Flock Safety built an AI tool that tracks drivers by travel patterns, contrary to its claims

Flock Safety spent years telling the public its technology "cannot identify, verify or track people." Code documents WIRED located on the company's website show it built a system that does exactly that: an AI tool for police that identifies drivers and follows vehicles based solely on their movement patterns.

The tool, originally called Nightshift and renamed OS Investigate, runs on a camera network that logs driver movements in more than six thousand communities. The exposed cache — more than 450 files served through Flock's login pages to anyone who loaded them — describes forty-five tools available to the model: license-plate scans and camera metadata, arrest records, case files, 911 dispatch logs, ballistics results, and commercial databases holding Social Security numbers, dates of birth, phone numbers, emails, relatives and associates. The system ships with sixty-nine pre-built prompts that officers can select, edit and send, plus the option to enter free-form prompts.

Flock's original business model was straightforward: a camera photographs a passing vehicle, converts the plate to text, and checks it against a watchlist. Vehicles not on the list are merely logged. The pre-loaded prompts in OS Investigate describe a reversal of that arrangement. An officer no longer needs a plate, a name or an offense to begin. They feed in a location, a time window and a behavior pattern, and the system is designed to return the people who match.

One prompt asks: "Find me leads based on the vehicles seen most in [neighborhood] in [the last 14 days] during [daily timeframe] (will not include whitelisted vehicles)." The officer fills in the blanks and receives a list of plates, which other tools in the product then resolve to names and home addresses. Another prompt instructs the system to list everyone arrested more than twice in two years for "any offense" except drug offenses, map where they live, pull service calls at those addresses, and run a "workup" — Flock's term for a "background check" in a single command — on the top three, a process that starts with anyone who has a criminal record in the area and ends with case files on the three the software selects.

Flock says it is testing the product with a small group of law-enforcement partners and characterizes it as still in development, with capabilities that may not reflect what is ultimately sold. The rollout arrives as the company faces bipartisan political pressure, a lengthening roster of officers caught misusing the platform, and vandalism that has left cameras sawn off and lenses painted over in cities across the country. Privacy and legal scholars say Flock's existing tools already raise serious constitutional concerns by giving police broad, often warrantless access to vast records of people's movements; the exposed prompts push the boundary further, turning a known-vehicle locator into a tool that casts suspicion on drivers based on where and how much they drive, regardless of whether they are wanted for any offense.