This City Is Forcing a Neighborhood HOA To Tear Down Its Flock Cameras—but Will This Be the New Norm?

A homeowners association in Brentwood, CA, is catching blowback after installing Flock cameras on public streets around the neighborhood. Not only are many homeowners up in arms, but the city has pulled approval of the system and is ordering their removal. 

Brentwood city officials reportedly said that the approval of these specific Flock cameras, which automatically capture license plate and other vehicle information, was issued by mistake. 

As ALPR systems like Flock expand their footprint across the country, homeowners and communities are grappling with whether they go too far and allow for unchecked private surveillance. 

How a permitting mistake unleashed a privacy fight

The cameras belong to the Shadow Lakes Homeowners Association, a golf-course community of nearly 800 homes. According to acting Brentwood City Manager Terrance Davis, the city issued approval under the mistaken understanding that the HOA's application was part of the Brentwood Police Department's existing Flock program, which runs 62 license plate readers across the city. 

The city has since moved to revoke the permit, which will require Flock to remove the cameras and restore the public right-of-way.

According to local reporting, some residents have come out strongly against the cameras, and insist they weren’t aware that they were being installed. Others have said they don’t mind them.

The Shadow Lakes HOA says that the “community was notified about the proposed Flock Safety system through multiple forms of communication,” including open forum meetings and newsletters. But perhaps more controversial than the cameras themselves is the ambiguity around who can access them. 

Why access is the real question

The Shadow Lakes HOA has said that "management" is the system's only administrator, and that data is held for 30 days. But during a Brentwood City Council meeting, councilmember Jovita Mendoza said “anyone on their board can review the data.” She also noted that Flock applied for permitting on the HOA’s behalf. 

"If one person thinks only management can view the data and another thinks the whole board can view it, that is a control issue before it becomes an IT issue," says California-based attorney Jamie E. Wright. "With surveillance information, 'who has access to it?' should not be subjective."

Under California law, Wright says, that ambiguity shouldn't exist in the first place. Operators and users of ALPRs—private HOAs included—have defined legal responsibilities around security, authorized use and privacy. There should be a clear policy spelling out exactly who can access the system, why, how that access is tracked, and how the information can be shared. 

Homeowners don't have much say once the cameras are up, either. A car driving past a scanner gets recorded whether its owner supported the system or not, Wright said. But that doesn't give an HOA free rein. 

Is Brentwood a preview of what’s to come?

Other cities and states are already re-examining their relationship with Flock and similar systems. San Jose's city council has approved restrictions on how Flock data can be used and by whom. And in what may be the biggest pushback yet, Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee called for a statewide pause on Tuesday of new ALPR installations and ordered a 60-day review aimed at setting uniform standards for privacy, transparency and data use across the state.

There's also more law on the books than people might assume. Wright points out that California already regulates ALPR operators, private ones included, requiring documented security protocols and a publicly available policy on how data is accessed, used, shared and retained. A 2026 appellate decision went further, holding that collecting and using ALPR data without that legally required public policy can itself amount to real harm.

"We're reaching a point where an HOA can obtain surveillance technology that we previously might only associate with the government," Wright said. "When that technology gets that powerful, the legal guardrails should be just as robust."

The accountability gap is part of what worries David Weisselberger, a Florida-based attorney and founder at Erase the Case. Misuse of ALPR data isn't hypothetical, he says—similar cases have surfaced in other cities.

"An officer at least faces the possibility of discipline or, in some states, criminal charges," Weisselberger says. "A board member with camera access may not answer to anyone beyond the HOA itself."

That lack of oversight is important, because it can impact how defensible, and accessible, the data itself is. 

"Police-operated systems are built for legal scrutiny, so that means they have documented calibration, defined retention rules, and clear access logs," Weisselberger says. “Flock just makes it easier for someone you already know, an ex, a neighbor, someone with a grudge, to use that access to track you. An HOA board member can hand over footage informally, an officer can ask a property manager directly, or someone with login access can pull a plate for reasons that have nothing to do with crime at all.”

What to ask before your community installs Flock

For homeowners weighing whether to support a system like this—or buying into a community that already has one—Wright suggests a short, specific list of questions for the board: What information is being gathered? Who can search it? Are all searches logged? How long is data retained? Can law enforcement access it directly? Can the vendor sell it? What happens if it's abused, and who is responsible?

Her advice is to get the answers in writing before the system goes live, not after. A license plate reader isn't the same thing as a doorbell camera, she notes: The data is searchable, and it can be used to reconstruct exactly when a specific car came and went from a specific address over time. 

Brentwood is now reviewing its own permit records to see whether it approved similar systems for other private groups. Whatever it finds, the Shadow Lakes dispute has already answered one question for homeowners elsewhere: the rules governing this technology are still being written in real time, city by city—which means the burden of asking the right questions, before the cameras go up, currently falls on the neighborhood itself. And Weisselberger says he sides with people avoiding that burden entirely. 

“Without proper safeguards in place, I wouldn’t recommend living in a community with one,” he says.