Image: Wikimedia
Penn State will not renew its one-year contract with Flock Safety for stationary license-plate readers at University Park. Jacqueline Sheader of University Police and Public Safety told The Daily Collegian the decision followed a review of “cost, return on investment and operational value.” Chief Financial Officer Sara Thorndike confirmed it at a Faculty Senate meeting. The cameras, installed in August 2025 as a cost-free pilot around the campus perimeter, are coming down. No removal date was in Sheader’s email. She said the department will keep looking for tools with similar capabilities at a lower price. A replacement ALPR is not ruled out.
What the Pilot Was
DeFlock logged 24 camera locations at University Park. The Daily Collegian visited them and confirmed the hardware. These are not ordinary security cameras. They scan plates and vehicle traits and feed a searchable record of time, place, and plate. Flock markets them for stolen vehicles, missing persons, and investigative leads. Penn State described the setup as limited and time-bound. The company product is a national shared network. Any participating agency can query another’s cameras. Penn State’s data was available to the rest of that network, and Penn State could query the rest.
The Queries the Budget Note Does Not Cover
The Collegian’s investigation, by searching audit logs other agencies publish, found Penn State had accessed 6,319 other Flock networks since November 26. A Kyle, Texas, transparency log recorded one Penn State search that hit 5,773 networks, labeled missing or endangered. UPPS said access was limited to trained, authorized personnel, that use was logged and audited, and that some of the activity was system testing. Those claims cannot be checked against Penn State’s own logs through an ordinary records request.
Penn State is a state-related university with a partial exemption from Pennsylvania’s Right-to-Know Law. Audit logs, usage records, and the plate data itself may sit outside standard disclosure. Case law does not make every record unreachable, but the practical result is that the public cannot independently confirm the testing explanation or the scope of the queries. Community members had already called the cameras mass surveillance and said the university had not disclosed how the system worked or what stopped misuse. The Collegian numbers made that complaint specific.
Cost Closed This Contract. It Did Not Close the Category.
Centre Daily Times noted that the ACLU has described Flock’s system as a nationwide mass-surveillance network and a civil-liberties threat. UPPS’s stated reason for ending this deal was cost and operational value, not that critique. Sheader’s follow-up was that the department regularly evaluates tools and remains committed to public-safety technology “in alignment with University policies and applicable laws.” The next purchase, if there is one, will face the same architecture: a local camera that is also a door into thousands of other jurisdictions’ plates, with retention set by the contract and no routine public audit.
A free pilot that produced thousands of cross-network queries, then ended on a budget line, leaves the accountability question where it was. The hardware at University Park is being removed. The shared database it joined is not. Until a replacement is either rejected in writing or bound to a published retention rule, a searchable audit, and a records path that does not depend on another city’s transparency log, the campus has paused one vendor, not the practice of logging every car that passes the perimeter.
