Boston has stopped using Flock Safety's automatic licence-plate reader (ALPR) cameras after the company shared data nationwide in breach of its contract with the city, Mayor Michelle Wu confirmed. The incident, revealed in Boston's annual surveillance technology report, adds weight to growing concerns about how police forces across the US use Flock's systems, with civil liberties groups warning that officers can access sensitive location data with little accountability or justification.

The report covers a 2025 pilot in which Boston police deployed roughly 45 ALPR cameras with Flock between April and September. Within three days of the trial starting, the department discovered a "vendor error" had enabled a nationwide lookup feature, letting other law enforcement agencies view plate and vehicle data despite the contract requiring such sharing to be switched off; the feature was disabled once discovered, and the report does not say how many agencies accessed the data. Boston has since begun trials with Motorola and Axon instead, while a separate Electronic Frontier Foundation analysis published around the same time found officers nationally often log flippant or nonsensical justifications, such as "LOL" or "idk", when searching Flock's database.