Congressional scrutiny of automated license plate readers has ramped up in recent weeks, with criticism mostly aimed at Flock Safety over the large number of law enforcement agencies it contracts with.
Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) have introduced the Ban Flock Act, which would bar federal agencies from using or accessing data collected by automated license plate readers, or ALPRs. It would also prohibit federal grants from going to state and local governments that use the technology.
While the legislation to prohibit ALPRs draws its name from the Atlanta-based company, Flock is not the only player in the ALPR game, with one of its major competitors more closely associated with the flip phones of the early 2000s: Motorola Solutions.
The backlash against Flock has also created an opening for its competitors as cities reconsider their license plate reader contracts. Dozens of communities have deactivated Flock cameras, rejected proposed deals, or canceled contracts amid concerns about privacy, data sharing, and law enforcement misuse.
Flock being in the hot seat has created an opportunity for companies such as Motorola to swoop in.
Motorola offers law enforcement a variety of technologies, including ALPRs, software systems, and a national data-sharing system. Its technology is also available to commercial and enterprise customers, including parking enforcement operations, while license plate information collected by repossession vehicles feeds a separate commercial database.
Jay Stanley, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, said that while Flock is a giant in the ALPR space, particularly in its use of artificial intelligence, Motorola has its own privacy risks.
“Flock is dominant in many ways,” he said. “I think Flock is pushing AI the hardest, which is a serious matter. But Motorola has big problems of its own. It seems to be very large in terms of its plate reads.”
From Razr phones to public safety technology
Motorola’s path from cellphones to police surveillance is not as direct as the familiar name might suggest.
Motorola Inc., the company behind the iconic Razr flip phone, split into two independent companies in 2011. Motorola Mobility took over the consumer cellphone business, while Motorola Solutions inherited the company’s commercial and government operations.
At the time of the division, Motorola Solutions was already focused on public safety communications. The company had decades of experience selling radio communications equipment to government agencies and increasingly expanded its business into software, video security, and other public safety technology.
Behind the split was CEO Greg Brown, who previously said he had always seen public safety as being the “jewel” of the franchise. With Brown at the helm, the company grew through organic and inorganic investment.
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Those inorganic investments, meaning the expansion came from external capital, were the acquisitions of other companies that were already in the public sphere. By 2017, Motorola had invested $1.7 billion to take over or support companies that make body cameras, facial recognition tools, and other technologies. In doing so, Motorola consolidated a corner of the surveillance technology market.
A closer look at Motorola’s ALPRs
License plate readers became a significant part of Motorola’s portfolio in 2019, two years after Flock was founded.
The company paid $445 million to acquire VaaS International Holdings, a vehicle-location data and image analytics company whose subsidiaries included Vigilant Solutions for law enforcement and Digital Recognition Network for commercial customers.
Motorola’s acquisition of VaaS brought fixed and mobile license plate cameras into Motorola’s portfolio, but it also gave the company something possibly more valuable: access to an established system for searching and sharing vehicle-location information.
At the time, Brown said the acquisition would expand the company’s command center software with what he described as the “largest shareable database of vehicle location information.”
Today, Motorola sells its license plate reader program as the “most comprehensive license plate recognition system available.”
Motorola’s ALPRs can be affixed to posts, as Flock’s are commonly seen, or mounted to police vehicles. Additionally, Motorola’s ALPRs capture the “make, model, color, accessories and even unique vehicle features like damage or bumper stickers” on vehicles that pass by, which is then put into a database that makes data searchable.
While Motorola Solutions is now a separate entity from the cellphone maker, Stanley said it’s unclear how that name association can affect people’s perception of the ALPR company.
“It’s still a brand name that’s familiar to a lot of consumers because they sold consumer-facing goods, and I don’t know what extent that has,” Stanley said. “I don’t know if that’s had any effect in insulating them from public suspicion. Most of the police law enforcement [contracts are] under the brand name Vigilant as well … but for whatever reason, they haven’t become the target in the way that Flock has, but they deserve to be.”
