Police use Flock to search license plates. Now there's a viral website to see if yours was one of them.
Cris van Pelt, the founder of Have I Been Flocked?, said drivers have more to worry about than Flock cameras.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images A website called "Have I Been Flocked?" is trying to add transparency to license plate readers.
The website's founder spoke to BI about its popularity and mission.
"Ending Flock is not the end game," he said The national debate over Flock Safety's license-plate reader technology has turned a website built by a former software engineer into a sensation.
Hundreds of thousands of people a day are visiting "Have I Been Flocked?" — the database created in October 2025 by Cris van Pelt as he grew disillusioned with the tech industry.
"It's exploded over the past week," van Pelt told Business Insider last week, providing screenshots of traffic data that showed the site peaked at 60,000 unique visitors every two hours.
Flock's technology is used in more than 6,000 communities across 49 states , according to the company, and has been credited with helping police solve serious crimes and find suspects.
It's also sparked fresh discourse about police surveillance — and "Have I Been Flocked?" was caught in the right place at the right time.
It lets users plug in any vehicle's license plate and check it against a limited database of Flock Safety audit logs.
Van Pelt, who has left tech and enrolled in law school at the University of Iowa, said his goal was to show people "not only how prevalent these systems are, but how often and how unrestricted their use is." How the site works The site doesn't have data for every car that's driven by a Flock camera.
Instead, it lets users know if license plates have been part of a search.
Bloomberg/Getty Images The site doesn't show whether a car was snapped by a Flock camera.
Instead, it can show whether a Flock customer — like a police agency or a private company — has searched for a specific license plate number.
The site warns that its data is incomplete.
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