Alpharetta, Georgia has 67,000 residents and roughly 120 police officers. It also has Flock Safety cameras feeding license plate data to more than 2,000 organizations — colleges, airports, a Medicare fraud unit in Illinois, Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Commission. According to WIRED’s public records analysis published August 28, the suburb receives data from over 1,300 entities in return. This isn’t a story about one rogue department. It’s about how a vendor’s platform architecture quietly transforms a local camera purchase into a national surveillance app-enabled decision nobody consciously made.
The 500-Mile Default
A single configuration choice — auto-approving requests within 500 miles — quietly wired Alpharetta into a surveillance network spanning thousands of agencies.
Alpharetta Lieutenant Jason Hiott told WIRED the department “automatically approves” data requests from law enforcement within 500 miles. He couldn’t say whether that was the original default, when it was set, or what earlier configurations looked like. Flock’s admin panel lets agencies share by radius, by state, or by manually selecting partners — but most administrators don’t fully understand what they’ve enabled, or for how long. Flock spokesperson Jess Montejano claimed data sharing is “off by default” for new customers, without clarifying whether that had always been true.
Since June 2025, entities receiving Alpharetta’s data grew by roughly 42 percent; entities sending data to Alpharetta grew by 125 percent. Then there’s Nationwide Lookup — Flock’s 2023 tool letting any customer query cameras across the country. Palo Alto, California didn’t learn the feature had ever been active on its system until December 2025, months after Flock disabled it — a potential conflict with California law, which bars sharing ALPR data with out-of-state agencies. San Jose has a Flock problem that mirrors these same tensions around local oversight. The city manager first heard about it at a June study session. The department’s own officers found out six months later.
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Query logs from Reynoldsburg, Ohio reveal how platform design and human behavior together push searches toward the widest possible scope.…