The Brenham Home Depot and Lowe’s are secretly feeding your data to Law Enforcement and Hackers
An investigative report reveals that Flock Safety surveillance cameras at 173+ Home Depot locations, including in Brenham, Texas, secretly capture license plates and feed the data to police and hackers.
What Brenham Home Depot Customers Need to Know
Your license plate, vehicle description, and visit timestamp were captured and uploaded to a cloud database.
That data is searchable by law enforcement agencies across the country — potentially including ICE, Border Patrol, and agencies that have used the system to track protesters, target ethnic minorities, and surveil reproductive healthcare patients.
You were never told. There is no sign at the entrance. No opt-in. No opt-out. No consent form. No privacy policy disclosure at the point of capture.
Flock’s cameras have a documented 10% state misidentification rate. Innocent people — disproportionately Black Americans — have been detained at gunpoint, handcuffed, and forced to the ground because of these errors.
Police officers have used this same system to stalk ex-partners, monitor spouses, and harass citizens with no connection to criminal investigations.
Every time you pull into a Home Depot parking lot, you are not just a customer. You are a data point in a $7.5 billion surveillance machine funded by Andreessen Horowitz and operated without your knowledge or consent.
Home Depot
Home Depot, one of the country’s most popular home improvement stores, is contributing to the massive surveillance dragnet coordinated by Flock Spy Camera. Do customers know that these stores are collecting their data and sharing indiscriminately? Probably not. Have these companies given thought to how this data might put their customers in danger, whether it’s cops stalking their exes or aggressive ICE agents targeting yard workers? Probably not. If Home Depot wants customers to feel safe in their homes, they should ensure they’re also safe when buying their supplies.
Americans are destroying Flock surveillance cameras
Brian Merchant, writing for Blood in the Machine, reports that people across the United States are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras, amid rising public anger that the license plate readers aid U.S. immigration authorities and deportations.
Flock is the Atlanta-based surveillance startup valued at $7.5 billion a year ago and a maker of license plate readers. It has faced criticism for allowing federal authorities access to its massive network of nationwide license plate readers and databases at a time when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is increasingly relying on data to raid communities as part of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
Flock cameras allow authorities to track where people go and when by taking photos of their license plates from thousands of cameras located across the United States. Flock claims it doesn’t share data with ICE directly, but reports show that local police have shared their own access to Flock cameras and its databases with federal authorities.
While some communities are calling on their cities to end their contracts with Flock, others are taking matters into their own hands.
Merchant reports instances of broken and smashed Flock cameras in La Mesa, California, just weeks after the city council approved the continuation of Flock cameras deployed in the city, despite a clear majority of attendees favoring their shutdown. A local report cited strong opposition to the surveillance technology, with residents raising privacy concerns.
Other cases of vandalism have stretched from California and Connecticut to Illinois and Virginia. In Oregon, six license plate-scanning cameras on poles were cut down and at least one spray-painted. A note left at the base of the severed poles said, “Hahaha, get wrecked ya surveilling fucks,” reports Merchant.
According to DeFlock, a project aimed at mapping license plate readers, there are close to 80,000 cameras across the United States. Dozens of cities have so far rejected the use of Flock’s cameras, and some police departments have since blocked federal authorities from using their resources.
A Flock spokesperson did not say, when reached by TechCrunch, whether the company keeps track of how many cameras have been destroyed since deployment.