The government has been tracking every car you drive past a camera — no warrant, no suspicion, no limit.

Flock Safety is finally feeling the heat, but the people cheering its downfall may be celebrating too soon.

And the ugly truth about who is waiting in the wings to replace Flock should have every freedom-loving American demanding real legal protection, not just a corporate swap.

Flock Is Running Scared — and That Is Not Enough

Flock Safety is feeling the heat from ongoing public backlash against its controversial surveillance technology. Amid mounting contract cancellations and anti-Flock vigilantes targeting automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras across the country, CEO Garrett Langley appeared on Fox News beseeching a national “compromise” to save the company from efforts to ban the technology outright.

Good. Let it squirm.

As the largest provider of ALPRs, Flock has 120,000 cameras across 49 states, works with over 5,000 law enforcement agencies, and captures more than 20 billion license plate scans every month. That is not a public safety tool. That is a mass surveillance dragnet built on the assumption that every American driver is a subject to be catalogued.

Reports have been streaming in about the growing number of police misusing ALPR data, including conducting wrongful stops at gunpoint and using the data for purposes unrelated to law enforcement, such as stalking romantic interests. The Institute for Justice, a nonprofit law firm that fights for strong Fourth Amendment rights, has tracked over 100 incidents of ALPR abuse so far.

Flock tried to get ahead of the backlash by announcing new data policies. The reforms include lowering the default data retention window from 30 to seven days unless the data is tagged for preservation, making the company’s auditing tools mandatory for all customers, and requiring case numbers for all law enforcement searches by the end of 2026.

But the Institute for Justice was not impressed. “One word you don’t see mentioned anywhere in Flock’s proposed reforms is the word ‘warrant,'” said Michael Soyfer in a statement. “And until police are required to get a warrant based on probable cause to search ALPR databases, these half measures will do nothing to protect innocent people from warrantless mass surveillance.”

He is right. And the problem runs much deeper than Flock’s PR strategy.

The Replacement Is Already Circling

While Flock bears the brunt of the public’s animosity, competitors are watching, learning, and waiting, ready to swoop in on whatever infrastructure Flock leaves behind. And whatever comes after could potentially be even worse, unless government actors start taking privacy rights seriously, according to Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.

Motorola Solutions, currently Flock’s “most significant” competitor, “has been expanding its police technology offerings through an aggressive acquisition strategy in recent years,” writes Stanley in a new analysis. And through the company’s nationwide Digital Recognition Network, over 500 million monthly plate scans are made available to participating law enforcement agencies.

And Motorola is not making any of the concessions Flock was pressured into making.

Unlike Flock, which adjusted its controversial 30-day default retention policy down to seven days and introduced limits on police access to data, Motorola has made no such changes. Motorola has no default retention period and imposes no enforced limits on how long customers, including law enforcement, can retain ALPR data.

The New York Police Department retains data from Motorola’s ALPRs for a whopping five years, according to Stanley. Five years of time-stamped location records on law-abiding citizens who never committed a crime, never attracted suspicion, and never consented to being logged.

Motorola has contracted with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) since at least 2018, and in September 2023 was “awarded a $15.6 million contract…to ‘implement and maintain’ ICE’s tactical communication infrastructure,” according to Forbes, giving ICE direct access to Motorola’s surveillance database.

That is a federal immigration agency with a direct pipeline into a private company’s nationwide vehicle tracking network. No warrant. No individualized suspicion. Just access.

Axon Is Positioning Itself as the “Ethical” Option — Do Not Buy It

Another one of Flock’s competitors, Axon, is also gunning for a top police surveillance position. Formerly known as Taser, the company got its start with the TASER energy weapon and has since grown its police offerings to include body-worn cameras and digital evidence management software. The company’s newest products include ALPR services, which it began selling through dashboard and in-car camera products in 2021 and fixed cameras in 2025, according to Stanley.

Since “many Flock customers already have contracts with Axon for body cameras and other products,” argues Stanley, switching from Flock to Axon may be an easy and attractive option for government officials during this time of anti-Flock fervor.

But that is exactly the wrong move.

Even though Axon, unlike Flock and Motorola, does not offer nationwide data sharing, the company’s policies on handling ALPR data still fall short of protecting privacy. From long data retention periods to the experimental use of AI analytics, whatever Axon and many other surveillance competitors’ policies and capabilities may look like now, they simply cannot be trusted to protect civil liberties over the long term.

A company that does not share data nationally today can change that policy tomorrow. Voluntary corporate commitments are not constitutional protections. They never were.

What Actually Needs to Happen

The real issue is not which company runs the cameras. The real issue is that the government has built a mass surveillance infrastructure on the legal fiction that photographing your car on a public road does not constitute a search. Every court that has bought that argument has handed law enforcement a tool that the Founders would have recognized immediately as general warrants — the very abuse the Fourth Amendment was written to prohibit.

“Communities should not gain too much comfort from what companies are and are not doing right now, but instead keep their eye on the longer game by putting protections into law,” writes Stanley. Whether a community chooses to use ALPR surveillance or not, Stanley recommends a handful of legal protections, including a retention period of no more than 48 hours, disallowing nationwide data sharing, storing data locally, and declining AI analytics software.

Those are reasonable starting points. But the only protection that lasts is one that requires a warrant.

Think about what this network actually does. Cameras photograph every car that passes, documenting the license plate, color, make, model, and other distinguishing characteristics. This data is paired with time and location and uploaded to a massive searchable database. Flock Safety encourages agencies to share the data they collect broadly with other agencies across the country. It is common for an agency to search thousands of networks nationwide even when they have no reason to believe a targeted vehicle left the region.

That is not targeted law enforcement. That is a permanent record of where every American has been, available to any agency with a login.

A Milwaukee Police Department officer allegedly used Flock to stalk a former romantic partner, prompting calls for urgent reforms. Criminal charges were later filed against a Milwaukee Police Internal Affairs Detective assigned to investigate the first incident for also allegedly using Flock to illegally surveil two people.

The abuse is not theoretical. It is documented. And it will keep happening as long as the legal standard for accessing this data is lower than the standard for searching a glove compartment.

The public anger at Flock is legitimate and long overdue. But channeling that anger into a campaign to swap one surveillance vendor for another accomplishes nothing. Motorola is not a privacy company. Axon is not a privacy company. They are technology firms competing for government contracts, and their data policies will evolve based on what the law requires — not based on what their marketing teams say this month.

Congress and state legislatures need to step in with hard statutory limits. Warrant requirements for ALPR database searches. Short, enforceable retention caps. Prohibitions on nationwide data sharing. Real penalties for misuse. Not because Flock is bad and its competitors are good, but because the government should not be tracking the movements of law-abiding Americans without individualized suspicion and a judge’s approval. Full stop.

Flock Safety’s CEO going on television to beg for a “compromise” is a sign that public pressure is working. But pressure without law is just pressure. The surveillance state does not dissolve when one company’s stock price takes a hit. It finds a new vendor, signs a new contract, and keeps logging your plates.

Sources: Reason, August 27, 2026; Reason, August 14, 2026; ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, Jay Stanley analysis; Institute for Justice Plate Privacy Project; ACLU “Get the Flock Out” campaign; Forbes; NPR, August 22, 2026