A student drives to H-E-B to buy groceries for the month. The next day, they park their car in a campus parking garage before walking to their 8 a.m. class. That night, they drive with their friends to a local restaurant to eat.
In all of these scenarios, automated license plate readers, or ALPRs, stationed throughout cities capture these kinds of activities every day. The average person might not think that a few Flock cameras on their route will affect them, but because of information sharing agreements within some of these private companies, including Flock Safety, their data could be shared with thousands of police departments and other organizations across the country.
Despite being initially popularized in the 1990s, the number of automated license plate readers in the U.S. has increased drastically over the past few years. According to the Finding Flock website, from January 2025 to January 2026, over 50,000 ALPRs were newly documented across the country, though this number can be attributed to a new focus toward documenting the cameras. Not all cameras in this statistic were installed in that time period.
Today, there are nearly 150,000 of these cameras in the U.S., with over 17,000 of them stationed in Texas alone. As this technology has expanded and offered new ways to protect cities against crime, many universities across the country have also begun to turn to companies like Flock Safety to increase security on their campuses.
Flock Safety is a private technology and surveillance company that has pioneered centralizing ALPR data through the cloud, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. The company was originally founded in 2017 to combat the number of car break-ins in the founder’s neighborhood, according to a profile from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Since then, Flock has grown not only in the number of cameras stationed around the U.S., but in the amount of backlash it has received from citizens worried about privacy violations.
According to an article from Politico, concerns regarding mass surveillance and data privacy have led communities across the U.S. to cut their ties with Flock, with the source of the opposition mainly coming from the company’s nationwide data-sharing networks. These shared networks allow the police departments that utilize Flock cameras to share the information they collect with outside organizations.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts website, these police departments can choose to share their data with specifically named departments, statewide departments or the entire U.S. Flock network. This means that the license plate and vehicle characteristics of that student driving to H-E-B to get groceries could be shared with a police department in Chicago, among thousands of others.
“I think that local governments really underestimate the impact that even a few cameras can have because of the way the Flock network works,” said Travis Fife, staff attorney for the Texas Civil Rights Project. “When we think about the privacy implications of this technology, it’s not just about what a local government can see with its own cameras, but also what it can see with the cameras of other jurisdictions, and what those other jurisdictions, including out-of-state jurisdictions, can see in Texas towns.”
The Texas Civil Rights Project is one of multiple activist groups across the state that have raised concerns over privacy and mass surveillance. Fife said their organization, among many others, fights for Texans’ privacy rights through local advocacy, litigation in the courts and demonstrations from city councils to the state Capitol.
Critics of Flock cameras argue that in many cases since this technology has become widely adopted, law enforcement has misused access to Flock’s database, according to an article from the American Civil Liberties Union. For example, certain individuals in law enforcement have utilized Flock data to find a woman in Texas who self-managed an abortion, stalk an ex-girlfriend by tracking her over 2,000 times or search for undocumented immigrants as a part of ICE investigations.
As concerns regarding privacy and mass surveillance grow, universities across the U.S. have seen potential in utilizing Flock’s technology to outsource their security needs. At least 150 U.S. higher education institutions rely on Flock’s surveillance network, according to a study published in peer-reviewed journal Policing & Society.
Despite this expansion and offers from Flock Safety itself, UT-Austin has chosen not to implement Flock cameras onto its campus. According to UT’s University Risk and Compliance Services handbook, UTPD currently utilizes traditional video recording and closed-circuit television security systems “so that safety and security is enhanced while respecting the privacy rights of the University community and the public and maintaining compliance with all applicable laws and policies.”
While UT-Austin itself has not yet collaborated with Flock for its campus security needs, multiple schools within the UT System have, including UT-Dallas, UT-Arlington, UT-San Antonio, UT-Tyler and more, according to a slide deck from Flock Safety obtained via a public records request.
License plate readers are enticing to many of these university police departments because they can simplify and enhance security measures, according to a Baycom article. With a system that can recognize license plates that belong to banned individuals, people that have committed a crime or even traffic violators, security teams can more easily and efficiently track down incidents on campus.
UT-Dallas, for example, has installed 13 Flock-automated license plate readers onto its campus, according to their system’s “transparency portal” to “ensure proper usage and guardrails are in place.” The portal shows that the cameras on the UTD campus have detected over 85,000 unique vehicles over the last 30 days — information that is being shared with nearly 500 outside organizations that are granted access to this data via LPR surveillance networks.
The majority of these outside organizations are police departments and sheriff’s offices from nearly every county in Texas. Other organizations that received UT-Dallas’ LPR data include various statewide auto theft task forces, the North Texas Anti-Gang Center, the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission, the Texas Financial Crimes Intelligence Center and the Texas Departments of Criminal Justice and Public Safety. Since the UT-Dallas Police Department chose to share their information on a statewide level, all of these organizations have access to every piece of data that comes from the Flock cameras on the UT-Dallas campus.
