Flock Forces Website Showing Camera Locations To Shut Down, Because ‘Transparency Matters’ - Jalopnik
Smith Collection/gado/Getty Images Flock Safety is famously known for its accountability and transparency, as well as its airtight security. That must be wh...
Smith Collection/gado/Getty Images
Flock Safety is famously known for its accountability and transparency, as well as its airtight security. That must be why it has forced a website showing the locations of its cameras and other surveillance hardware to shut down. The Intercept reports that cybersecurity researcher Joshua Michael, who runs the website FlockSurveillance.org, received a trademark infringement complaint on behalf of Flock, and a strongly worded letter that "requested" the site to be taken down. As of Monday, September 28, the website is unavailable.
Flock says it has 120,000 cameras across 49 states. DeFlock, which collects and shares data submitted by the public, puts that number closer to 143,000. Michael's information comes from a different source: Flock itself. For a time in late 2025, it was quite easy to access Flock's network using a security key exposed publicly on Flock's systems, granting full access to the entire FlockOS system. The amount of data that was exposed here is staggering, including live access to drone telemetry, police car locations, and even individual officer locations through their body cams. While Michael was in there, he saved a snapshot of all Flock device locations as of December 2025. This data became the backbone of his own map.
As a white-hat hacker, Michael did the responsible thing and reported the security breach to Flock. At least, he tried to, three times before finally getting a response that pretty much blew him off. It wasn't until Michael published a detailed blog post about his findings that Flock finally patched this massive security hole. Around that time, Flock also published a blog post definitively stating that Flock has never been hacked. The ACLU has documented a long history of Flock misleading the public in multiple ways.
What does Flock not want us to see?
The website may be down, but the internet is forever, and the Internet Archive has preserved the original site. It lists not only 175,269 Falcon LPR cameras, but also 44,116 Wing PTZ (pan-tilt-zoom cameras, which Flock claims are only for surveillance, not reading license plates), as well as 27,341 Raven Audio devices that detect the sounds of gunshots, car crashes, and who knows what else. This map documents a total of 335,701 current, future, and decommissioned Flock device locations as of December 2025. The site also contains another page with a table of the raw location data Michael obtained.
"Transparency matters because questions about public safety technology are often really questions about visibility, oversight, and trust," says another Flock blog post. So of course, Flock wants to suppress this information. From The Intercept:
On Thursday, Michael was notified that Doppel, which describes itself as an "AI-native social engineering defense platfom," filed a trademark infringement complaint regarding his site, claiming to be working on Flock's behalf. Doppel says that the site is using the trademark "FLOCK SAFETY" without authorization, which "may cause customer confusion / harm." Doppel requested the site be taken down.
On the archived version of the website, the first thing you see, even before the map loads, is a disclaimer that says:
Independent research site presenting Joshua Michael's cybersecurity work. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Flock Safety, Flock Group, Inc., or their products. Flock names and marks belong to their respective owners and are used only to identify the research subject. Use of copyrighted material is intended as fair use for criticism, comment, scholarship, and research under 17 U.S.C. § 107.
This disclaimer is the only place where the phrase "Flock Safety" appears anywhere on the website. If this trademark claim somehow manages to hold up, I wonder if other websites, like DeFlock, will become takedown targets on a similar pretext. While Flock claims the right to track us, it certainly doesn't want us to track them. Transparency, indeed.