Flock is just the latest example of using surveillance to stalk women

Flock Safety claims over 5,000 law enforcement agencies use its license plate readers to help locate missing persons, catch thieves and identify suspicious vehicles. The company is most known for its camera network, which extracts data about cars from photographs and allows operators to search for vehicles by description or license plate number.

But there’s been another persistent, unsanctioned use: officers stalking women.

At least 50 law enforcement officers have been accused or charged with the misuse of Flock or similar tools, and over half of the incidents involve surveillance related to romantic partners, per a recent investigation by The Washington Post. The reports include officers of all genders, but many cases involve a uniformed man stalking a civilian woman — or the people close to her. Forty-six of the cases tallied by The Post involved Flock equipment.

Flock is under fire as stories roll out about how its surveillance network has been used to find a woman who self-managed an abortion, share data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and search for people based on race. The San Francisco Standard found at least 39 Flock contracts have been cancelled in 2026 so far, and community activists across the country continue to push for jurisdictions to ditch more.

But the problem is not only one company. Two law enforcement agencies in Colorado cut ties with Flock, only to shift contracts to Axon, another automatic license plate reader (APLR) vendor. The heart of the matter, advocates say, is this: New surveillance technologies are always appropriated to inflict intimate partner violence. Experts say systems like smart cameras and automated license plate readers are sold to the public as ways to increase safety, but there are few, if any, guardrails to prevent them from becoming tools of domestic violence. 

LOVEINT, short for “love intelligence,” entered the lexicon in 2013 when National Security Agency (NSA) officials admitted some employees misused intelligence networks to spy on romantic partners. The revelation came as the country grappled with whistleblower Edward Snowden’s leaks exposing the vast reach of the agency’s surveillance. Snowden also talked about how intimate images stumbled upon by young NSA analysts would travel through the workplace.

Any technology that has the capacity for mass surveillance is inevitably used for gender violence, said Reem Suleiman, senior campaign director at Fight for the Future, a digital civil rights nonprofit. She helps organize an effort to “deflock” Lowe’s, one of the company’s largest commercial clients. 

“Even if you can find a use case or some utility for it, you cannot actually guardrail away some of these inherent harms,” she said. And those harms most often come at the cost of vulnerable groups like women, LGBTQ+ people and people of color.

At the same time, survivors of domestic violence or stalking use these surveillance products for their advertised purpose: to monitor their personal safety. Products like Ring, doorbells with always-on recording capabilities, are easier to set up than a closed-circuit security system, but how the data will be used by surveillance tech companies is unclear. There is a difference in levels of disclosure and control between a police officer having to ask someone individually for their private surveillance footage versus submitting a request to a corporation that isn’t obligated to give notice to its customers when it shares their data. 

Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has spent years working with survivors of domestic violence. That led her to co-found the Coalition Against Stalkerware, an international working group tackling the problem of software tools frequently used to spy on unknowing romantic partners. 

Her efforts led the antivirus software Kaspersky to begin flagging the tools known as stalkerware as a privacy threat to its customers instead of labeling it as benign. But companies go under and relaunch with new advertising all the time. Galperin said she has seen how creators of stalkerware have resisted changing their product function in favor of rewriting ad copy to say their software is meant for parents, employees or “building trust in relationships.” 

In response to cases of law enforcement officers across the country improperly accessing Flock for personal reasons, the company rolled out a voluntary audit tool in April. It requires precincts to opt in, and only catches abuse after it happens. 

“We’re not going to change humans, and humans make bad decisions,” Garrett Langley, CEO and co-founder of Flock, told The Post. “What we can do is make sure that they know if you use this tool, you will be held accountable.”

Lucy Qin, a postdoc at Georgetown University who researches privacy, pushed back against this framing: “Shorter-term fixes can band-aid the immediate problem but do not address a long-term pattern,” she said.

Galperin is similarly skeptical of any potential features that could meaningfully curb stalking: “It is not salvageable technology because of just the sheer scale of propensity to abuse.”

The abuse wasn’t necessarily unpredictable, either. Galperin pointed out that Flock is frequently used by police, a population generally shown to have above-average rates of domestic violence. Qin echoed that unauthorized use of surveillance data among law enforcement isn’t unprecedented.

Langley told a TED audience in April that the misuse of the company’s technology was “a trade-off I can make” compared to the number of investigations he said it assists with. 

But the scale of the stalking problem isn’t fully known, Galperin said: “This is not a matter of a few people engaging in aberrant behavior. These are just the people who have gotten caught, and who have gotten caught so blatantly that they have experienced consequences.”

And those consequences tend to be mild: Several incidents in the Washington Post piece resulted in probation for offenders who used Flock inappropriately. Among the NSA employees who were caught for LOVEINT, the ones who didn’t resign were temporarily suspended or had security clearances revoked. 

Getting to even that point can be difficult. Norma Buster is the chief of staff at C.A. Goldberg, a victim’s rights law firm focused on survivors of tech-enabled abuse. She handles intake for new clients, including those who are targeted by stalkers. 

She said the team evaluates every circumstance individually, but typically helps clients currently experiencing stalking to file for a protective order. In New York, where the firm is located, people are only eligible for those if they are being stalked by a partner or ex-partner. This is a huge limitation, as Flock has been used by officers to track not just exes but the new beaus with whom they have moved on. C.A. Goldberg advocated for the CREEP Act, which would allow for protective orders to be filed against anyone for harassment regardless of relationship status. The bill is currently awaiting the signature or veto of Gov. Kathy Hochul.

After Marci Bakely’s ex-boyfriend confessed to using Flock to track her whereabouts in 2024, The Washington Post reported a judge denied her petition for a protective order, saying she had no evidence to back up her allegations of stalking. 

Buster said there’s a digital literacy problem in the legal system; she saw this firsthand when she had difficulty finding a prosecutor to take up her own case involving image-based sexual abuse years ago. 

Ultimately, Buster said, it’s on tech companies to make sure their products are safe before they are released into the world. She doesn’t consider herself a tech expert, but over the years said she’s worked with thousands of survivors of tech-facilitated violence. “If I can foresee this, then I think an engineer who’s designing the product can foresee it too.”