Flock Wanted to Turn 350,000 Uber Drivers Into a Nationwide Plate-Scanning Fleet

The controversial law enforcement vendor Flock Safety wanted to make every Uber, Lyft, and delivery car a moving license-plate reader.

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A presentation the company wrote for the Georgia Attorney General’s office, and later shared with 404 Media, lays out a plan to use dashcams from Nexar—a company whose cameras already sit in hundreds of thousands of vehicles—to scan the plates of cars those drivers passed.

Flock said it never actually launched the Nexar deal. The document still shows how far the company wanted to stretch its reach.

Flock’s normal product is a fixed camera on a pole that logs the plate, color, make, and model of every car that drives past, building a searchable map of where vehicles go. They’ve become incredibly divisive in communities where they’ve gone up, with people taking to knocking them down or covering them up in protest.

The Nexar idea would have untethered these cameras from the pole. Instead of one camera watching one intersection, 350,000 cars would have carried the camera with them, filling gaps between fixed sites and tracking plates across whole regions in real time.

Axon sells a similar roaming version for police cruisers; Motorola’s DRN and Vigilant do it through repossession agents’ cars. Flock’s pitch was to do it at civilian scale.

Flock hit an $8.4 billion valuation in April and its stationary cameras now cover more than 5,000 U.S. communities. Yet the ground is shifting under that network. In July, the LAPD let its Flock contract expire, citing “serious concerns” over civil liberties and privacy.

CNN documented at least two dozen cases in which officers resigned or were arrested for allegedly abusing Flock’s license-plate system. A presentation pitching a 350,000-car expansion landed right as the company’s existing footprint drew fire.

The backlash isn’t just local. The non-profit advocacy group EPIC urged Congress in May to ban automatic license-plate readers outright, and states are moving on their own: Washington passed SB 6002 restricting ALPR (Automated License Plate Recognition) use, and California is weighing a bill to limit how the data is shared. Decrypt also previously reported on a proposed House bill that would require warrants for government AI surveillance.

Also, the implementation of Flock’s cameras on Federal buildings drew a heavy opposition arguing it may violate civil rights.

The legal front is active too: A federal judge let a Norfolk suit alleging Flock cameras violate the Fourth Amendment proceed, citing the Supreme Court’s Carpenter v. United States ruling on warrantless tracking.