The national debate over Flock Safety’s license-plate reader technology has turned a website built by a former software engineer into a sensation.
Hundreds of thousands of people a day are visiting “Have I Been Flocked?” — the database created in October 2025 by Cris van Pelt as he grew disillusioned with the tech industry.
“It’s exploded over the past week,” van Pelt told Business Insider last week, providing screenshots of traffic data that showed the site peaked at 60,000 unique visitors every two hours.
Flock’s technology is used in more than 6,000 communities across 49 states, according to the company, and has been credited with helping police solve serious crimes and find suspects.
It’s also sparked fresh discourse about police surveillance — and “Have I Been Flocked?” was caught in the right place at the right time. It lets users plug in any vehicle’s license plate and check it against a limited database of Flock Safety audit logs.
Van Pelt, who has left tech and enrolled in law school at the University of Iowa, said his goal was to show people “not only how prevalent these systems are, but how often and how unrestricted their use is.”
How the site works
The site doesn’t show whether a car was snapped by a Flock camera. Instead, it can show whether a Flock customer — like a police agency or a private company — has searched for a specific license plate number.
The site warns that its data is incomplete. It aggregates a patchwork of audit logs, including records published by agencies themselves and by others released in response to public records requests. The database now contains more than 242 million recorded searches dating back to November 2021, according to the site.
Van Pelt said the site is part of a broader grassroots effort by people pushing back against Flock cameras in their communities. Volunteers, particularly members of the DeFlock Discord community, help file public-records requests, answer users’ questions, and point people toward additional resources.
The site says it relies on donations streaming through the Alternative Newsweekly Foundation, a nonprofit that supports independent watchdog journalism. Van Pelt said it takes about $50 to $100 to run the servers each month.
Flock Safety didn’t respond to a request for comment. Van Pelt told Business Insider that “Have I Been Flocked?” does not collect data from other automated license plate-reading companies, such as Axon or Motorola Solutions, though he said he hoped other people are thinking about building similar websites for those companies.
A national conversation
Flock Safety has become a national lightning rod.
The Atlanta-based company, which was valued at $8.4 billion in April, is best known for its automated license plate reader technology, which combines cameras often perched atop intersections with advanced search features. The cameras capture physical descriptions of vehicles — including license plate numbers, make and model, paint color, and dents or scratches — and compile them into an AI-driven database.
Investigators say the tech was instrumental in tracking the vehicle of Claudio Neves-Valente, the man who was accused of killing two students at Brown University and a professor at MIT in December 2025.
The readers have come under increasing scrutiny amid allegations of misuse and inaccuracies.
In early August, The Washington Post reported that at least 50 law enforcement officers across the US had been accused of misusing license plate scanning tech to track unknowing drivers. Flock cameras were used in 46 of those cases. In March, Business Insider reported on multiple circumstances in which innocent drivers were pulled over, stopped at gunpoint, bitten by a police dog, or jailed after Flock’s technology misread license plates.
Flock announced a series of changes in mid-August aimed at addressing concerns about privacy and misuse, including shortening its recommended data-retention period for new customers from a month to a week and introducing additional tools designed to flag potentially improper searches.
Those changes haven’t satisfied all of Flock’s critics. In a statement, the ACLU called Flock’s recent changes a “thinly veiled PR attempt to counter communities’ genuine privacy concerns with its mass surveillance system.”
Controversies have also fueled a growing network of citizen-run projects to monitor the technology, including DeFlock and FlockHopper.
“Have I Been Flocked?” has quickly emerged as one key tool in that surveil-the-surveillance-tech ecosystem.
Doug MacMillan, an investigative reporter who contributed to The Washington Post’s August story, posted on X that he’s used “Have I Been Flocked?” data in his reporting.
Van Pelt built the site to make Flock’s data visible
Van Pelt said he began independently reviewing Flock data in late 2025, when the surveillance systems began entering the national consciousness. Struck by the volume of law enforcement searches he saw, he built the website in a “couple of weeks,” he told Business Insider.
At the time, van Pelt was already looking to move out of software engineering. “I kind of did the math there, and I figured tech isn’t really contributing to society as much as it once used to,” he said of his career pivot to law.
Van Pelt said his concerns aren’t limited to Flock. He said he sees the company as one piece of a broader surveillance infrastructure that includes license-plate readers, drones, sound-detection systems, and technology sold by other companies.
He said local governments and police departments should provide more transparency about what surveillance technologies they use, how those systems are interconnected, and why.
“Ending Flock is not the end game,” van Pelt said. “It’s really examining the mass surveillance infrastructure.”
Do you have a personal story about Flock Cameras? Share your experience in the comments section below.
If you have a story about Flock, we want to hear from you. Contact Ben Shimkus at bshimkus@insider.com or Signal at bshimkus.41. Use a personal email address and a non-work device.
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