Boston has ended its contract with Flock Safety, the company behind a widely deployed network of automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras, after city officials determined that outside law enforcement agencies had gained access to vehicle data collected within city limits. The Boston Police Department confirmed this week that it is discontinuing use of the system, citing concerns over data-sharing practices that extended beyond what local officials had authorized.
The decision makes Boston the latest major U.S. city to reverse course on Flock’s camera network, which has expanded rapidly across thousands of municipalities by offering real-time vehicle tracking and searchable historical plate data to participating police departments.
What Prompted the Reversal
According to city officials, an internal review found that agencies outside Boston — including some from other states — had queried the city’s Flock camera data through the company’s shared network, a feature that allows any participating agency to search license plate records collected by cameras belonging to other jurisdictions unless specifically restricted.
Boston officials said they had not fully understood the scope of that cross-agency access when the contract was signed, and that the arrangement conflicted with the city’s own data-sharing policies, which restrict cooperation with agencies conducting immigration enforcement or investigations unrelated to local public safety needs.
Massachusetts has state-level protections limiting how local police can assist federal immigration authorities, and Boston has its own ordinance reinforcing those limits. City officials said the Flock network’s design made it difficult to guarantee that out-of-state or federal agencies could not indirectly access Boston’s plate-scan data through searches run by other member departments.
How Flock’s Network Works
Flock Safety’s cameras photograph license plates and vehicle characteristics, uploading the data to a cloud-based system that officers can search by plate number, state, vehicle type, or other identifying details. The company markets the network’s interoperability as a selling point — a nationwide grid that lets police departments follow a vehicle’s movements across jurisdictional lines.
That same interoperability, however, has become the focus of growing scrutiny. Civil liberties groups have warned for years that the shared-search model creates a de facto national surveillance database with inconsistent oversight, since individual cities can set some access rules but have limited ability to control how their data is used once another agency runs a query.
Boston’s experience echoes concerns raised elsewhere. NarwhalTV has previously reported on officers entering vague or flippant justifications, such as typing ‘LMAO,’ to run Flock searches, incidents that fueled criticism over lax audit controls within the network.
City and Advocacy Response
Boston officials framed the move as a matter of protecting resident privacy and maintaining consistency with local policy, rather than a rejection of license plate technology outright. A police department spokesperson said the city may consider alternative systems with stricter data controls in the future, but that any replacement would need clear guarantees limiting outside access.
Privacy advocates welcomed the decision. Groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts have long argued that ALPR networks should require explicit, auditable agreements before any outside agency can query a city’s data, rather than defaulting to broad network-wide sharing.
“When a city collects data on its own residents, it has an obligation to know exactly who else can see it,” one privacy advocate said in response to the announcement, reflecting a common concern voiced across cities reconsidering similar contracts.
Part of a Broader National Pattern
Boston joins a growing list of cities and counties that have paused, restricted, or ended Flock Safety contracts in 2026 after similar discoveries about cross-agency access. In several cases, local officials found that immigration enforcement agencies or out-of-state prosecutors had queried plate data tied to abortion-related travel, prompting emergency policy reviews in states with protective privacy laws.
Flock Safety has said it offers customizable permission settings that let agencies limit who can search their data, and that misuse of the network violates its terms of service. The company has faced pressure to tighten default settings and improve audit logging following a string of local investigations into unauthorized searches nationwide.
What Happens Next
Boston’s cameras are expected to be deactivated in the coming weeks as the city winds down its agreement with Flock Safety. Officials have not announced a timeline for a replacement system, saying any future technology will undergo a more rigorous privacy and data-governance review before deployment.
The episode adds to a wider debate over how far automated surveillance tools should extend beyond the jurisdictions that install them, and how much control local governments can realistically maintain once their data enters a shared national network.
