Six Oregon cities and two counties canceled or suspended contracts over privacy and data leak fears.

By Khushboo Rathore/Oregon Journalism Project

Oregonians’ distrust of Flock cameras has intensified over the past year, with at least six cities and two counties canceling or curtailing contracts with the surveillance technology company across red and blue parts of the state.

Republican and Democratic state lawmakers have also vowed to introduce legislation to ban the AI-powered camera network, which captures license plate numbers at more than 500 locations in Oregon.

Critics as politically diverse as the American Civil Liberties Union and the sheriff of Josephine County, where Republicans outnumber Democrats nearly 2 to 1, say the cameras constitute an invasion of privacy because they can track any motorist’s car even when that person isn’t suspected of a violation or crime.

In testimony to the Oregon Legislature, ACLU representative Ethan Krow wrote: “The result is an ever-growing volume of highly sensitive data about Oregonians’ daily lives.”

The exact number of Oregon license plate readers and Flock cameras can’t be determined. Flock doesn’t release their locations. The $8.4 billion company has said it has 120,000 cameras nationwide that capture and store images of plate numbers, including date, time and location, and even such details as dents, decals and bumper stickers. And Flock isn’t the only one. Motorola, Axon and other companies have their own camera networks in Oregon and elsewhere.

Activists in Oregon and other states have compiled Flock locations in a crowdsourced database called Open Street Map, even noting in some cases which direction a camera points. The map shows Oregon has at least 529 license plate readers, almost certainly a vast undercount.

License plate reader technology has been around for decades. But the AI-powered Flock network is markedly different: a comprehensive, vehicle-profiling ecosystem with a central database available to more than 5,000 police departments, according to the company.

Flock has been accused of lax data security and has misidentified suspects and stolen cars. These issues have drawn fire from the Republican governors of Florida and Texas and the Los Angeles Police Department as well as activists concerned that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement can improperly use the database to sweep up immigrants. In Los Angeles, police reported a 32% inaccuracy rate in ALPRs identifying stolen cars over the course of two recent months.

During a trial run in Woodburn, Oregon’s most Latino city, officials found that the data they collected was being accessed by federal immigration agencies, something explicitly prohibited by Oregon law.

In Oregon, the cities of Bend, Eugene, Springfield, Talent, Winston and Woodburn signed contracts with Flock but in the past several months canceled or suspended them, citing safety and privacy concerns. The readers have led to false arrests and detainments across the country, according to the ACLU. On the other hand, images from a Flock camera reportedly helped police capture a suspect in a quintuple homicide in August near Forest Grove.

This past spring, Oregon lawmakers passed legislation to curtail the reach of AI-powered camera networks. They mandated that images may be stored for only 30 days, unless the driver of a vehicle photographed is suspected of traffic offenses or other more serious crimes.

Two lawmakers believe the change didn’t go far enough and want to ban automatic license plate reader cameras entirely. One of them, state Rep. Willy Chotzen (D-Southeast Portland), has campaigned for reelection on a platform of data privacy, writing that “we deserve our privacy protected as a fundamental freedom in our lives.”

You can crowdsource Flock camera locations via Open Street Map or the DeFlock App. Learn more at: deflock.org/report.

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This story was produced by the Oregon Journalism Project, a nonprofit investigative newsroom for the state of Oregon.