Why Flock Safety Restricts Its Camera Map—and Your Alternatives

Flock Safety's automated license plate readers are deployed by police departments and cities around the country, but the company has never published an official public map showing where they are. When outsiders have built their own maps, Flock's response has not been a privacy argument or a security patch — it has been trademark lawyers. That pattern, visible in the company's own cease-and-desist letters and policy documents, tells you more about why Flock hides its camera map than any marketing page does.

Why doesn't Flock publish a public camera map?

Flock doesn't maintain a single national map of its own devices for anyone to search. Instead, outside researchers and volunteers have filled the gap. A volunteer-run project called DeFlock.me, started by creator Will Freeman, has crowdsourced camera locations; by the time Flock sent its cease-and-desist letter, DeFlock had "mapped out more than 16,000 individual camera locations, more than a third of which are Flock Safety devices," according to EFF's account of the dispute. EFF's own Atlas of Surveillance project, by contrast, tracks which agencies use license plate readers rather than exact device coordinates, and had identified over 1,700 agencies using the technology at that point.

A second, separate map appeared more recently from security researcher Joshua Michael, who found an unauthenticated access token on a Flock website and used it to pull data from ArcGIS. According to Tom's Hardware's reporting, Michael built a database of camera locations in November 2025 and later published it as the Flock Surveillance Map, listing 335,701 cameras nationwide. These two projects are not the same thing: one is crowdsourced observation of public infrastructure, the other is a map built from company data exposed through a security flaw. Flock went after both.

What legal basis does Flock cite for restricting camera information?

Not a privacy law. Not a copyright claim. Flock's demands in both cases rest on trademark dilution. The cease-and-desist letter sent to DeFlock.me, which EFF has published in full, accuses the project of diluting the Flock Safety mark simply by naming it on a map of camera locations, per the actual letter EFF obtained. In the researcher's case, Tom's Hardware reports that the brand-protection firm Doppel told Michael, on the surveillance company's behalf, that he was using the trademark "FLOCK SAFETY" without authorization and that it might confuse customers — "despite a pop-up that appears on the website when accessed for the first time" disclaiming any Flock affiliation, as Tom's Hardware notes.

Trademark dilution law exists to stop someone from, say, selling sneakers under a famous soda brand's name and blurring its identity in shoppers' minds. It is not built to stop someone from naming a company while describing or criticizing its product. EFF's rebuttal letter to Flock spells this out directly: "Your claims of dilution by blurring and/or tarnishment fail at the threshold ... Federal anti-dilution law includes express carve-outs for any noncommercial use of a mark and for any use in connection with criticizing or commenting on the mark owner or its products," according to EFF's deeplinks post. Mapping where a company's cameras are installed, using the company's own name to identify them, is commentary about that company's products — exactly the use the carve-out protects.

Is DeFlock.me still available after Flock's cease-and-desist?

Yes. EFF took on the case on Freeman's behalf and refused the demand outright, telling Flock the mapping project is "well within its First Amendment rights," per EFF's statement. The ACLU's own guidance confirms the project remains a working resource, pointing users to "Deflock.org" and its "crowdsourced map showing exact locations of ALPR cameras" as one of several ways to locate devices near them, according to the ACLU's Get The Flock Out toolkit. (DeFlock's content has appeared under both the .me and .org domains; check which is current before relying on either link.)

How can I find Flock cameras near me if the maps are restricted?

Community maps aren't the only route, and they aren't the most durable one either, since they depend on volunteers and can be targeted by more legal letters. The ACLU's toolkit lists several parallel paths: Flock's own city-level "transparency portals," which it describes as containing only "barebones information," searching your city's website for installation announcements, and checking "past city council meeting agendas and minutes" for when and where contracts were approved, per the ACLU toolkit. Privacy Unpacked has a separate step-by-step guide to using these community maps and records to find cameras near you; this piece is about the policy fight behind why that guide is necessary at all.

What does Flock's trademark takedown claim actually mean for you?

It means the company is choosing intellectual-property pressure over addressing the underlying transparency gap. EFF frames this choice bluntly: "Flock Safety's cease and desist later is just the latest in a long list of groups turning to bogus intellectual property claims to silence their critics. Frequently, these have no legal basis and are designed to frighten under-resourced activists and advocacy groups with high-powered law firm letterheads," according to EFF. Volunteer mapmakers rarely have in-house lawyers; a cease-and-desist letter from a company's counsel, even a weak one, can be enough to make someone take a project offline out of caution rather than because the law actually requires it.

The timing around Michael's map adds to that picture. His disclosure to Flock in November 2025 got a thin response — "Thank you for the findings. We are internally triaging them and will reach back out with next steps soon," per Tom's Hardware's account of Flock's email — and the company never followed up before the trademark complaint arrived once Michael published his findings. Flock has also publicly said it has "never been hacked" and never had "a data breach," a claim the outlet notes Michael disputes because he had already pulled the device database off Flock's system before the flaw was fixed, per Tom's Hardware. The gap between a quiet internal process and a trademark complaint, once the data became public, suggests the legal letters are less about brand confusion than about stopping the map's visibility.

What have the EFF and ACLU said about this, and does it connect to anything bigger?

Both organizations treat ALPR opacity as part of a larger surveillance fight, not just a mapmaking dispute. The ACLU's toolkit calls lack of transparency "one of the biggest problems with ALPR cameras," noting "it can be very difficult to find out exactly where these cameras are and what they are recording," per the ACLU. It has drafted a model resolution for local governments to cancel existing Flock contracts and model legislation to regulate or ban the cameras outright.

Courts are starting to weigh in on the underlying surveillance, if not the mapping fight specifically. EFF reports that a federal district court in Oklahoma recently ruled that a warrantless search of Flock's system violated the Fourth Amendment, calling ALPRs "a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance," after a single search "returned at least 30 days of data, allowing the officer to track the car across at least three states, over the span of a month, from a single search," according to EFF's reporting on the ruling. A day earlier, a California trial court dismissed EFF and the ACLU of Northern California's own case, SIREN v. San Jose, challenging that city's warrantless searches of its ALPR data; EFF says the ruling "is wrong on the law" and plans to appeal.

Where does the data actually live, and what can you do about it?

Flock's own Evidence Policy makes clear that the company does not consider itself the custodian of camera data in the way a map search might assume. "Customers retain ownership and control of all data generated through their use of the Flock platform," and Flock directs subpoenas and legal requests to the local police department or city that bought the cameras, not to itself, according to Flock's Evidence Policy. The standard retention window is seven days, after which data is "permanently deleted and irretrievable," per the same policy — meaning Flock "cannot restore LPR data in response to legal requests once it has been deleted."

That structure is exactly why public records requests to your city, rather than any single map, are the more durable way to document where cameras sit and how they're governed. The ACLU's toolkit suggests asking whether your city has an ALPR contract, requesting a copy, and asking "how long does your city retain its ALPR data and does it share it with others," per the ACLU. Privacy Unpacked's guide to filing a public records request with a company or local agency walks through how to word and file that kind of request. Maps can be taken down by a lawyer's letter. A signed contract and a council meeting record are public documents your city has to keep.