In 1938, Verman Kimbrough, the mayor of Sarasota, announced that city officials had figured out how to harness the marvels of the machine age. Grinning, he claimed it wouldn’t be long before rolling sidewalks would usher beachgoers from the cushy sand to their cars, and electric shuffleboard games would take the “hard work” out of play, transforming our humble town into a “utopia for lazy people.”

When the 21st century rolled around, the sidewalks stayed put, and the flying cars we were promised never arrived. But the machines did show up. Our watches remind us when we’ve been sitting too long, driverless cars share our streets and Alexa can teach our children a second language while we’re cooking. Futurist Alvin Toffler got it right in 1999 when he said we were “moving into a future where information will flow as freely as air, and the boundaries of the public and private will be redefined.”

That future is perhaps nowhere more visible—or invisible—than in the cameras capturing our comings and goings. Automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) have existed since the 1970s, but recently they’ve become flashpoints for debates over civil liberties and data security—in large part due to Flock Safety, a company that leases ALPRs and other surveillance technologies to law enforcement, homeowners associations and businesses. Sarasota has 57 ALPRs within city limits.

Last year, the Sarasota City Commission unanimously approved a two-year, $339,250 contract with Flock, giving the Sarasota Police Department (SPD) expanded access to Flock’s technology and software platform, supporting its Real-Time Operations Center (ROC), which will cost $690,581 for its first two phases. It’s easy to see why—police report that hundreds of criminals in Sarasota have been apprehended since its inception, with charges ranging from credit card theft to homicide. In one recent case, three individuals coordinated a theft at a restaurant on St. Armands Circle. When the victim stepped away from her table, one suspect snatched her wallet while the others acted as lookouts. The next day, analysts found posts on Facebook showing the same suspects committing a similar theft in Boca Raton. By accessing other Flock cameras throughout the state and leveraging the ROC, officers tracked their vehicle, arresting a woman who turned out to be a career criminal with a national history of fraudulent use of identification, credit cards, grand theft and money laundering.

City police aren’t just using their own network of cameras; they’re also incorporating privately owned ones. SRQ City View, a program encouraging homeowners and businesses to register their personal security cameras, builds a map of video sources across the city that investigators can tap into when a crime occurs. When a resident adds their camera, it appears on a map with the owner’s contact information and location. If something happens nearby, SPD can send a request asking the owner to voluntarily upload relevant clips through a portal.

Organizations have the option of taking the partnership with SPD a step further. A handful of businesses have signed agreements allowing police to view their cameras in real time. Together with ALPRs and other feeds, their cameras can be routed into the ROC, where analysts can piece together video from multiple sources during an investigation.

From the perspective of many in law enforcement, these tools are the modern extensions of patrol car computers and body cameras—another high-tech tool in the public safety arsenal. Critics, however, argue it’s not about a single snapshot. It’s about scale. Seeing a car once on a public road is one thing, but aggregating location data allows anyone with access to reconstruct movements over time, effectively creating a retroactive tracking device—which is exactly what officers across the country have used it for, and not always for the reasons they were supposed to.

Over the last few years, dozens of misuse cases have surfaced. In 2024, the police chief of Sedgwick, Kansas, used Flock cameras to track his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend 228 times, even following them in his patrol car. In another case, the police chief of Braselton, Georgia, was arrested after using the technology to stalk and harass multiple people.

Misreads by Flock’s ALPRs, or a lack of verification by officers, have resulted in innocent people being stopped at gunpoint, mauled by police dogs and sent to jail. Civil liberties groups argue that such instances, along with misuse cases, prove there’s too much potential for abuse and that the system invades the privacy rights of citizens not suspected of any crime—claims that Flock disputes.

Flock has also faced controversies as a company. Executives claimed the company had no federal contracts and that data access was strictly controlled by local police, but reporting later revealed pilot programs with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security Investigations. Flock acknowledged it had “communicated poorly” and paused the pilots.

At least 30 cities canceled agreements with Flock in January and February alone—not just because of the miscommunication or individual misuse cases, but also in response to negative public sentiment, driven largely by content creators and independent media. Critics uncovered that Flock has been used to identify individuals at protests and, in another case, to search for a woman who had an abortion. A YouTuber identified more than 50 technical security issues. He was able to gain root-level access, so not only could he access all the data, he could install any software he desired, even plant false data if he wanted.

Under its Sarasota contract, Flock receives a “perpetual” and “irrevocable” license to aggregate and anonymize data for marketing and other uses, though it remains unclear exactly how that data is processed or what limits exist on its use.

When the Sarasota City Commission approved the contract with Flock, Mayor Debbie Trice asked department representatives to address public concerns regarding privacy and civil liberties violations. Officials said they operate within the bounds of the Constitution and local ordinances, emphasizing that ALPRs are only used when a crime is committed.

But there are risks: Many of us are unaware of or seem indifferent to the harvesting of personal information. After all, sometimes our targeted advertisements know us better than we know ourselves, recommending that wrinkle-erasing cream everyone’s talking about or highlighting a travel deal for a city we’ve been daydreaming about. And we know there are threats when datasets are combined, like when the therapy platform BetterHelp shared answers to health questionnaires to Facebook for advertising purposes.

Once datasets are merged, even a few points can identify an individual and reveal patterns. If already aggregated and sold behavioral and location data were combined with Flock’s, it could be cross-referenced with social media, voter records and other sources to further track individuals, analyze their behavior and monetize those insights. Once dispersed across countless databases, security is only as strong as the weakest system or the employee who falls for a phishing email.

Ultimately, the debate around Flock points to something larger than one company. It reflects a question that communities everywhere are grappling with: How much visibility into our daily lives are we willing to trade for convenience and security? The same technologies reshaping policing—from the algorithms that recommend what we watch to the systems that monitor our health—promise efficiency and safety, but also ask us to reconsider where the boundaries of our private lives begin and end.

Sarasota isn’t unusual. Like many cities across the country, it’s experimenting with tools that would have sounded like science fiction a generation ago. For law enforcement, the benefits are tangible: faster leads, clearer timelines and cases that might otherwise go unsolved. For critics, they raise the possibility of a surveillance infrastructure instituted long before the public understands it or decides how it should be governed. Whether you see them as progress or overreach, these technologies aren’t going anywhere—leaving us to decide how they fit into our lives.