Flock Safety told city councils for years that its cameras "cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals." Then WIRED pulled the company’s own code off a login page.
The tool is called OS Investigate. It used to be called Nightshift. It sits on top of license-plate cameras in more than 6,000 U.S. communities, and it does not wait for a name.
Fourteen of the 69 prewritten prompts need no plate, no suspect, and no crime. An officer types a place, a window of time, and a behavior. Cars that hit three retail stores in three days. Cars that passed several banks in a week. The system filters out buses and delivery vans so an ordinary person making those rounds stays on the list.
Then it does the part that should matter to you even if you never drive past a Flock camera.
The code WIRED reconstructed describes 45 tools. Some query Flock’s own plate scans. Some query arrest records, 911 dispatch logs, case files. And some query commercial identity databases that hold Social Security numbers, dates of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, relatives, and associates.
A "workup," in Flock’s language, starts with a name and a birth date and comes back with vehicles, prior listings, relatives, phone numbers, and online accounts. That is not a detective with a warrant. That is a broker file with a badge on it.
Flock says OS Investigate is a separate product from the cameras, still in testing with a few law-enforcement partners, and that the final version may look different. It has not disputed the capabilities WIRED described.
Why this is a data-broker story
People argue about cameras on poles. Fine. Argue about cameras.
The quiet half is older and dumber. Brokers already assembled you. They stitched voter files, warranties, loyalty programs, and people-search sites into a profile that includes your SSN-adjacent identity graph. Police software does not invent that graph. It buys it, or it queries a vendor who already did.
If you are not in those commercial databases, a driving-pattern prompt is a car. If you are in them, a driving-pattern prompt is a person, a household, and a list of relatives.
That is why "I have nothing to hide" is the wrong sentence. You might have nowhere to hide. The file exists whether you posted a selfie or not.
What you can actually do
You cannot opt out of a police camera network from your couch. You can make the commercial half of that stack worse for the people who sell you.
- Search your name plus your city. If Spokeo, BeenVerified, Whitepages, or Radaris is in the top five, that listing is a workup waiting to happen.
- Send a legal deletion to the brokers and the household-name companies that feed them. CCPA, GDPR, and 20+ state laws already say they have a deadline.
- Do it again. Brokers re-scrape. A one-time form is a nap, not a deletion.
RemoveMyTracks is built for that second and third step. Not for "erasing Flock." For starving the commercial databases the AI is reaching into.
Try 3 companies free. No credit card. If the dashboard moves, you know it is real.
We are not a law firm. We send authorized opt-out and deletion requests and track the replies. Police systems are outside that. The broker file is not.