Recording now · Florence · Muscle Shoals · Sheffield · Tuscumbia
Someone is logging every car that drives through the Shoals.
Flock Safety cameras read and store your license plate as you pass, recording where you were and when. We're mapping every one of them in the Shoals, and organizing to get them removed.
The basics
What is a Flock camera?
Flock Safety sells automated license plate readers (ALPRs), which are solar powered cameras usually mounted on a small pole near a road. As you drive past, the camera photographs your car, reads your plate, and records the time and location. It builds a searchable history of where vehicles have been.
Police departments buy access to this data, often on annual contracts. Many networks are also shared between agencies, so a plate captured here can be searched by departments far outside the Shoals. Most people have no idea the cameras are there or that their movements are being logged.
These aren't simple traffic cameras. Flock markets its system as AI powered, and it does more than read plates. Its "Vehicle Fingerprint" technology uses machine learning to catalog a car's make, color, body type, dents, roof racks, bumper stickers, and other features, so police can search for a vehicle even without a plate number. Flock's newer Condor cameras can automatically pan, tilt, and zoom to detect and follow people. Flock says its plate readers don't use facial recognition and don't identify individuals, a distinction critics argue is thin once a camera is zooming in on faces. (Sources: BGR, Wikipedia, and Flock's own policy pages.)
This site exists to change that, to show people exactly where the cameras are, and to give them the tools to push back through their own city councils.
Why it matters
Privacy is a prerequisite for freedom. These cameras strip it away.
Flock cameras are a kind of surveillance we don't have a good name for yet: private surveillance, run for the government. A company most people have never heard of gets to record every time you drive to the grocery store, the doctor, your church, a protest, or anywhere else, and keep that record.
Here's why that matters. The police aren't allowed to follow you around town, log everywhere you go, and keep a permanent record of it. If they suspect you of a crime, they have to bring evidence to a judge and get permission first. That check of a judge, probable cause, and a warrant is what stands between ordinary life and unreasonable search and seizure.
Flock is the loophole. Because Flock is a private company, it isn't bound by those rules. It can track everyone, all the time, no suspicion required. But Flock works hand in hand with the police. So instead of asking a judge for permission, an officer can simply ask Flock where your car has been for the past month. The warrant requirement doesn't get satisfied. It just gets skipped.
That's the real problem: surveillance the government could never legally run itself, bought off the shelf from a company that can.
Follow the money
Your tax dollars pay to watch you
Flock cameras aren't free. Local police departments buy them on contracts that can run tens of thousands of dollars a year, paid out of city budgets, which means paid by you. Residents are funding a system that surveils those same residents, often without ever having been asked in a public vote.
Flock says it doesn't sell your data, and that customers own it. Take them at their word. The record still shows the safeguards failing in practice:
So the honest answer to "how do we know the promises are true?" is: we don't, and several cities have learned the hard way that they weren't. Once the cameras are up and the data exists, control over who sees it has proven very hard to guarantee, and impossible to take back after the fact. The only reliable way to keep your movements from being searched is for the data not to be collected in the first place.
Sources: reporting from Mountain View and Santa Clara County (KTVU/AOL), San Jose and El Cajon lawsuits (Mercury News, CA AG), and the ACLU's 2026 analysis of Flock's public statements. Links available on request. We'll cite specifics at council meetings.
Who's really watching
Police have used these systems to stalk people
The promise is that only authorized officers search the data, for real investigations. In practice, officers have repeatedly used Flock to track romantic partners, exes, and even total strangers. This isn't a rare glitch. It's a documented, recurring pattern, and most cases only came to light because the victim reported being stalked, not because internal safeguards caught it.
In April 2026, the Institute for Justice, a civil liberties law firm, identified at least 18 cases nationwide of officers allegedly using ALPR systems to stalk someone they were interested in, with most occurring since 2024. A separate tracker, the ALPR Abuse Library, has catalogued around 20 stalking or targeting cases. Investigators consistently describe these tallies as a floor, not a ceiling. A few of the documented cases:
The point isn't that every officer is a stalker. It's that once this database exists, a single person with a login can track anyone's movements as easily as a Google search, and the safeguards have repeatedly failed to stop it in advance.
Where they're pointing
Cameras are showing up in unsettling places
Flock cameras are marketed as license plate readers for roads. But residents and journalists have documented them installed facing places that have nothing to do with traffic, including a children's playground, which went viral in June 2026 and prompted widespread questions about the real purpose of the placement.
The concern got sharper in late 2025, when a security researcher found that Flock had left at least 60 of its AI powered cameras exposed on the open internet, including a live feed showing unattended children at a playground. Anyone online could watch, and, using the footage, potentially identify people. Flock called it a limited misconfiguration that had since been fixed.
- Playground controversy: Daily Dot
- Exposed camera feeds, including a playground: 404 Media / Yahoo News
- Cameras aimed at schools, sidewalks, playgrounds: WUFT
Where this is heading
Cameras today. Drones tomorrow.
License plate readers are only the start. Flock has already moved into drones. It acquired a "Drone as First Responder" company and is rolling out programs that let police launch aircraft to a location and follow vehicles from the air. The company has said it aims to expand these drone programs to around 100 cities.
A camera on a pole records the cars that pass one fixed spot. A drone can follow you, leaving your driveway, tracking you across town, watching where you stop. It's the same warrant skipping problem, lifted into the sky and made mobile.
The time to draw the line is before the Shoals becomes one of those cities. It is far easier to keep new surveillance out than to remove it once contracts are signed and budgets depend on it.
The map
Where the cameras are
This is the live DeFlock map, zoomed to the Shoals. Every marker is a reported license plate reader. Spotted one that isn't here? Report it below so it gets added.
Live map data from deflock.org, built on OpenStreetMap. Camera locations are community reported and may be incomplete. Open the full map →
Join the movement
You're not the only one who's uneasy about this
The cameras count on people not paying attention. The fastest way to change that is together. Here's how to plug in. Pick whatever fits.
Join the Facebook group
Our main hub for discussion, camera sightings, and organizing. Come introduce yourself and don't back down.
Join the groupGet on the list
Leave your details and we'll keep you in the loop on actions and ways to help. No spam, just when it counts.
Take action
How we get them removed
Flock cameras are approved by local officials, which means local people can get them un-approved. Here's the path:
Find out who approved them
File a public records request with the Florence, Muscle Shoals, Sheffield, and Tuscumbia police departments asking for their Flock Safety contract, data retention policy, and audit logs.
Show up and speak up
City councils vote on these contracts and their budgets, and public comment periods are where residents get heard. Showing up to council meetings matters. So does contacting your local city government offices directly. Call them, email them, and don't back down.
Bring your neighbors
One person is an outlier. Twenty is a constituency. Share the map, collect signatures, and make the surveillance visible to people who'll vote.
Crowdsource
Report a camera
Seen a Flock camera in the Shoals? Note the cross streets, snap a photo if it's safe to do so, and report it. Every report makes the map more complete.
You can add cameras directly to OpenStreetMap using the tag man_made=surveillance plus surveillance:type=ALPR, the same open dataset DeFlock uses. You can also report it through deflock.org.