Information present police justified Flock license plate searches with solutions like “LMAO” and “idk”

A sizzling potato: Warrantless database searches are a central a part of the rising controversy round Flock’s AI-powered digital camera surveillance community. As law enforcement officials maintain getting caught abusing the corporate’s license plate readers, a brand new evaluation of its search information suggests the issue runs deeper than remoted incidents and trace on the true scale of the problem.

Search logs from Flock’s Computerized License Plate Reader (ALPR) database present that, over the previous few years, officers throughout the US have routinely searched the system with out providing any respectable justification. And the corporate’s personal repair for the issue might have made it worse.

The information, obtained by the EFF by way of a public information request, present officers repeatedly typing flippant or nonsensical solutions into the obligatory “cause for search” subject. Frequent entries included “LMAO,” “lol,” “idk,” and outright strings of random keyboard mashing.

Flock’s ALPRs, now deployed throughout hundreds of US communities, use AI to log passing automobiles’ plates right into a searchable cloud database that officers can use to reconstruct folks’s actions. In contrast to a search of somebody’s cellphone location historical past, pulling knowledge from Flock’s database doesn’t require a warrant.

Officers are presupposed to doc a cause for each search, however a lot have merely ignored that requirement. It is one of many core complaints about Flock’s system, alongside the handfuls of officers who’ve been caught utilizing it to stalk ladies.

The throwaway search justifications span roughly 2023 into 2026, even after Flock started pushing officers towards a drop-down menu of pre-set causes in late 2025 as an alternative of a free-text subject. Nonetheless, as an alternative of fixing the problem, the change might need pushed officers to obscure random searches behind seemingly respectable causes. Many merely choose “different.”

Considerations about mass surveillance and false positives have pushed quite a few cities to cancel their Flock contracts. Individuals are additionally commonly caught destroying the corporate’s cameras outright, and rival ALPR distributors are making an attempt to distance themselves from Flock’s popularity whereas advertising {hardware} that does basically the identical factor.

Flock, for its half, says new contracts far outnumber cancellations – and in no less than one case, the corporate reinstalled its cameras with out permission after a metropolis had already eliminated them. Flock and its rivals are additionally increasing past stationary plate readers: the corporate’s fastest-growing enterprise is now drones that learn license plates from the sky, and police departments nationwide are more and more utilizing them for dwell surveillance, typically for calls that are not emergencies in any respect.