Viral site 'Have I Been Flocked?' reveals if police searched your plate

A viral website called Have I Been Flocked? now lets anyone plug in a license plate and see if it appears in a database of 242 million recorded searches from Flock Safety's license plate readers. The site, built by former software engineer Cris van Pelt, has exploded in popularity, peaking at 60,000 unique visitors every two hours last week, according to traffic data he shared with Business Insider. Van Pelt, who left tech to enroll in law school at the University of Iowa, created the site in October 2025 to expose how prevalent and unrestricted these surveillance systems are. The database aggregates audit logs from Flock customers - police agencies and private companies - that have been published or released through public records requests. It does not show every car a Flock camera captured, but rather whether a specific plate was searched by a Flock customer. The site warns its data is incomplete, yet it already contains more than 242 million recorded searches dating back to November 2021.

Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based company valued at $8.4 billion in April, operates in more than 6,000 communities across 49 states. Its cameras capture physical descriptions of vehicles - license plate numbers, make, model, paint color, and damage - and compile them into an AI-driven database. Investigators credit the technology with helping solve serious crimes, including tracking the vehicle of the man accused of killing two students at Brown University and a professor at MIT in December 2025. But the technology has faced increasing scrutiny. In early August, The Washington Post reported that at least 50 law enforcement officers across the US had been accused of misusing license plate scanning tech to track unknowing drivers, with Flock cameras used in 46 of those cases. Business Insider reported in March on innocent drivers pulled over, stopped at gunpoint, bitten by a police dog, or jailed after Flock's technology misread plates.

In mid-August, Flock announced changes aimed at addressing privacy concerns, including shortening its recommended data-retention period for new customers from a month to a week and introducing tools to flag potentially improper searches. The ACLU called the changes a "thinly veiled PR attempt to counter communities' genuine privacy concerns with its mass surveillance system." Those changes have not satisfied critics, and the controversy has fueled a growing network of citizen-run projects to monitor the technology, including DeFlock and FlockHopper. Have I Been Flocked? has quickly emerged as a key tool in that surveil-the-surveillance-tech ecosystem. Investigative reporter Doug MacMillan, who contributed to The Washington Post's August story, posted on X that he has used the site's data in his reporting, noting that the data showed many officers had run hundreds or thousands of searches on a single plate.

Van Pelt said he began independently reviewing Flock data in late 2025, when the surveillance systems began entering the national consciousness. Struck by the volume of law enforcement searches he saw, he built the website in a "couple of weeks," he told Business Insider. At the time, he was already looking to move out of software engineering. "I kind of did the math there, and I figured tech isn't really contributing to society as much as it once used to," he said of his career pivot to law. The site runs on donations streaming through the Alternative Newsweekly Foundation, a nonprofit that supports independent watchdog journalism, with server costs of about $50 to $100 per month. Volunteers, particularly members of the DeFlock Discord community, help file public-records requests, answer users' questions, and point people toward additional resources.

Van Pelt said his concerns aren't limited to Flock. He sees the company as one piece of a broader surveillance infrastructure that includes license-plate readers, drones, sound-detection systems, and technology sold by other companies. He said local governments and police departments should provide more transparency about what surveillance technologies they use, how those systems are interconnected, and why. "Ending Flock is not the end game," van Pelt said. "It's really examining the mass surveillance infrastructure." He also noted that Have I Been Flocked? does not collect data from other automated license plate-reading companies, such as Axon or Motorola Solutions, though he hopes others build similar websites for those companies.

For executives and boards, the site's viral success signals a shift in public tolerance for passive surveillance. The transparency it provides - and the backlash it fuels - could force technology vendors and their government customers to rethink data retention, audit practices, and community engagement. The fact that a volunteer-run database can expose patterns of misuse suggests that opacity is no longer a viable defense. As van Pelt put it, drivers have more to worry about than Flock cameras alone; the entire mass surveillance infrastructure is under the microscope. The question now is whether companies and agencies will proactively address these concerns or continue to react to each new revelation.