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Boston Swapped Its Plate-Reader Vendor, But the Surveillance Network Stayed

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Boston's mayor announced in September 2026 that the city was ending its contract with license-plate-reader vendor Flock Safety after a misconfiguration exposed local plate data to police departments nationwide without city approval. However, the Boston Police Department had already installed 75 plate-reading cameras from Motorola and Axon before the cancellation was announced, meaning surveillance continued under different branding. Public records revealed roughly 11,000 database searches over five months, with nearly half carrying no case number to justify the lookup. The original Flock misconfiguration had no audit trail of who accessed Boston residents' data, and the 30-day retention window erased the records before any review could take place. Residents were not informed of the initial data exposure until approximately 17 months after it occurred.

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