Police use Flock to search license plates. Now there's a viral website to see if yours was one of them.
Cris van Pelt's website "Have I Been Flocked?" is visited by thousands of people a day, but he told BI that "ending Flock is not the end game."
A website called Have I Been Flocked? is helping shed light on the use of license plate readers. Cris van Pelt, the website's founder, told Business Insider that the platform has become a sensation in the past week, attracting hundreds of thousands of daily visitors. Flock Safety's technology, used in over 6,000 communities across 49 states, has helped police solve serious crimes but has also sparked concerns about police surveillance.
Have I Been Flocked? allows users to input a license plate and check it against a database of Flock Safety audit logs. The site warns that its data is incomplete and only shows whether a license plate has been searched, not whether a car was captured by a Flock camera. The site's data comes from a mix of agency audited logs and public records requests, with more than 242 million recorded searches dating back to November 2021.
Van Pelt, who is now studying law, hopes the site will raise awareness about the prevalence and sometimes unrestricted use of Flock cameras.
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