How an Atlanta Suburb Ended Up Sharing Flock Data With More Than 2,000 Organizations

Flock data sharing: An Atlanta suburb’s web of 2,300 nodes

It's a quiet revolution. Flock data sharing has turned a small Atlanta suburb into one of the most connected surveillance points in the country, with Alpharetta, Georgia, population roughly 68,000, now exchanging automatic license plate reader data with more than 2,300 organizations. That includes over 2,000 receiving its camera feeds and 1,300 sending data back. So the numbers tell a stark story.

The sheer scale is staggering. The network reaches from Morehouse College to Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Commission. It touches Medicare fraud investigators in Illinois, a drug task force in east-central Missouri, and the inspector general of a federal agency. Some connections make little obvious sense. Why would the University of North Texas’ Denton campus police need a mutual exchange with Alpharetta? What does the Alabama Drug Enforcement Task Force’s Region G gain from it?

Silence. None of those agencies answered questions. Only one non-police entity responded: the Louisville Regional Airport Authority, which runs 13 Flock cameras and shares data with 2,240 agencies while receiving from 1,124, a sprawling web of surveillance that operates on automatic trust. Its settings automatically accept in-state requests, but they manually review out-of-state ones. So the local gatekeeper decides.

The expansion exploded in one year

Since June 2025, the number of entities receiving Alpharetta’s data grew 42 percent, and the number sending data jumped 125 percent. That's explosive. But this growth happened without any public debate, without a single city council vote, and without any formal discussion about what it means for residents. It can't be undone quietly.

Flock data sharing is the company’s core selling point. A criminal crossing city or state lines can be tracked through a web of interconnected cameras. That pitch works. But it creates a sprawling private surveillance network governed by wildly inconsistent rules.

Traditional ALPR sharing goes through state-run fusion centers or federally funded HIDTA programs. Those have oversight. Flock is a private company. Its network has no such guardrails. And when police departments don’t closely supervise their settings, they become nodes in a system far larger than they understand.

How the settings work

Flock’s administrator interface allows agencies to share data automatically within a custom radius, home state, or multiple states. They can also pick individual organizations. Administrators can limit what data others receive, like live feeds versus archived video. They can restrict who can even ask for data.

Lieutenant Jason Hiott of Alpharetta police says the department automatically approves requests from law enforcement within 500 miles. Outside that radius, agencies must individually request access, and that's where the process gets more deliberate. Hiott couldn't say what the default settings were, whether they changed them, or how long that 500-mile radius has been active. But he did say the department shares no live feeds or analytics. It's a hard line.

Flock claims data sharing is off by default for new customers. But the company didn't confirm whether that's always been true. Historically, Paris Lewbel, another Flock spokesperson, says customers could request data from others within the same state or within 50 miles, a practice that suggests the default wasn't always so restrictive, though it's unclear when or if that changed. So the record remains fuzzy.

“It’s gotten to the point where people want to search more agencies just to be able to search more agencies, without a real reason behind it.”

Caught off guard by Nationwide lookup

That quote comes from Commander David Hart of Minnesota's Beltrami County Sheriff's Office. He had to rein in permissions set up when his office adopted Flock in early 2024, a process that took months to untangle as the system's default settings were far broader than anyone initially realized. For months, officers could send and receive data requests to any Flock customer in the country. So by late 2024, Hart limited both to in-state agencies only. It was a necessary fix.

Reynoldsburg, Ohio had a worse surprise. It was June, and the city discovered its Nationwide lookup tool was active, a quiet failure that left police leadership assuming officers could only search cameras within Ohio's borders. So they changed the settings immediately. But nobody knew when or why nationwide searches had been enabled, and that uncertainty hung over the whole process like a shadow. That's the problem.

City attorney Chris Shook demanded answers from Flock. But the emails tell a frustrating story: customer success manager Caroline Bush could only confirm the tool was enabled before February 2025, while an “event-log limitation” kept her from pinpointing the exact date. It's a gap that matters. Still, audit records didn't lie, and they showed nationwide searches happening as early as March 2023, which suggests the system was active well before anyone could say precisely when. So there it is.

Bush suggested the setting was enabled during initial account setup. It's a common default configuration for agencies at that time, she wrote. That was before Flock introduced stronger disclosures around the feature, and the timing matters because it's precisely when the company's own policies began shifting toward greater transparency for users. So the change came late. But the claim stands.

California’s strange case

Palo Alto had an even stranger experience. City manager Ed Shikada told a council study session that Flock activated Nationwide lookup for all customers in mid-2023. Flock calls that claim false. The company says research found agencies in California that never joined the Nationwide Network.

But California law forbids sharing ALPR data with federal or out-of-state law enforcement. Shikada says Flock disabled the tool for Palo Alto in October 2024, and then for every agency across the state by March 2025. The police didn't know it had ever been active until December 2025. That's a long silence.

Queries reveal the randomness

Reynoldsburg's records expose how arbitrary search scopes can be. It's a stark lesson. On January 1, 2025, an officer queried just 53 Flock networks. Forty minutes later, that same officer cited the identical criminal offense code but probed 5,392 networks, a hundredfold jump that suggests no clear logic or consistent standard guiding the surveillance. But the log doesn't explain why. So we're left with a question.

Most Reynoldsburg searches stayed under 100 networks. But that’s not universal. The Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, operating under strict state law, shares data with fewer than 400 agencies. Yet in one month, member agencies ran over 57,000 Flock queries. More than 96 percent probed at least 100 networks. Many hit thousands.

Flock lets officers customize search scope. Most simply don’t. “The particular officer can narrow the networks they want to search, but typically they don’t,” Shook says. “Typically, they search every network they have access to.”

What Flock changed

On August 13, Flock announced software changes. The company now recommends a 7-day data retention period, down from 30 days. Customers can pay for extended retention. Law enforcement must enter a criminal case code for every search. By year’s end, all customers must activate an Audit Assistance tool that scans for abnormal behavior and automatically suspends access.

Alpharetta police chief Trent Lindgren learned about the tool in July. He didn't hesitate. And by July 20, the department had already opened an investigation into an officer, a move that set the wheels of internal accountability turning with unusual speed. On August 5, that officer resigned. Simple as that.

Flock data sharing built this network. But the humans operating it decide how far it reaches. Some, like Hart, pull back. Others, like Alpharetta, let it grow by 42 percent in a year. The cameras don’t decide. The settings do. And too often, nobody notices what those settings allow.