Boston officials disclosed on Monday that Flock Safety, a surveillance company providing automatic license plate reader technology, inadvertently allowed law enforcement agencies outside the city to access Boston’s license plate data during a five-month pilot program last year. The revelation comes from the city’s 2025 Surveillance Technology Report.

During the pilot, which involved the deployment of 45 Flock cameras across Boston, the system captured images of passing vehicles along with license plate numbers, vehicle descriptions, locations, and timestamps. According to the report, access to this data was intended to be tightly controlled, with only a limited number of specially trained Boston Police Department (BPD) detectives authorized to query the database for investigative purposes.

Boston’s contract with Flock explicitly stated that data sharing with outside agencies was to be disabled, and prior to the pilot launch, BPD confirmed with Flock that the settings preventing data sharing were activated. However, just three days into the pilot, BPD learned that other law enforcement agencies nationwide had access to Boston’s license plate data through a “nationwide lookup” feature—a function later described as “enabled by the vendor in error.”

The report does not specify which external agencies accessed the data, if any, or the nature of the queries made. Upon discovering the unauthorized data sharing, Boston police immediately ordered Flock to disable the feature, ensuring compliance with the original contract terms.

City officials also announced they will discontinue using Flock Safety’s technology going forward. Despite the data sharing issue, the report noted that BPD found no complaints or evidence of misuse associated with the technology during the pilot period.

Flock Safety did not respond to requests for comment regarding the matter.