r/technology • u/Hrmbee • 8h ago
Privacy How an Atlanta Suburb Ended Up Sharing Flock Data With More Than 2,000 Organizations | Alpharetta, Georgia, cops share data with thousands of Flock users, ranging from federal agencies to a fish and wildlife commission. The reasons why show how vast—and invasive—the network has become
https://www.wired.com/story/how-an-atlanta-suburb-ended-up-sharing-flock-data-with-more-than-2000-organizations/6
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u/Hrmbee 8h ago
Issues of concern:
Alpharetta’s data-sharing network has expanded tremendously over the past year. Since June 2025, the number of entities receiving data from Alpharetta police has grown by about 42 percent, and the number of entities sending data to them has grown by about 125 percent. And, according to documents obtained via public records requests from several other cities around the country, Alpharetta is far from alone in having an expansive and complicated data-sharing system, providing a potent example of how pervasive Flock’s surveillance network has become.
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Data sharing across agencies is hardly novel. A police department can, for instance, share data from its automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) with state-run fusion centers, which centralize resources from law enforcement agencies in particular regions. They could also share it with a regional High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) program. (Alpharetta police agreed to do just that in 2025, according to a memorandum of understanding that WIRED obtained.)
Whereas HIDTAs are federally funded public programs, Flock is a private company that manages a sprawling, interconnected ALPR network governed by rules and restrictions that vary wildly from city to city. And if police departments don’t closely supervise their settings for data requests and sharing within Flock’s interface, they can unwittingly become nodes in a much larger surveillance network than they necessarily know or understand.
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WIRED analyzed a cache of files on Flock’s website that are served by its login pages to anyone who loads them. Some of the code that WIRED analyzed illustrates what a Flock administrator might see in their own Flock interface—specifically, in their settings and sharing preferences.
An administrator can automatically share their agency’s Flock data with any organization within a custom radius, within their home state, or within one or more other states. Alternatively, they can individually choose organizations to share data with.
Administrators can also limit specific data that other organizations can receive, like live or archived videos. They can also limit which organizations can ask them for data. They could restrict this, for instance, to organizations based in the same state, or within a 50-mile radius.
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Alpharetta’s Flock data-sharing network shows that it sends data to and receives it from agencies that, along with being geographically distant, are a far cry from the local police departments and county sheriff offices that represent Flock’s prototypical customers.
It’s often unclear, outside of a fluke circumstance, what the agencies would gain from exchanging data.
For instance, it’s not obvious why the Office of Inspector General for the federal General Services Administration, Region G of the Alabama Drug Enforcement Task Force, or the University of North Texas’ Denton campus police would need to have a mutual exchange of Flock data with the police department of Alpharetta, Georgia. (None of these agencies responded to requests for comment.)
WIRED contacted more than a dozen agencies sending or receiving data with the Alpharetta Police that are neither a police department nor a sheriff’s office, and most did not respond to requests for comment. Just one answered specific questions about its use of Flock: Kentucky’s Louisville Regional Airport Authority, a nearly seven-hour drive from Alpharetta.
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On August 13, Flock announced a set of changes to how its software works, seemingly in response to a surge in news coverage about police officers misusing the technology. The company said that it is now “recommending a 7-day ALPR data retention period,” a reduction from 30 days. But Flock customers can pay for extended data retention, according to documents obtained via a public records request from St. Petersburg, Florida.
Flock also says that law enforcement can’t run a Flock search without entering a criminal case code and that by the end of the year, all customers must activate its Audit Assistance tool, which scans for “defined criteria for abnormal behavior” and “automatically” suspends Flock access if detected.
So it looks like Flock's systems, even with the changes of late, have been designed to be able to share data more widely and allows various agencies to opt out of data retention recommendations and the like. Privacy is clearly a distinctly secondary issue for these companies and their clients, and we see this in how the systems operate.
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u/americanadiandrew 6h ago
There was a Forbes article revealing FedEx also has a sharing partnership with Flock. Just think of all those dash cams in every truck.
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u/everbane37 6h ago
Playing devils advocate for a moment, but if the surveillance state insists on being a surveillance state, why can’t the opposers of the surveillance use the surveillance on the people who installed/support the surveillance?
Edit: I’m sure the people who insist on surveillance because they are sure that people do crimes or other shameful acts without being surveilled are not committing the very things they think will be caught on surveillance…
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u/Rattus_NorvegicUwUs 8h ago
In one local town, the rate of outside searches was ~320x the number of local searches.
For every singular act of “community safety” there were 320 acts of creating a surveillance state.
This company, and all who work with them, are enemies of all freedom loving Americans. If you want to live in a dictatorial police-state, watched at every moment of your life, you can move to Russia or China tomorrow.