Boston Ditches Flock After Cameras Shared Data With Police Nationwide Behind Its Back
Boston has quietly walked away from Flock Safety's licence plate reader network after the company shared vehicle data with law enforcement agencies across the United States in direct breach of its contract with the city.
Mayor Michelle Wu confirmed the split during her monthly Q&A slot on GBH News, a few days before Boston published its annual surveillance technology report. That report fills in the details: between April and September last year, the Boston Police Department ran a trial of roughly 45 automated licence plate reader cameras using Flock's system. Within three days of switching the cameras on, officers at other agencies were already pulling Boston's data through a nationwide lookup feature that Flock had left enabled by mistake.
The contract had been explicit. Data sharing was to be disabled. BPD had confirmed this with Flock directly before launch. It happened anyway.
Once BPD caught the problem, it got the feature shut off and required written requests for any future data access. The report does not say how many agencies dipped into Boston's data during those first three days, which is a fairly significant omission.
Flock's bad week doesn't end there. The Electronic Frontier Foundation published its own analysis yesterday, pulling search logs from Flock systems across the country. What it found was grim, if not entirely surprising. Officers have been running searches on the nationwide database with logged justifications including 'LOL', 'LMAO', 'sexy', and 'idk'. That is the full extent of the documented reason for accessing sensitive location data on private citizens.
Flock has since introduced a dropdown menu requiring officers to select a crime category before searching. The EFF notes, with appropriate scepticism, that nothing in the system actually verifies whether the selected reason has any connection to the real purpose of the search. A box-ticking exercise, then.
Boston isn't done with licence plate readers, just with Flock. The police department moved on to a trial with Motorola in February and started another with Axon in June. Wu was fairly clear about the city's position: the technology is useful, but only when the controls around it actually hold. 'When the toggles or the access controls either are not able to be restricted in the ways that conform with that policy, or are set but then can be unset or reset in ways that violate that policy, we would not use that platform,' she said.
The city requires vendors to delete recordings after 30 days unless there is a specific legal or investigative reason to keep them, and data sharing must be contractually prohibited.
Boston is not alone in souring on Flock. As we reported last month, cities have been dropping the company at an increasing rate over surveillance overreach, unwanted data sharing, cost, and documented abuse by officers. Flock told us at the time that new partnerships are still outpacing cancellations by around ten to one in 2026. We have reached out to the company about the Boston report and will update if they respond.