Against the advice of his own working group, Mayor Ben Walsh granted Flock the right to keep Syracuse drivers’ anonymized data.
Mayor Ben Walsh in 2023 granted Flock Safety the perpetual right to use Syracuse’s data — which Flock says it “anonymizes” by removing details from the data — when he signed an agreement with the company to provide the city with license plate readers.
The Flock Safety contract Walsh agreed to allows the company to access and disclose Syracuse drivers’ anonymized data for its own purposes.
Walsh’s decision flew in the face of recommendations of a hand-picked team of technology experts.
The Surveillance Technology Working Group, created by Walsh and composed of high-ranking city officials and knowledgeable stakeholders, in 2023 reviewed a proposed license plate reader program and issued Walsh a list of recommendations to guard against misuse.
Writing on behalf of the group, the city’s Chief Innovation and Data Officer Nico Diaz explicitly stated in a letter to Walsh that Syracuse must not grant Flock access to use the city’s data for its own purposes.
“Data should not be shared with the vendor and it must not be used to improve or contribute to the vendor’s existing products or to the development of new products,” Diaz wrote in 2023.
Central Current in October obtained the city’s contract with Flock as city lawmakers began pushing to sever Syracuse’s ties with the embattled surveillance technology manufacturer.
The Flock contract Walsh signed in Oct. 2023 grants the company a “non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free right to use and distribute such Anonymized Data to improve and enhance the Services and for other development, diagnostic and corrective purposes, and other Flock offerings.” This includes the “training of machine algorithms,” according to the contract.
City officials contend they followed the working group’s recommendation because the data collected by license plate readers is anonymized by Flock, said the city’s Chief Policy Officer Greg Loh. At least one technology expert who sits on the working group believes it would be difficult for Flock to anonymize data to the degree the company says it can. Flock rejects that claim, and Loh supported the thoroughness of Flock’s anonymization process.
“Anonymized is clearly defined in the contract as being ‘permanently stripped of identifying details and any potential personally identifiable information, by commercially available standards which irreversibly alters data in such a way that a data subject (i.e., individual person or entity) can no longer be identified directly or indirectly,’” Loh wrote.
In a statement to Central Current, Syracuse Police Department spokesperson Kieran Coffey reiterated that the city is considering alternate license plate reader vendors. Coffey said the terms of the contract “speak for themselves.”
But Councilor Corey Williams, who worked with Councilor Jimmy Monto to initiate conversations about the city terminating its Flock contract, believes the contract clause in question is opaque, and factored into his and Monto’s decision to seek alternatives to Flock.
“There’s a number of reasons to find our contract with Flock problematic. This language is one of those reasons,” Williams said. “What we’re talking about is legal interpretations of a vague clause. We have no way of knowing that the Flock interpretation is the same as the city’s interpretation.”
Flock, a controversial surveillance company pledging to eliminate all crime in the country, provides Syracuse’s 13 license plate readers, which scan passing vehicles’ identifiable features and store that data in a cloud-based Flock server. The city purchased 26 Flock readers but has not installed the remaining 13.
Monto and Williams have led councilors in pushing back against Flock’s presence in Syracuse.
Earlier in 2025, the Syracuse Police Department found it had inadvertently opted into sharing data with Flock’s national network — a mistake that resulted in outside entities searching SPD’s data nearly 4.4 million times. Central Current in September reported that Flock had quietly granted Customs and Border Protection agents access to its servers, which at the time included Syracuse’s database. That secret agreement contradicted Flock’s repeated pledges that it had no formal agreements with federal immigration agencies, and undermined the company’s oft-touted insistence that its customers are the sole owners of the data their license plate readers collect.
What is anonymized data?
In an interview with Central Current, Flock Safety’s chief legal officer Dan Haley and communications director Holly Beilin downplayed concerns about the potential misuse of data. An anonymized data clause is “ubiquitous” in agreements with technology companies whose offerings use data, Haley said.
Haley said other major tech companies anonymize data from customers and pointed to Tesla and Google as companies whose user data helps improve their products.
The Flock representatives characterized the company’s use of anonymized customer data as similarly targeted at small updates to maintain and improve the efficacy of Flock’s products.
