How Long Does Flock Safety Store Your Data?

Every time a Flock Safety camera scans your license plate, that scan — along with your vehicle photo, make, model, color, location, timestamp, and direction of travel — is uploaded to Flock's cloud platform. How long does it stay there? The answer depends on where you live, and it's almost certainly longer than you think.

Flock's Default: 30 Days

Flock Safety states that its default data retention period is 30 days. After 30 days, scan data is automatically deleted from the platform under standard settings.

This sounds reasonable until you understand three things: agencies can change the default, there is no federal law requiring them to keep the default, and "deleted from the platform" doesn't necessarily mean deleted from every backup or exported copy.

What Agencies Actually Configure

Individual law enforcement agencies that subscribe to Flock can set their own retention periods — and many set them far longer than 30 days. Public records requests and investigative reporting have revealed retention periods ranging from 60 days to over a year at various agencies. Some agencies have been found retaining data indefinitely with no documented policy at all.

Who Can Access Your Data During That Window

While your data is stored — whether for 7 days or 5 years — it is accessible to every law enforcement agency on Flock's network. That's 3,000+ agencies nationwide. An officer in any of those agencies can query your plate's movement history with no warrant and no notification to you.

This means that even a 30-day retention window represents a significant surveillance exposure. If you drive past Flock cameras daily, 30 days of data contains roughly 200–500 individual plate scans — enough to reconstruct your daily schedule, your home address, your workplace, your doctor's office, your place of worship, and your social connections.

Can You Request Your Data Be Deleted?

In most states, no. There is no general right to request deletion of ALPR data from law enforcement databases. California's CCPA provides some data rights against commercial entities, but law enforcement agencies are explicitly exempt.

Your best option: submit a public records request to your local agency asking for their data retention policy and requesting any records associated with your plate number. In many jurisdictions this request is honored. In others, law enforcement data is exempt from disclosure.