Jude Elsadi, a political science sophomore at UT-Dallas and lead newsletter writer for UTD Democrats’ The Comet Civic Review, wrote an opinion article titled “Get the Flock Out” about the increased expansion of Flock cameras across the U.S. and how this acts as a Fourth Amendment violation. Elsadi said it was concerning to learn that the Flock cameras nearby were tracking every time she left her house, capturing her license plate and vehicle’s characteristics daily.
“I feel like that might be a pretty general realization between a lot of people,” Elsadi said. “Especially considering how the Flock cameras on campus are closer to the student housing, and (they are) able to track when students leave campus, when they get onto campus, where they’re going, what they’re doing and how long they’re on campus. … Seeing how it personally affected me and the people that I know, that’s what was kind of shocking.”
Though UT-Austin hasn’t implemented Flock cameras onto its campus, that doesn’t mean there has been zero communication between the ALPR company and the University.
In April, UT Police Department’s Chief of Police Shane Streepy received an email from a redacted Flock Safety representative inviting him to connect with their team at the 2026 Southeastern Conference Police Chiefs and Emergency Managers Conference in Nashville, Tenn., which took place April 12-14. The email also noted that Flock would be sponsoring the welcome reception on Sunday, where they would be running a live stream showing a drone flight over the Georgia Tech campus during the event.
Hosted by Vanderbilt University Public Safety, the conference is an annual event that “brings together chiefs of police, emergency managers, and public safety executives to exchange best practices, explore emerging challenges, and strengthen partnerships that support campus safety and preparedness across the SEC,” according to the Vanderbilt University Public Safety website. The Vanderbilt University Division of Operations and the Campus Network website notes that UT-Austin was among the schools that attended the conference, with Streepy speaking at a panel regarding game day command, coordination and crowd safety with other SEC university police chiefs.
Additionally, according to a second email from a redacted Flock representative, Streepy and Pat Connor, assistant chief of police, met the Flock team at the SEC conference and were presented with a slide deck detailing how Flock has “partnered with campuses across the UT System and the SEC” to look into incorporating Flock cameras on the UT-Austin campus. The Flock representative also asked to continue their conversation and “explore what could make sense for UT Austin.” There has been no further digital communication between Streepy or Connor and Flock Safety since these initial messages and presentation, and there are currently no Flock cameras on the UT-Austin campus.
When asked for information about UTPD’s reasoning for not moving forward with their communications with Flock, a UTPD spokesperson said that although Flock is not currently a vendor used by UTPD, the department “is aware of the broader national discussion surrounding Flock and ALPR technology.”
“UTPD takes privacy, data governance, access, retention, information sharing, security, and appropriate oversight very seriously when evaluating any public safety technology,” the spokesperson wrote. “Those considerations are not unique to Flock or ALPR systems; they are part of our responsibility when determining whether and how technology should be used in the University environment.”
The UTPD spokesperson said that there are numerous vendors and technology solutions in this space, and their decisions are based on the University’s broader operational and public safety needs.
“We commend the University’s decision not to install Flock cameras on UT-Austin’s campus,” Fife said. “The biggest reason is that universities, at their best, are inculcators of intellectual growth for students, and we have found that students’ intellectual growth and their exercise of First Amendment rights flourishes when you don’t have unnecessary government surveillance.”
The presentation that Flock showed to Streepy and Connor includes information about crime on college campuses and how staffing shortages might have influxed these numbers, citing that campus crime incidents surged to 22,212 cases in 2023. The slides go on to detail how standard campus camera networks might miss important elements, such as perimeter coverage, real-time alerts, license plates, partnerships with law enforcement and audio detection. The presentation also explained how their audio detection technology and simplified searching system allows for more efficient responses and investigations.
While the future of Flock cameras on the UT-Austin campus is unknown, local efforts and pushback on the devices have protected UT students from its surveillance so far, and this resistance has not been exclusive to Austin. According to The Texas Tribune, statewide backlash propelled Gov. Greg Abbott to order all state agencies to pause funding for Flock cameras in August, and voters in the Houston suburb League City rejected a proposition that would allow their police department to continue utilizing the 55 Flock cameras in their city Nov. 3.
“Chief Streepy’s approach is that technology must have a purpose: it should address an identified problem, improve a capability, or provide meaningful public safety value rather than simply being adopted because it is available,” the UTPD spokesperson wrote. “Where the right technology can make the campus safer or improve UTPD’s ability to serve the University community, UTPD will continue to evaluate opportunities for responsible implementation, with privacy, data governance, security, and appropriate oversight incorporated into that process.”
