They aren't just tracking license plates though. They're tracking people - let me explain. Their 'ALPR' cameras (purposefully misleading to call them ALPR btw) capture the footage and send it off to their servers where it's retained - building a long-term historical location history on every vehicle. Advanced analysis is performed on the data to provide features to their customers such as the ability to search for vehicles based on a description of its characteristics (no plate needed), real-time route prediction, location heatmaps, and identifying vehicles that travel together (convoy search). Here's the important part - data is also ingested into another service they run called 'Nova', which is essentially a people search tool that connects the vehicles they capture directly to people and their PII. Access to their platforms (Flock OS, Nova, etc.) is sold via a subscription to law enforcement where they can perform searches for individuals or vehicle whereabouts for any reason, without a warrant, and practically no oversight or regulations.
Warrants (are supposed to) have judicial oversight and are limited in their scope. There's also a paper trail attached to information obtained from a warrant.
A warrant required for the searches should already be the bare minimum. If the constitution were being upheld it would have been a requirement from day 1. So, I suppose I would be 'okay' with this in a sense. What really irks me is the fact that Flock, Axon, etc. are acting almost exclusively as a proxy for the government to conduct mass surveillance that would otherwise be unconstitutional. If the government were directly doing the indiscriminate tracking these companies are, it would be unconstitutional even before a traditional "search" (query) of the data took place, so instead they pay a proxy (i.e. Flock, Axon, etc.) to perform the tracking for them and offer the searches as a subscription service.
