Have I Been Flocked? How to search your license plate | Mashable
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People aren’t exactly thrilled about Flock’s growing surveillance network. Communities are canceling contracts, protesters are taking down cameras in increasingly creative ways, and activists have built a crowdsourced map showing where the devices are hiding in plain sight. Even Flock has announced new privacy restrictions as the backlash grows.<br>Now, drivers can search some of those records for themselves.<br>A website called Have I Been Flocked? lets you enter your license plate number and check whether it appears in publicly released records of searches conducted through Flock Safety’s system. As of Aug. 17, the website had compiled nearly 242 million searches involving more than 4.6 million plates.
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The need for that kind of transparency isn’t hypothetical. A recent Washington Post investigation found that at least 50 law enforcement officers had been charged with or accused of misusing license plate readers, including to stalk women without their knowledge or consent.<br>The concerns extend beyond individual officers. Public records reviewed by 404 Media documented more than 4,000 Flock searches conducted by local and state police at the request of federal officials, as informal favors, or for potentially immigration-related purposes. Flock says ICE cannot directly access its system, but the records show how local agencies can search the network on the federal government’s behalf.<br>Have I Been Flocked? won’t reveal everything Flock knows about your car, and finding a match doesn’t necessarily mean you were investigated. Nevertheless, here's how to run a search — and understand what the results actually mean.<br>How to check whether your license plate was searched<br>Go to HaveIBeenFlocked.com, enter your license plate number in the search box, and click “Search.”<br>If your plate appears in the database, the results may include when it was searched, the agency associated with the query, the person who conducted it, and the reason provided for looking up the plate. Some of that information may be incomplete or redacted.<br>The website is part of Footnote4a, an independent editorial project focused on mass surveillance and government contracts. Its database is built from Flock audit logs released by local governments through transparency portals or obtained through public records requests.<br>Those audit logs document searches made within Flock’s system. According to the website's FAQ, the license plate and stated reason shown in the results are information that a Flock operator manually entered.
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What does it mean if your plate appears?<br>A match means a Flock user queried the company’s database for that license plate. It does not necessarily mean that your car was stopped, that you were suspected of committing a crime, or that you were formally investigated.<br>The person conducting the search may have been a police officer, but the website notes that not every Flock user is a member of law enforcement. Businesses, schools, homeowners associations, and other private organizations also use Flock’s technology.<br>The reason listed alongside a result may provide more context. An operator could say the search was related to a stolen vehicle, traffic stop, missing person, or another investigation. However, because users supply those explanations themselves, they should not be treated as an independent account of what happened.<br>The website also does not show whether the search produced a match inside Flock’s system or reveal exactly what the operator saw.<br>No result doesn’t mean you haven’t been searched<br>Have I Been Flocked? has collected hundreds of millions of records, but its database is still incomplete.<br>The project depends on public records released by individual government agencies, and relatively few make their complete Flock audit logs easily available. The records that are released can also be heavily redacted or out of date.
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"There can be a significant delay — months or even years — between when a search occurs and when it appears on this website," the project explains on its site.<br>That means an empty result does not prove that nobody has ever searched for your plate; it only means the...