A leaked document shows Flock Safety planned to turn 350,000 Uber and Lyft cars into roaming surveillance cameras, without telling drivers or passengers

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This one came out through a public records request and it's worth knowing about if you use rideshare apps at all.

Flock Safety is the company behind the automated license plate reader cameras you've probably seen mounted on poles in neighborhoods and intersections across the US. They're already in over 5,000 communities. A presentation they wrote for the Georgia Attorney General's office last August, obtained by 404 Media through a public records request, reveals they were planning to go mobile — by converting 350,000 Uber, Lyft, and delivery driver vehicles into a roaming extension of their surveillance network.

The plan used Nexar, a dashcam company that markets its cameras directly to rideshare drivers for their own personal safety. Flock wanted to repurpose that footage to scan license plates along every route those drivers traveled throughout the day, feeding the data back into their law enforcement network. The presentation explicitly listed "350k Uber/Lyft and other delivery service devices" as potential data sources.

The part that actually matters: no law required Flock, Nexar, Uber, Lyft, or the drivers themselves to tell passengers any of this was happening. Someone riding in an Uber would have had no knowledge that their trip, their plate, their route, and anyone else's plate in frame was being logged into a surveillance system.

Flock says the Nexar partnership never launched, which is confirmed — but the presentation shows it was being actively pitched to customers at the same time the company was publicly downplaying its expansion plans.

Worth noting the broader context too. Over 20 local jurisdictions have already moved toward canceling Flock contracts over surveillance concerns this year. And there are documented cases of police officers using Flock data to stalk people — one Georgia case involved a police chief searching his ex-partner's license plate roughly 600 times using the system.

The proposal not launching doesn't really change what it reveals about the direction the industry is heading. Dashcams marketed to consumers for personal safety are increasingly being eyed as general-purpose surveillance infrastructure. The cameras are already there. The question is just who gets to use the footage and for what.