Can you opt out of Flock cameras?

There is no general opt-out. Flock Safety’s published license plate reader policy describes no process by which a member of the public can ask for their plate to be excluded from collection, and it is explicit that the company is not the party holding the data: “LPR data gathered by the Flock Safety system on behalf of Flock Safety customers is owned by the customer.”¹

That single sentence explains why most opt-out requests go nowhere. The customer is the police department, county, business, or homeowners association that bought the cameras. Asking the vendor to delete your record is asking a company to delete someone else’s property. Whatever leverage exists sits with the agency, and with the local officials who decide whether that agency keeps the cameras at all.

The same policy sets the default clock: LPR data is “hard deleted on a rolling 30-day basis by default; this may be increased or decreased on a case-by-case basis.”¹ So in a default deployment, a record of your car passing a camera today ages out about a month from now — unless the agency has negotiated something longer, or the record has been attached to an investigation.

The feature most often mistaken for one is Flock’s SafeList. It is real, but it is narrower than it sounds in three ways worth knowing before you go looking for it.

It does not stop the camera. Registering a plate marks images of that vehicle as belonging to a resident so that neighbors searching the system can filter them out. The photograph is still taken and still stored. Only if you tick a specific box — “Remove my vehicles from footage” — does Flock say the vehicle stops turning up in searches at all.²

It is a neighborhood feature, not a public one. Flock’s own description of signing up is that “all you need is a link from your authorized Flock system keeper” — the administrator of a particular HOA or private community deployment.² There is no equivalent for the cameras a police department runs on public roads.

It only covers the system you registered with. A SafeList entry in your subdivision has no effect on the department one town over, which is running its own cameras and, in many cases, sharing what they capture across a much wider network.

A small number of municipalities have built their own. Los Altos Hills, California, ran one: residents could have a plate excluded from the town’s ALPR system by submitting proof of vehicle registration to an address inside town limits, and because the exemption attached to the plate rather than the car, it followed the plate if it moved to a different vehicle.³

Two things about that example are worth carrying to your own city. The first is the shape of the ask: it worked because the town council adopted it as policy, not because anyone persuaded the vendor. The second is what happened next. The same town later voted to terminate its Flock contract outright and took the cameras offline in January 2026.³ An opt-out list is the compromise available when the cameras stay.

If your city has no such program, the question to put to your council is whether it will create one — and the place to ask is the same public meeting where the contract gets renewed.

There is no federal ALPR statute, so the rules that bind an agency are whatever its state legislature has written — and most states have written nothing specific.⁶ Where a statute does exist it typically caps retention, restricts who data can be shared with, or requires a warrant for some kinds of access, rather than granting individuals a right to be excluded.

California is the broadest example. SB 34 reaches private operators as well as police: every ALPR operator must publish a usage and privacy policy, log each query, and public agencies may not sell or share plate data with non-public agencies.⁵ That does not remove your plate from a camera, but it creates written obligations you can hold an agency to, and a policy document you can ask to see.

We track the statutes we have verified, with links to the official text, in license plate reader laws, state by state.

You usually cannot look up your own car, but you can often look up the searches. Flock offers agencies a Transparency Portal that publishes a public-facing view of their program, which can include the agency’s policy, usage statistics, sharing arrangements, and a search audit showing fields such as case number, search reason, offense type, an anonymized user identifier, and how many cameras or networks each search touched.⁴

The important caveat: publishing one is the agency’s choice, not a default setting.⁴ If your department has no portal, that absence is itself worth raising, and the underlying audit logs are the kind of record a public records request is designed to reach. What a given state will actually release varies, and investigative records are frequently exempt.

To see how many readers have been documented where you live, start with our state and city index or the interactive map.

Every option above works around a camera that stays up. The only thing that has reliably taken readers down is a local government deciding not to keep them — declining to renew, voting a contract down, or pausing a program after an audit. We maintain a cited list of the places that have done it, and the reasons they gave, in cities that have dropped Flock Safety.

Advocacy groups organize around exactly this decision point rather than around individual removal; the ACLU’s campaign, for instance, directs people to a local advocacy toolkit and to state affiliates, and says nothing about opting a single vehicle out — because that is not where the leverage is.⁷

We do not publish techniques for defeating, obscuring, or evading cameras. This site documents where readers have been reported and explains how the systems work so that residents and local officials can make informed decisions about them; that is the whole of our editorial policy on the question. Obscuring a plate is also a traffic offense in most states, independent of anything to do with ALPR.

If you are trying to understand what a reader records in the first place, start with what a Flock camera is and how it works.