How an Atlanta Suburb Ended Up Sharing Flock Data With More Than 2,000 Organizations

Summary

Alpharetta, Georgia, police are sharing license plate data captured by Flock Safety cameras with over 2,000 organizations, including federal agencies and colleges. This expansive data-sharing network, which also receives data from over 1,300 entities, highlights the pervasive nature of Flock's surveillance system and the potential for misuse, as evidenced by past incidents involving officers misusing the technology.

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CommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyAlpharetta, a prosperous suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, is home to about 67,000 people, served by about 120 local police officers. It also hosts several dozen cameras sold by Flock Safety, the increasingly controversial surveillance company that collects license plate data and other information and makes it searchable by police.Data captured by those Flock cameras, WIRED has learned via public records requests, is accessible to more than 2,000 police departments, colleges, airports, and government agencies across the United States. These range from Morehouse College to Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Commission and include Medicare fraud investigators in Illinois, a drug task force focused on east-central Missouri, and the inspector general of a federal agency.In return, Alpharetta receives Flock data from more than 1,300 entities, which span from the prosecutor’s office of Whitley County, Indiana, to the Metro Police Authority of Genesee County, Michigan.The Alpharetta Police Department—which, as reported by WIRED, had an officer resign due to Flock misuse on August 5—also exchanges Flock data with several agencies that have been similarly rocked by recent incidents of officers misusing its technology, including Georgia’s Bibb County Sheriff’s Department, the Savannah Police Department, and the Dallas Police Department.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.One of Flock’s central selling points is its network of customers—mostly, though not entirely, law enforcement agencies. If a criminal suspect crosses city, county, or perhaps state lines, Flock tells its customers, a query can prevent them from falling through the cracks.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.This can lead to situations like that in Alpharetta, where citizens and visitors are embedded in a data-sharing network that has propagated to more than 2,300 nodes. So, how does it happen?Setting BoundariesTo understand how cities like Alpharetta can build such expansive data-sharing networks with Flock, it’s important to understand how Flock’s interface actually works.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.Lieutenant Jason Hiott of the Alpharetta Police Department tells WIRED that per the city’s Flock settings, the department will “automatically approve” requests for its Flock data from law enforcement agencies within 500 miles. If they’re outside that radius, the police department has to individually request access to Alpharetta’s data.Hiott was unable to say what the Alpharetta police department’s default settings were, whether it altered the default settings, or how long the radius has been set to 500 miles—though he did note that the department “does not share any live feeds, analytics, etc. with anyone.”Flock spokesperson Jess Montejano claims that data sharing is turned off by default for new and onboarding customers—so no law enforcement agencies automatically get access to another agency’s data. Flock did not specify whether that has always been the case.Paris Lewbel, another Flock spokesperson, adds that “historically,” its customers have been able to request data from other customers that are within the same state, or within 50 miles—the precursor to actually sharing data.Coast-to-CoastFlock’s network settings allow agencies to set specific limits on what Flock data it shares and receives, but in some cases, police departments have been caught off guard by how expansive the search settings were for their officers.Often, the confusion has been tied to Flock’s Nationwide Lookup tool, which the company introduced in 2023. It allows any Flock customer to query any other Flock customer in the country, as long as they have a specific license plate. (Flock disabled the tool for federal agencies following backlash to the company’s pilot program with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.) In several cases, Flock customers had no idea this tool was enabled.Got a Tip?Are you a current or former police officer, government official, or Flock Safety employee who wants to talk about the company? We’d like to hear from you. Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact the reporters securely on Signal at carolinehaskins.61.Chris Shook is the city attorney in Reynoldsburg, Ohio, where two officers recently resigned after the police department probed their alleged misuse of Flock’s technology. He tells WIRED that in June, the city’s police department made an unexpected discovery while attempting to complete a public records request: Per the department’s Flock settings, the Nationwide Lookup tool was active. Police leadership, however, had been under the impression that officers could only search cameras within Ohio.Shook says that the police department immediately changed the settings to enable only in-state camera searches. But they had no idea when, or why, nationwide searches may have been enabled. Lacking answers, Shook turned to Flock.According to emails reviewed by WIRED, Flock public affairs manager Caroline Bush could only say that Nationwide Lookup “was enabled at some point before February 2025.” Due to an “event-log limitation” prior to that month, she could not say exactly when. But she added that, upon checking the police department’s audit, she “found nationwide searches as early as 03/2023.”This came as a surprise to Shook. If nationwide search was enabled, he said, there must have been an error, “but we are unsure of how that error could have occurred.”“The most likely explanation is that the setting was enabled during initial account setup or onboarding,” Bush replied. She said Nationwide Lookup “was a common default configuration for agencies at that time, before Flock introduced stronger in-product disclosures and tighter controls around this feature.”In California, the Palo Alto Police Departme

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