Deflock Idaho Files Tort Claims Against Cities Over Flock Safety Camera AI Data Use

WILDER, Idaho — A grassroots advocacy group is taking the first steps toward legal action against several Idaho municipalities, alleging that widespread police surveillance cameras violate state privacy laws by allowing a private company to use residents' driving data to train commercial artificial intelligence models.

The group, known as Deflock Idaho, is raising alarms over the rapid proliferation of automated license plate readers manufactured by Flock Safety. These specialized cameras are designed to capture high-resolution images of passing vehicles, automatically logging the license plate, make, model, and color of every car that passes. Tyler Kane, a Wilder resident and member of the advocacy group, noted that the density of the network has grown so severe that he passed 12 distinct cameras during a routine 18-minute drive, averaging nearly one camera every minute. While law enforcement agencies routinely use the network to track suspect vehicles and investigate active crimes, privacy advocates argue the system's fine print crosses an unacceptable legal boundary.

At the center of the dispute is a friction between Flock Safety's terms of service and an Idaho privacy statute passed in 2025. The state law explicitly mandates that automated license plate data can only be utilized for strict law enforcement purposes, such as investigating active crimes, reconstructing traffic crashes, or locating missing persons. However, Kane points out that Flock's standard municipal contracts grant the company a perpetual, worldwide license to retain up to one percent of the captured footage. The company utilizes this fraction of public information as "training data" to refine its proprietary AI algorithms. Although Flock Safety maintains that it never sells individual citizen data, Deflock Idaho contends that repurposing public surveillance footage to improve a private corporation's software constitutes a commercial use explicitly forbidden by state law.

Seeking to force a correction, the advocacy group presented its legal concerns to four Idaho cities currently utilizing the camera network: Caldwell, Wilder, Idaho Falls, and Twin Falls. The group requested that local officials address the statutory conflicts within three days. When administrators in Wilder and Caldwell failed to provide a framework for a fix, Deflock Idaho officially served both cities with formal notices of tort claims, which serve as the mandatory precursor to a civil lawsuit. The organization plans to file identical tort claims against Idaho Falls and Twin Falls if those city councils do not swiftly intervene.

The active tort claims demand that the municipalities immediately cancel their active contracts with Flock Safety, or alternatively, halt all automated data sharing and completely purge the historical driving logs the cameras have already collected. Organizers emphasize that allowing a private entity to harvest public movements for corporate advancement is an inappropriate use of civic infrastructure. Kane stated he hopes the targeted cities choose to rectify the contracts independently to avoid escalating the matter to the Idaho Attorney General’s Office, arguing that under the current system, taxpayers are not only funding their own surveillance but are effectively being turned into the product itself.