Trending Now Say More Look Up Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Switch Off Creator Playbook Mashable Voices Mashable Selects Safety Net Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List In My Bag All Series Florida's order comes amid a remarkable wave of Flock cancellations, suspensions, and proposed bans across the country. Olivia Tauber is the deputy editor of digital culture, covering creators, media, movies, beauty, and more. Based in New York, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Cut, Teen Vogue, Complex, and Interview Magazine. She holds a Master's degree in Journalism from NYU and a Bachelor's from the University of Michigan. She also runs Fan Mail, a weekly pop-culture newsletter.

Security News This Week: The Cybersecurity Apocalypse Is Coming in'Months,' AI Giants Warn Plus: Hackers target over 100 US water systems, ICE puts in an order for robot dogs, and you'll never guess what "MrChildPorn" was arrested for. You may have noticed that Flock Safety's automatic license plate reader cameras--and the cops who misuse them--are getting a lot of coverage lately. This week, WIRED found a particularly wild case: A cop in Alpharetta, Georgia, was accused of searching for the license plate of a coworker dozens of times after an affair between the two ended, according to internal documents obtained by WIRED. The same police department where the former lovers worked also shared the data captured from its Flock cameras with more than 2,000 police departments, colleges, and other organizations across the United States, and accessed data from more than 1,300 entities in exchange. Also at the intersection of love and surveillance, background-check company PeopleFinder is making use of its extensive dossiers on people to start a new dating site called Stud or Dud.

Mice, a Caved-In Ceiling, and Cloudy Water: The GSA's New Office Is Falling Apart "Do we need to look at the ceiling before going to the bathroom? Can we actually trust the water is safe to drink?" asks one GSA worker. About 1,600 federal employees who work at the General Services Administration have been forced to relocate from their current office on F Street in Washington DC to the Theodore Roosevelt Federal Building, roughly two blocks away. Workers say the new building, which also houses staff from the Office of Personnel Management has mice, a caved-in bathroom ceiling, and drinking water that needs to be run for 5-10 seconds before it is clear. The federal workforce has been rocked by changes made by Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) since January 2025.

Alpharetta, Georgia, cops share data with thousands of Flock users, ranging from federal agencies to a fish and wildlife commission. The reasons why show how vast--and invasive--the network has become. Alpharetta, a prosperous suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, is home to about 67,000 people, served by about 120 local police officers. It also hosts several dozen cameras sold by Flock Safety, the increasingly controversial surveillance company that collects license plate data and other information and makes it searchable by police. WIRED has made this article free for all to read because it is primarily based on reporting from public records requests. Please consider subscribing to support our journalism.

After an affair with a fellow police officer ended, a Georgia cop used Flock to track her movements--and those of a man whose vehicle often showed up near hers, internal investigation records show. In recent months, there has been a surge in reports of police officers misusing automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) sold by Flock Safety to stalk former romantic partners--but details about these incidents are often scarce. Now, with documents obtained via a public records request, WIRED can reveal specific details about one extensive Flock-fueled surveillance campaign and the subsequent investigation and fallout. Dustin Bozzo, who until this month worked as a patrolman in the Atlanta-area suburb of Alpharetta, Georgia, allegedly used Flock 56 times between March and May to search for the license plate of a former romantic partner--a fellow member of the Alpharetta Police Department. When Bozzo noticed that his ex's car was often near that of another police officer, he began searching for that officer's vehicle as well.

Sen. Josh Hawley is investigating Flock Safety's network of over 120,000 AI-powered license plate reader cameras amid growing privacy concerns over vehicle data collection.

'Darth Vader' Wants You to Know He Definitely Supports Flock Surveillance Anthony Ralphs was frustrated by the San Diego City Council's support for Flock. He decided it would take something more than reasoned argument to get their attention. At the San Diego City Council's most recent budget meeting, Sith Lord Darth Vader had some points to make. Between gasping breaths, Vader praised the council's recent votes to renew its contract with the surveillance company Flock Safety, which has been making headlines recently as more and more stories of police officers abusing its tools have continued to come out--and as a WIRED review of code for a new AI tool already in use by some police departments has made clear that it is watching far more than just license plates. "The emperor is a fan of Flock. And we must continue utilizing Flock technologies so that we can follow and surveil the rebel scum as they move from playground to playground, from playground to pool, from pool to gymnasium."

Flock Has a Powerful New AI Tool for Police. Flock's surveillance cameras have already sparked outrage. WIRED reconstructed its next-generation AI system, already in use by some police, to confirm it goes much further than tracking license plates. Vehicle surveillance giant Flock Safety has told the public for years that its technology "cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals." It has now built a system that does both, an artificial intelligence tool for police that can identify drivers and track vehicles by their patterns of movement alone, WIRED has learned. Drawing on a network of cameras that logs the movements of drivers in more than 6,000 communities, the tool can pick out potential witnesses by how often their cars pass through a neighborhood, or surface a driver's "associates" from the cameras they pass together. Because the system also reaches police case files, 911 dispatch logs, and commercial identity records, those plates can be turned into names, home addresses, and relatives.

The Download: how people really use AI, and Flock's design choices Plus: a child privacy trial starting today could change Meta forever. We still don't know how people are really using AI AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI regularly publish reports on how people are using their products. But they only release the data they want us to see, AI researchers say, and there's no independent source to corroborate it. A new research project called the AI Observatory aims to fill in the gap. Its analysis shows many more sensitive behaviors than are captured in reports from major AI companies, which focus more on work than on personal use. The researchers also found significant differences between models.

Look Up Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Say More Safety Net Creator Hub Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Mashable Selects Switch Off Trending Now In My Bag VidCon with Mashable All Series More than 4.6 million license plates appear in the website's collection of public Flock records. Olivia Tauber is the deputy editor of digital culture, covering creators, media, movies, beauty, and more. Based in New York, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Cut, Teen Vogue, Complex, and Interview Magazine. She holds a Master's degree in Journalism from NYU and a Bachelor's from the University of Michigan. She also runs Fan Mail, a weekly pop-culture newsletter.