Your Questions
Answered.

Flock Safety is an Atlanta-based company that makes AI-powered Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs). Their cameras are small black rectangular boxes mounted on poles, traffic lights, and neighborhood entrance signs. They scan every passing vehicle and upload the data to Flock's cloud platform in real time. As of 2026, there are over 85,000 Flock cameras across the US, used by 3,000+ law enforcement agencies.

Flock cameras collect far more than just your license plate. Their AI system builds a "Vehicle Fingerprint" that includes your license plate number and state, vehicle color, make, model, body style, distinctive features (bumper stickers, roof racks, dents, aftermarket wheels), direction of travel, and exact timestamp and GPS location. This is enough to identify your vehicle even if your plate is obscured or unreadable.

Flock Safety states that data is deleted after 30 days by default. However, individual law enforcement agencies can configure longer retention periods. There is no federal law limiting how long ALPR data can be stored, and many agencies have been found retaining data for much longer than 30 days. Some jurisdictions store it for 6 months, a year, or indefinitely.

Convoy Analysis is a Flock Safety feature that automatically identifies vehicles that frequently appear near each other. The system flags these vehicles as potential associates — even if they have never interacted and simply share a commute route. If you regularly drive near someone under investigation, you may be flagged as an associate in the Flock database with no suspicion of wrongdoing on your part.

Yes, completely legal. You have the absolute right to choose which roads you drive on. Using a tool to plan your route — whether to avoid traffic, speed traps, or surveillance cameras — is lawful. UnFlocked does not help you evade any law, break any speed limit, or obstruct any investigation. It simply shows you where cameras are so you can make informed choices about your route.

Currently, no warrant is required. Law enforcement agencies on the Flock network can query your vehicle's movement history with no warrant, no probable cause, and no legal process. They simply search the system. This is because courts have generally held that your license plate — visible in public — has no Fourth Amendment protection under the "third-party doctrine." However, this legal question is still being litigated, and several courts have pushed back on mass ALPR surveillance.

This is actively debated in courts. The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures. The Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Jones (2012) that long-term GPS tracking of a vehicle requires a warrant. Critics argue that a network of 85,000 cameras building a month-long movement history is functionally identical. In 2024, a Virginia trial court held that one city's Flock network functioned as a "dragnet over the entire city" and raised serious Fourth Amendment concerns. The Supreme Court has not yet definitively ruled on networked ALPR surveillance.

In some jurisdictions, yes. You can submit a public records request to law enforcement agencies that operate Flock cameras. The website Have I Been Flocked compiles publicly available audit logs that may show whether your plate has been searched. The process varies by state and agency.

Our primary camera data source is DeFlock — an open, crowdsourced database of Flock camera locations maintained by privacy advocates. We supplement this with community reports submitted through UnFlocked. Data may be incomplete or inaccurate — cameras may have been added, removed, or repositioned since the data was last updated.

No. We do not store your location, routes, searches, or driving patterns on our servers. When you enable Live Mode, location is processed on your device only and never transmitted to us. Route calculations are sent to the open-source OSRM routing API — we do not log or store these requests. An app about privacy should actually respect yours.

No. UnFlocked is an independent privacy tool with no affiliation, endorsement, or connection to Flock Safety, Inc. We are critics of their technology and advocates for driver privacy.

The camera map, surveillance scores, and basic features are free forever. UnFlocked Pro ($4.99/month) unlocks privacy routing, real-time driving alerts, personal exposure reports, and GPX downloads. We believe privacy tools should be accessible — the free tier will always exist.