What's Next News Summer 2026 Open Letter To Our Community About

Cancel Flock Now

To: President Jonathan Levin and Provost Jenny Martinez

As faculty, staff, students, campus residents, alumni, and members of the Stanford community, we have deep concerns about the use of Flock AI surveillance cameras on campus. Flock's AI-powered system collects, timestamps, and stores detailed information on every car that enters or exits the Stanford campus. The ACLU says: “Imagine that a police officer stood on your street writing detailed notes about you every time you drove or walked by them... Now imagine that there is an army of police officers doing this on every block. This is the surveillance world that Flock is building.”

The collection of this detailed data, held by a private company with documented privacy abuses, creates a mass surveillance state in a time of egregious federal government behavior. This is profoundly unsafe. It is about much more than license plates.

The documented wide-ranging problems with Flock are significant and serious, including 1) millions of warrentless searches by unauthorized agencies – including searches by ICE and the federal government and searches of Palo Alto data, 2) routine use of the cameras for surveillance of people not suspected of a crime, 3) no local control of the data, 4) lack of transparency about our "anonymized" data stored indefinitely by Flock, 5) the detailed surveillance of faculty neighborhoods, 6) questionable access to data by Flock employees, 7) the high risk of hacking, 8) the lack of substantive evidence that the cameras reduce crime, 9) liability to the university, and 10) Flock's continuing bad faith behavior. (See here for sources for each of these areas.)

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes, "Flock Safety's surveillance infrastructure is not a neutral public safety tool. It's a system that enables and amplifies racist policing, threatens reproductive rights, and chills constitutionally protected speech."

These problems have been recognized and acted upon. Fifty-seven communities have removed the cameras, including Mountain View, Los Altos Hills, and Santa Cruz. Moreover, in March 2026, the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors updated the County Surveillance Use Policy to forbid Flock as an Automated License Plate Reader vendor. Since SUDPS is deputized by the County Sheriff, we are surprised that SUDPS is not following this policy. Does Stanford continuing to use Flock violate both policy and law, and put the policing power of the university in jeopardy? What will this mean for the university's relationship with the County?

As an institution of higher education, Stanford has a special obligation to protect privacy. Rights to privacy are intimately connected to academic freedom and freedom of speech. Because local policy does not safeguard the data, people, especially international scholars, students, and staff, may well curtail their participation in the life of the university. This chilling effect created by unregulated 24/7 Flock mass surveillance on campus is absolutely anathema to the free and open exchange of ideas and participation in events and assemblies.

Since its founding, Stanford has committed itself to its motto: "Die Luft Der Frieheit Weht" (The Wind of Freedom Blows). To live up to that commitment to freedom, Stanford must 1) immediately cover the Flock cameras, 2) cancel the contract with Flock and 3) commit to caring for community safety going forward by establishing limits on any new or existing system, including requiring a valid judicial warrant for any data access, prohibition of the use of facial recognition or biometric analysis, and no aggregation of data into a regional, statewide, or national system.

Signed,

This letter is endorsed by:

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