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Stanford University has terminated its contract with Flock Safety, a company whose license plate cameras have prompted backlash from privacy advocates across the nation.
The university announced Tuesday that it has ended its agreement with Flock and has replaced the Flock system with one that does not allow data to be accessible by any third party, according to the Stanford Report, a university publication. In making the switch, Stanford is joining a growing number of jurisdictions that have either ditched Flock in recent months or have added new restrictions.
In many instances, city leaders were surprised to learn that the license plate data that was captured by Flock cameras was used by other agencies in violation of local policies. As this publication has previously reported, hundreds of out-of-state agencies had searched Palo Alto’s license plate data because of a nationwide search feature, which Flock disabled for Palo Alto in October 2024 and for all of California in March 2025. State law has made it illegal to share license plate data with out-of-state or federal agencies since 2016.
Mountain View opted to terminate its contract with Flock in February, after the Mountain View Voice reported about widespread data breaches, while San Jose added new limits on data storage. East Palo Alto opted earlier this year to renew its contract with Flock, defying critics who contended that the data may be used for immigration enforcement. Palo Alto has agreed to do an audit before it considers its future partnership with the company, and the results are expected to be presented to the City Council later this year.
In Sacramento, lawmakers are considering legislation by Sen. Sabrina Cervantes that would add safeguards to Flock data, including a 30-day limit for storing license plate data unless it involves a search for missing people, according to CalMatters. The bill would also ban law enforcement agencies from entering into contracts with camera companies that federal and out-of-state police can search by default.
Other states are also seeing growing resistance to Flock’s surveillance technology. In Winona, Minn., people had recently cut down all eight of the department’s Flock cameras, according to the local newspaper, Winona Post. In Dallas, Texas, police reported that about 25 Flock cameras had been vandalized, according to NBV DFW. And in North Carolina, a county commissioner barred dozens of Flock critics from citing their concerns at a recent meeting, 404 Media reported.
Stanford is replacing its Flock system with a Genetec Cloudrunner system, which will collect still images of vehicle information from campus entrances, according to the Stanford Report. The data will be stored in a cloud server for less than an hour, where it will not be accessible by any third party.
According to the university, the data would then be automatically transferred to a server that Stanford controls and the data will be permanently deleted from the cloud.
The university, which contracts with the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office for public safety services, began using license plate cameras in 2024 as a tool to investigate crimes. According to the university, the cameras have assisted the Department of Public Safety with numerous investigations. They have led to arrests of one serial thief who stole property from multiple offices and another serial thief who stole packages from various areas of campus. Chief Laura Wilson from Stanford Department of Public Safety called the cameras “an important investigative tool.”
The university stated that it does not provide other law enforcement agencies or third parties with access to its license plate reader camera system. However, Palo Alto’s network audit of Flock data shows that the university police conducted dozens of searches in a database that included Palo Alto’s cameras as recently as the end of June.
Patrick Dunkley, the university’s vice provost for institutional equity, access and community, noted that the new system, unlike Flock, is “designed to use within a single institution.”
“Flock is built as a shared network with the capability for data to move beyond a single institution, even if that’s not how we chose to use it,” Dunkley said in a statement to this publication.
He said the university is not aware of any third-party access to its data.
“The new system does not have third-party access built into the architecture,” Dunkley said. “It’s a tool for Stanford’s Department of Public Safety to investigate specific incidents on our campus, not a system that could be connected to a broader network.”
Staff Writer Riley Cooke contributed to this report.
