Florida, Texas curb Flock camera use as privacy, police-misconduct concerns grow
September 6, 2026 at 07:27 AM
Coverage
3 reports · over 82 hours
Flock says its cameras make US safer - so why are they being sabotaged?
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X says attackers are targeting user accounts after the launch of X Money | TechCrunch
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Florida and Texas move to block Flock cameras over privacy concerns | TechCrunch
(opens the publisher’s site)State agencies in Florida and Texas have moved to restrict or end their use of Flock Safety's automatic license-plate readers, joining a wave of contract cancellations amid mounting privacy and police-misuse allegations.
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Florida's transportation department said it will stop using the license-plate readers within 30 days, citing "concerning reports of misuse, data privacy concerns, and surveillance schemes"; Texas ordered state agencies to stop funding the cameras days after a Lufkin officer was indicted on 100 felony counts for unauthorized database searches.
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More than 200 communities have cancelled or not renewed Flock contracts since 2021, including 90 in August alone, according to advocacy group Secure Justice; towns including Evanston, Illinois, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Eugene, Oregon, reported cameras reinstalled or reactivated despite terminated agreements.
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Police-misuse cases highlighted include a Kentucky officer charged with using Flock to track an ex-girlfriend over 2,000 times and a Texas detective who searched more than 80,000 images without a warrant in an abortion investigation.
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Documents obtained by the BBC show Harris County Sheriff's Office uses facial-recognition tool Clearview AI, with a contract running through March 2027, despite the company facing data-protection fines in several European countries.
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Flock has about 130,000 license-plate readers deployed nationwide; CEO Garrett Langley told the BBC the company is "a safety, not surveillance" firm, though three patents filed between 2020 and 2025 have the word "surveillance" in the title.
Editing note: The X Money password-reset story from the sources is unrelated to the dominant Flock Safety narrative and was omitted as a separate event; per editorial discretion, it was not folded into this brief.
Sources: BBC, TechCrunch