Boston city officials have ended their partnership with Flock Safety, a company that provides license-plate reader (LPR) technology, after the firm shared data across the country in violation of the contract. The decision was announced by Boston Mayor Michelle Wu during her monthly "Ask the Mayor" segment on GBH News, where she stated the city has "actually abandoned Flock." The move follows a pilot program with Flock in 2024, during which the Boston Police Department used about 45 Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) cameras to collect vehicle data. According to Boston's 2025 annual surveillance technology report, a "vendor error" by Flock led to the unintended sharing of data during the first few days of the pilot. The contract between the city and Flock specified that data collected by the ALPR cameras should only be accessible to trained Boston Police Department (BPD) personnel. It also required that data sharing be disabled, and BPD confirmed with Flock that the settings were "off." However, within three days of the pilot's start, BPD discovered that other law enforcement agencies were accessing license plate and vehicle information through a nationwide lookup feature that had been mistakenly enabled by Flock. Once the error was identified, BPD worked with Flock to disable the feature immediately, ensuring that access to the data could only occur through a written request to the department. No further direct access was available for the rest of the pilot period. The report did not specify how many agencies accessed the data or what impact this had on privacy or law enforcement practices. Despite this issue, Boston continues to explore other vendors for license-plate reader technology. The police department has already begun new trials with Motorola in February 2026 and with Axon in June 2026. The situation has also sparked a broader debate about privacy and the use of license-plate camera data by law enforcement. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, has raised concerns about how nationwide lookup tools allow police to search vehicle data with minimal justification, potentially infringing on individual privacy rights.