told InvestigateTV that the company does not track people, and described its cameras as capturing fixed points in time rather than performing continuous tracking.

That is the company's own account of its own product. It is authoritative for what was said and evidence of nothing else, which matters here, because the same report tested it.

What happened when a reporter tested it

Reporter Brendan Keefe walked past a Flock Condor camera mounted on a public trail. The camera panned, tilted and followed him as he walked, and the sequence was recorded on video.

Flock's own training material for that product states that it will acquire and track a person as they walk. Company webinars in the same reporting describe tracking a vehicle from location to location, and an officer in the training material describes tracking a suspect across a state line.

Asked about the Condor's Guardian Mode specifically, the company's position was that it detects movement rather than following a person to a destination.

What the Condor is

The Condor is a pan-tilt-zoom camera. It is not a licence plate reader and it is not aimed at traffic — it is aimed at people, and it moves. Flock's product page lists Guardian Mode alongside People Detection Alerts.

The distinction matters because "ALPR" is the word almost everyone uses for this company, and it is accurate about one product while quietly making the other one disappear.

The part that is hard to argue with

In December 2025, 404 Media reported that at least 60 Condor cameras had been left streaming to the open internet with no password at all. Anyone who found them could watch the live feed, download thirty days of archived video, change the camera's settings, read its logs and run diagnostics.

The cameras were located by technologist Benn Jordan and security researcher Jon Gaines using Shodan, an index of internet-connected devices. The reporter verified it in person by driving to Bakersfield and watching himself on an unsecured feed.

Among the scenes published: a woman walking her dog on a bike path in suburban Atlanta, a man crossing a Macy's car park, a man rollerblading on a public greenway — zoomed closely enough to show what he was watching on his phone — and children on a playground swingset.

Whatever the company's position on whether the product tracks people, sixty of these cameras were pointed at people, moving, and readable by anyone on the internet.

Police search for people, not just plates

In July 2026, 404 Media reported that police departments had used Flock at least hundreds of times to search for a person rather than a vehicle, entering physical descriptions — build, clothing, headgear — in place of a plate number.

And the plate network itself has been searched for individuals. In May 2025, a Texas sheriff's deputy searched more than 83,000 Flock cameras nationwide, including in states where abortion is legal, looking for a woman whom authorities said had self-managed an abortion.

So what is the honest answer?

The technology tracks people. The company disputes the characterisation while its own training material uses the word.

The useful version is more precise than either side's summary:

• A licence plate reader builds a searchable history of where a vehicle has been, pooled across agencies and state lines. That is tracking a person by proxy, and it has been searched for named individuals.
• A Condor detects a person, then pans, tilts and zooms to follow them through a public space. Flock's training material describes this as acquiring and tracking that person.
• Neither requires a warrant in most jurisdictions, and neither requires anyone to tell you it is there.

How to find out what is near you

We keep a free lookup that will tell you which law enforcement agencies are documented operating Flock ALPR cameras in a given US town or county, sourced from the Atlas of Surveillance.

Two honest limits on it. It covers plate readers, not Condors — we have found no public source mapping those. And an empty result means nobody has documented an agency there yet, which is a fact about the research and not about your town.

Look up your town · How we cover this in full