As an example, Haley said that if one of the 49 states in which Flock operates were to change its license plate’s colors or images, a small team of Flock engineers would access anonymized data to update Flock’s systems and prevent the plate change from leading to mistaken recognition of letters and digits.
Beilin said that when Flock anonymizes its customers’ data, it anonymizes:
Process images
Plate number
Timestamp
Timeframe
GPS coordinates
User-entered text
Uploaded files
Feedback that appended the search
Flock maintains this anonymization process thoroughly safeguards against misuse of the customer-generated data — but Syracuse University professor Johannes Himmelreich disagrees.
An expert in autonomous systems and the ethics of artificial intelligence, Himmelreich critiqued the concept that the data Flock “anonymizes” is truly untraceable. Himmelreich said that image data, even stripped of all metadata, remains traceable, especially when an image is outdoors or the location of the image is known.
Himmelreich is a member of Syracuse’s Surveillance Technology Working Group. He voted for Syracuse to add license plate readers with stipulations like the one violated by Syracuse’s contract with Flock.
Referencing the popular digital “geo-guessing” games — through which individuals have learned how to identify the location of an image based on available details like street signs, roads, vehicle designs and more — Himmelreich argued that the same may be possible for the data Flock is taking from Syracuse, regardless of the company’s stripping images of their metadata.
“The images that these cameras capture have a lot of information. Even when you anonymize them by throwing away metadata, you can figure out where the image was taken,” Himmelreich said. “After all, you still see the street and everything around the car. So, I doubt that the anonymization is robust. There is a real risk to de-anonymize them.”
‘You’re talking about ‘Minority Report”’
Central Current asked Flock if the company uses customer-generated anonymized data to train predictive models or proactive algorithms or plans to in the future. The American Civil Liberties Union in July contended the company was already using AI to alert law enforcement to drivers an algorithm deems suspicious. Flock’s Syracuse contract states the company has the right to use its customers’ anonymized data for the “training of machine algorithms.”
“Gosh, you’re talking about Minority Report, huh?” Haley said, referencing the dystopian story of a world governed by a “Precrime System” that identifies future criminals before those individuals ever commit a crime.
The company’s website features language arguing its products can help “stop crime before it happens,” and elsewhere, touts the utility of AI to “predict” risk and potential threats.
“Flock very categorically, doesn’t build predictive policing technologies,” said Beilin, Flock’s communications director, calling the claims on Flock’s website “marketing language.”
Acknowledging that he “sort of” understood such sci-fi-inspired concerns, Haley said the utility of anonymized data is low. Haley maintained that Flock’s anonymization process prevents the data from being funneled back to law enforcement or being used to find an individual vehicle.
If the city does decide to contract with a separate vendor for license plate readers, Flock Safety retains the right to use Syracuse’s “anonymized data” even after termination of the city’s agreement with Flock, according to the city’s contract terms.
Himmelreich contended that Flock’s interest in obtaining data generated by its customers still presents concerns, regardless of the company’s intended uses of that data. He argued that Flock seems intent on gaining and keeping customer data, and intimated the company fails to honor its commitments to customers who choose against sharing their data with the company and other outside entities.
“When someone withdraws their consent, you got to respect that,” Himmelreich said. “Looking at that language about perpetuity, it’s not clear Flock is ready to do that.”
After Central Current’s interview with Beilin and Haley, the Associated Press released an investigative report revealing that U.S. Border Patrol is already using the sort of AI-algorithm-based predictive models that the Flock representatives compared to science fiction.
According to the AP’s reporting, Border Patrol agents are surveilling American drivers, and detaining those that a computer deems “suspicious,” regardless of whether a human law enforcement agent has determined if a traffic stop is warranted.
Many civil rights advocates and constitutional scholars argue that such massive, dragnet monitoring may violate individuals’ Fourth Amendment rights, but Border Patrol claims wide-sweeping authority to disregard aspects of Fourth Amendment rights within 100 miles of any border — a tract of land in which the majority of Americans live.
Himmelreich believes Flock has shown a pattern of accessing and sharing data it promised to protect and that Flock perceives its customers, like Syracuse, and their data as a component of the services the business is offering.
“It sometimes looks to me like Flock sees SPD not only as their customer but also as their product,” Himmelreich said.