How Motorola’s data-sharing system works
According to Motorola, law enforcement agencies can access information collected by enterprise customers when those customers choose to share it, as well as a separate commercial database containing license plate detections collected by repossession vehicles.
The flow of information is asymmetric, however, as Motorola says enterprise customers can elect to share their information with law enforcement but cannot access police information. The company says it physically separates law enforcement and enterprise data to prevent police data from passing into its enterprise systems.
Stanley said data sharing between commercial and law-enforcement customers raises questions about how that data is being used by police. Compared to Flock, Stanley said civilian and law enforcement data crossover “goes beyond anything that Flock is involved in.”
“I think that that data is being used to make judgments about individual consumers in automobile insurance and other areas, and we don’t know how it’s being used,” he said. “How are people being judged by where they drive? How harmful is it to low-income and other disadvantaged groups? We know that AI algorithmic scoring generally tends to be very harmful, disproportionately harmful for vulnerable groups.”
Similar to Flock, Motorola allows its customers to determine whether they share license plate information they collect. Motorola says data collected from customers remains the property of those customers, who also control access and retention periods.
However, Motorola differs from Flock in that it does not specify data retention limits. Flock had previously set an automatic 30-day retention period for customers but, after backlash and reports of police misuse, changed the storage period to one week for new customers.
Motorola also says its system includes auditing tools and accountability measures. VehicleManager, the database, logs user activity and transactions, including successful and unsuccessful actions, the originating IP address, and what action was performed and when it occurred.
Audit records are retained for at least one year, unless a customer sets a different retention period, according to Motorola. The company also says changes to users’ access rights and privileges are logged indefinitely.
However, Motorola places responsibility for actually conducting those audits on the law enforcement agency using the system. The company says it provides tools consistent with FBI Criminal Justice Information Services security standards, but “it is the client agency’s responsibility to perform the audit process” using those tools.
Stanley said it’s better for Motorola and similar companies to have such guardrails in place, but cautioned against taking those measures as anything more than suggestions.
“It is better to have these accountability measures than not to have them,” he said. “But at the same time, there is a risk that they will fool people into thinking that they are meaningful when they are generally not.”
Stanley compared Motorola’s safety measures to those of Flock, which police officers have circumvented to misuse the technology to stalk former partners. For Stanley, accountability measures are worthwhile if they are enforced.
“What we’ve seen not only with Flock, but with other technologies … is that when you create accountability measures that are based on users logging the purposes of their searches, that they’re just easily circumvented by lying or otherwise obfuscating the true purpose of a search,” Stanley said. “Accountability really depends on managerial enforcement by agencies when it comes to their workforce, and that’s something that we have not seen done well in many or most police departments.”
Privacy concerns
Motorola’s surveillance technology has also faced privacy challenges.
The company faces an active class-action lawsuit filed in May 2026 regarding its license plate cameras, alleging Motorola violated California law by allowing data sharing with federal and other state agencies without drivers’ consent.
In 2025, Motorola settled a separate $47.5 million class action lawsuit in Illinois after plaintiffs claimed the company violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act by collecting, storing, and sharing residents’ facial biometric data through its FaceSearch technology without proper disclosure or consent.
The controversies underscore that the growing debate over Flock is also a debate over a much larger industry. Even as Flock’s cameras have drawn the bulk of recent attention from lawmakers and privacy advocates, networks operated by older public safety companies such as Motorola have quietly become another source of searchable vehicle location information for police nationwide.
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While Flock and Motorola each have their own respective issues among privacy advocates, Stanley questioned whether ALPR technology has a place in the United States.
“The only way to really protect privacy is not to engage in this kind of mass surveillance, not to be keeping records of where everybody drives and when, even of people who are not suspected of any involvement in wrongdoing,” he said. “In our society, the government isn’t supposed to be watching everything everybody does just in case you later turn out to be somebody suspected of a crime.”
The Washington Examiner reached out to Motorola for comment.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
