Home Depot and Lowe's Downplay Customer Surveillance Threats

Shareholders are seeking more info about how the companies collect and share data, including automatic license plate readers that cops and federal agents use to hunt immigrants.

https://prospect.org/2026/05/21/home-depot-lowes-downplay-customer-surveillance-threats-flock-cameras-immigration/


Flock Safety allows police departments and immigration officials to search a nationwide database of license plate data captured by its cameras. Credit: Stephen Zenner/SOPA Images/Sipa USA via AP Images

Executives at Home Depot and Lowe’s want to hide how—and whether—they protect customers’ civil rights when they share automatic license plate reader (ALPR) data with local cops and federal agents, who use the information to hunt immigrants and others. That’s the message from corporate board members responding to a pair of shareholder proposals. The shareholders are asking them to produce reports describing how their company assesses the risks to customers’ data privacy when they share sensitive consumer data, including images taken by the Flock Safety cameras installed in both companies’ parking lots. The cameras snap pictures of vehicles as they drive by, and the pictures go into a searchable database that police officers can use to find where a car was, and when. The images are so precise, civil rights advocates said, that Flock can identify cars that have no license plate, by dents and other markings.

But Flock cameras and its database are also easily hacked, enabling anyone to watch children and to stalk and terrorize romantic interests, undocumented immigrants, people seeking reproductive health care, or people of the “wrong” race. YouTuber Benn Jordan has demonstrated how easy such hacking can be, calling the ability to spy on people “Netflix for Stalkers.” The two companies’ annual shareholder meetings are upcoming, and the petitioners have asked them to explain ways they could mitigate those risks that go beyond legal compliance. “The concern with data sharing is that … you’ll put immigrants at risk, because we know this technology is being used by law enforcement agencies to conduct searches of immigrants,” said Gideon Epstein, policy counsel for the Technology for Liberty Program the ACLU of Massachusetts. “Looking at real Flock audit data, especially from 2025, we have seen literally hundreds of searches from police officers searching explicitly for immigration-related matters.”

Epstein noted that while Flock said last year that it had ended a pilot program with the Department of Homeland Security, local police departments still conduct searches on behalf of immigration agents, an issue he wrote about last fall. Flock Safety cameras are drawing fury from community members across the country, who are outraged that police department and municipal officials are contracting with the company to create a mass surveillance network. Flock is one of two major companies dominating the ALPR market and the go-to vendor for municipalities for their aggressive marketing strategy, Epstein said. As 404 Media has reported, Flock has at least 80,000 cameras in its national database. The other big provider is Vigilant Solutions, owned by Motorola Solutions, which maintains a database of images collected by cameras installed on cop cars.

Flock officials insist that their customers own the data the cameras capture, and that the company does not sell it to third parties. But they don’t bar customers from selling the data themselves, and they give police customers access to a nationwide search. The search ability allows cops to search for practically any reason, legal advocates told the Prospect, sometimes writing “investigation” into the field that requires an explanation. That makes it impossible to audit. As of last month, cops had used Flock and other ALPR cameras in 16 instances to “keep tabs on their [own] romantic interests, including current partners, exes, and even strangers who unwittingly caught their eye in public,” the Institute for Justice reported. Last year, Texas cops used Flock to search 83,000 cameras nationwide to hunt for a woman they said had performed a self-administered abortion, including in states where abortion is legal, 404 Media reported. In another instance, the same news outlet found that Flock’s sales workers ran a pitch by accessing the company’s cameras in an Atlanta suburb, including “in a children’s gymnastics room, a playground, a school, a Jewish community center, and a pool.”

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