How long does Flock keep licence plate data?

Flock Safety's standard retention period is 30 days. Reads not attached to an investigation are deleted after that. Agencies can configure shorter periods, some state laws impose their own limits, and any read pulled into a case file is retained under that agency's evidence rules instead — potentially indefinitely.

The default: 30 days

Flock Safety's standard retention window is 30 days. A read of your plate that is not attached to anything is deleted at the end of it. The company has consistently described the agency as the owner of the data, with Flock acting as processor.

The four things that change it

1. Agency configuration

Agencies can set shorter retention. Some choose 7 or 14 days as policy. The default is a ceiling their contract allows, not a fixed rule.

2. State law

A growing number of states legislate ALPR retention directly, and the limits differ substantially — from a few days to a year or more. Where state law is stricter than the vendor default, state law governs. This is the single largest source of variation, and it is why no national answer is precise.

3. Investigative holds

This is the important exception. Once a read is attached to a case — pulled into an investigation, exported, or included in evidence — it leaves the automatic deletion cycle and falls under that agency's evidence-retention rules. Those are typically measured in years, and for serious offences can be indefinite.

So "deleted after 30 days" describes the fate of the overwhelming majority of reads, not all of them.

4. Downstream copies

If a read was shared with another agency, or exported into a case management system, the copy follows the recipient's retention rules. Deletion at the source does not reach a copy that has already left.

Why the window matters to you

If you want to know what was recorded about your vehicle, retention sets your deadline. A public-records request filed on day 45 about a drive on day 1 returns nothing, because there is nothing left to return.

Practically, that means:

• If you have a specific reason to ask, ask within days, not weeks.
• Be specific: the plate, the date, and ideally the camera or road.
• Ask for the audit log too. Where a state requires one, the log of who searched your plate is often retained longer than the reads themselves.

Knowing what to ask about

A records request works better when you can name the cameras. Flock Camera's History logs every reader you passed while alerts were armed, with the street, the town, the time, and whether you were inside the camera's field of view — so you can point at a specific place and date rather than asking an agency to search everything.

1. Arm alerts in the Alerts tab before you drive.
2. Open History afterwards. Rows marked "likely captured" are the ones where the geometry says a read was probable.
3. Tap a row for the location and time, then use those in your request.

That history is stored only on your phone. Nothing about your movements is uploaded, which is also why the app cannot recover it if you delete it.