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An Atlanta-based surveillance contractor quietly pitched Georgia officials on a plan to convert 350,000 Uber, Lyft, and delivery vehicles into a roaming license plate reader network feeding data directly to law enforcement — and Georgians would have had no idea it was happening.

Flock Safety, the license plate reader company headquartered in Atlanta, prepared a presentation for the Georgia Office of the Attorney General last August describing a partnership with Nexar, a dashcam company popular with rideshare drivers. According to the document — obtained through a Georgia public records request and first reported by 404 Media — the arrangement would have folded "350k Uber/Lyft and other delivery service devices" into Flock's existing statewide surveillance network. Flock says the partnership was never executed.

Flock's existing infrastructure consists of fixed cameras mounted on poles that photograph the license plate, make, model, and color of every passing vehicle and log the time and location in a searchable police database. The Nexar plan would have made that collection mobile — riding along in rideshare and delivery vehicles across neighborhoods, subdivisions, and rural routes that fixed cameras never reach. Passengers would not have been told their vehicle was collecting data for law enforcement. Drivers may not have known either.

The presentation was obtained by Jason Hunyar, a Dunwoody, Georgia resident, who provided it to reporters. That a Georgia company was pitching Georgia's Attorney General on a mass surveillance expansion — using Georgia roads and Georgia drivers — without any public debate or legislative oversight is a story that deserves scrutiny here.

The proposal also carries a national security dimension. In September 2025, a hacker breached Nexar and accessed terabytes of customer video, including footage recorded near Department of Defense installations. A distributed fleet of 350,000 always-recording cameras concentrated near military bases, ports, and defense facilities represents exactly the kind of collection surface a foreign intelligence service would find valuable — whether through a direct breach or a legal data purchase.

The Flock pitch fits a broader surveillance expansion that has drawn little public attention. SignalTrace, a sensor marketed to police by defense contractor Leonardo, detects Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and RFID signals broadcast by phones, smartwatches, and other personal devices inside passing cars — then pairs those signatures with license plate camera data to build convoy and movement patterns. In plain terms: the system can identify who is in a vehicle based on the devices they carry, not just what vehicle they are driving.

The legal landscape is shifting. The Supreme Court's June 2026 ruling in Chatrie v. United States held that police obtaining bulk device location data via geofence warrants constitutes a Fourth Amendment search, and specifically noted that even short-term monitoring can expose political associations, family relationships, and personal activity. The court did not resolve whether passively collecting wireless signals — as SignalTrace does — would also require a warrant.

Flock has walked back other data efforts when scrutiny arrived. In 2025 it abandoned a tool that linked plates to individuals using leaked databases. In July 2026 it shut down a limited trial of audio "distress detection" microphones. Its gunshot-detection microphones remain on its poles. Each rollback came only after public exposure — not before.

Georgians should be asking their elected officials a direct question: what surveillance technology are companies pitching to state agencies right now, and who is reviewing it before it goes live?

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