Beware of Other License Plate Surveillance Companies Besides Flock

Subscribe to the Free Future Newsletter
Or get immediate notifications of new posts via Substack
Free Future home

There’s a nationwide rebellion against license plate readers underway, and the company Flock is the focus. That’s natural, because the company has “essentially dominated license plate recognition across the United States,” as industry analyst IPVM put it. But Flock is far from the only vendor, and with Flock rightly receiving most of the heat, it’s important to realize that its competitors aren’t so great either, and that simply replacing Flock surveillance with another company’s surveillance won’t necessarily solve any of the privacy and other civil liberties problems posed by this mass surveillance technology.

We have covered Flock in depth, including in this 2022 white paper and in numerous blog posts since. A pioneer of centralizing ALPR data through the cloud, the company runs a vast “National Lookup” searchable nationwide database of license plate and other photographic data of vehicles — an inherently authoritarian infrastructure that has, among other things, already been used to help ICE in its human rights-violating deportation drive, and to try to track and investigate a Texas woman who had an abortion.

Aside from being dominant in the domestic police ALPR market, Flock is also alienating many communities because of its lack of truthfulness and erratic and immature public statements. Unlike its biggest competitors, which are public companies, Flock’s private investors include tech billionaire venture capital firms such as Andreessen Horowitz, which also funds other surveillance companies like Anduril and Skydio, and explicitly aims to invest in building domestic law enforcement surveillance capabilities. These are legitimate reasons to avoid doing business with a company.

At the same time, communities can’t simply assume that their residents will be better off from a privacy and civil liberties perspective by dropping Flock and replacing it with another ALPR provider, as some customers have done. They should ask hard questions about whether they really want to create that kind of a system, and if they do, ensure it doesn’t function as a mass surveillance system.

Motorola Solutions (aka Vigilant)

One of Flock’s most significant competitors is Motorola. This company, which has been expanding its police technology offerings through an aggressive acquisition strategy in recent years, offers a nationwide law enforcement data sharing system similar to Flock’s called the National Vehicle Location Service (NVLS), operated by Motorola unit Vigilant Solutions. In addition to collecting data from law enforcement clients’ cameras, it also runs a large separate commercial ALPR unit that makes deals for tow trucks and other fleet vehicles to carry cameras and collect data for Motorola as they drive around, amassing billions of plate reads (a claimed 500 million monthly, subject to no apparent data retention policy). Known as the Digital Recognition Network (DRN), that unit sells its data for commercial purposes but also makes it available to its law enforcement customers for an extra charge. Motorola tells agencies they can have “access to billions of detections beyond your own,”

Some communities may want to take into account the fact that this uniquely powerful commercial plate-scanning infrastructure is marketed to private companies, including auto financers and insurers, and not only for repossession but also for “risk assessment” purposes — even though risk scores have been shown to disproportionately harm low-income and other marginalized drivers.

(Note that following a 2011 corporate breakup of the classic American electronics company Motorola Inc., the company Motorola Solutions being discussed here is separate from Motorola Mobility, a smartphone company owned by the Chinese company Lenovo.)

Axon

Formerly known as Taser, Axon has built its business around that police pain-delivery device, as well as body cameras, where it dominates the market, and its cloud data storage service Evidence.com. Like Flock and Motorola, the company is seeking to become a broad “operating system of police departments,” which has ominous implications we detailed in a recent white paper. Axon has been aggressively expanding its law enforcement products, including by pushing premature uses of AI. Many Flock customers already have contracts with Axon for body cameras and other products, making a switch to Axon all the easier — especially since Axon is pursuing an explicit strategy of bundling multiple technologies and services together in long-term contracts. That raises significant concerns over platform dependence and lock-in.

As part of these strategies, Axon is looking to build up its ALPR offerings — and the market for them, which (as the ACLU has seen firsthand) has included lobbying against state ALPR regulations and local surveillance tech transparency laws. The company began selling ALPR services in 2021 through its in-vehicle “Axon Fleet 3” dashcam and in-car camera product, and then in 2025 announced new fixed-camera ALPR products, including a “smart streetlight” that attaches to existing poles and power sources. Both products feature AI vehicle recognition. Axon doesn’t impose any data-retention limits on its customers and lets police departments decide how long they want their data to sit on Axon’s servers. It does have a default policy of 30 days, but that’s only a default.

All three companies offer products that blur the lines between ALPR and live video surveillance. “You no longer have to make tradeoffs when it comes to ALPR deployments — license plate recognition or livestreaming,” Axon boasts.

It’s not clear whether Axon has any formal arrangements with ICE or other DHS agencies to access plate-read data collected by Axon devices, though the company does have a number of contracts with the federal government, including an announced $220 million five-year deal to buy the company’s problematic Taser devices. That does not have the same privacy implications as sharing data on people’s locations with ICE, though supplying that agency and its often lawless and abusive officers with Tasers may violate the company’s responsibilities under internationally recognized human rights standards, and generally carries a moral stench.

Axon is explicitly positioning itself as a “more ethical” alternative to Flock. As the security industry analysts at IPVM put it in a headline, “Axon LPR Business Surges As Flock Is Embattled.” Axon has a particular rivalry with Flock over becoming a broad provider of police surveillance and data services — the “operating system of police departments” (with Motorola also in the running in a less high-profile way). I looked at that race and its implications in a June 2026 white paper.