Activists in Colorado thought they would be celebrating a victory against mass surveillance in December when the Longmont city council decided to let a contract with Flock Safety lapse.

But that excitement was cut short only months later when lawmakers voted to approve a new vendor to install automated license plate readers (ALPRs) on the city’s streets.

“They expected us to go away, but there’s a lot of people in our group – including me, to some extent – that would like to see these cameras go away for good,” said Longmont resident Andrew Palmer. He and like-minded neighbors had been riding the momentum of a nationwide backlash against these cameras and their ability to track cars.

Flock Safety has more than 120,000 cameras set up on roads across the US that scan license plates billions of times every month. Local law-enforcement agencies say they rely on ALPRs to solve crimes. Officers can search this data, even outside their state, to help find stolen vehicles and missing people.

Privacy advocates say Flock has created a dragnet, as these queries don’t require a warrant, and the cameras routinely capture details about cars driven by people who are not suspected of crimes. They also worry about police officers who used the tech to try to stalk their romantic interests, as well as ways this data ends up in the hands of federal immigration enforcement.

At least 56 municipalities have deactivated, canceled or rejected contracts with Flock this year, according to national advocacy organization DeFlock. The company is feeling the heat, and last week announced changes aimed at addressing concerns about privacy and misuse. Flock introduced updated policies around auditing, as well as data retention and sharing – although many critics calling for change consider them inadequate.

Even in cities that have officially gotten rid of Flock, though, surveillance persists: a new camera company steps in or private companies with cameras on their premises, unbothered by changes in municipal contracts, leave the devices up.

Sometimes Flock itself fails to remove the cameras in a timely manner. Several cities have resorted to hooding cameras with trash bags.

Flock did not offer comment by press time.

Swapping vendors

Most negative publicity about ALPRs has centered on Flock, which by far owns and operates the greatest number of them across the US. But critics of these cameras fear that cities are swapping out one vendor for another without addressing underlying concerns about data privacy and surveillance.

In Longmont, Palmer was in disbelief at how quickly the city moved to replace Flock’s license plate readers with ones made by Axon, an even larger police tech company that also produces Tasers. The contract for Axon’s ALPRs has not yet been finalized, although the city council is expected to move forward with the company after voting unanimously to approve the cameras in March. Lawmakers included additional requirements for data protection, transparency and an evaluation after one year.

Axon, a $48bn company that produces all manner of law enforcement technology, has capitalized on Flock’s PR woes by swooping in to replace their competitor in at least seven municipalities across five states.

“That’s not a coincidence,” said Chad Marlow, senior policy counsel at the ACLU. “We’ve absolutely seen them lurking in the shadows, waiting for Flock to fail and then rushing in.”

Axon has hinted to its investors that Flock’s failures are good for its bottom line. “We’re hearing directly from customers – some of whom came to us from other vendors – that our track record on privacy and ethics was a deciding factor in their decision,” said Josh Isner, Axon’s president, on an earnings call in February.

That’s what police in Longmont, and across the country, cited as their reasons for picking Axon after Flock. They highlighted how Flock’s policies were more likely to result in data being shared more widely with other government agencies. “It’s the exact opposite approach” with Axon, said Phil Piotrowski, Longmont’s assistant chief of police. Flock has since announced, last week, the introduction of an easy way for local police to block external agencies for searches related to immigration enforcement.

Longmont’s law enforcement also touted their decades-long relationship with Axon, which already provides them with Tasers, body cameras and a repository to store digital evidence.

Palmer and his fellow residents wished they had the chance to question claims law enforcement made about Axon’s ALPRs – including whether the city truly owned the data – in a brief presentation to lawmakers and the public before the vote. But there was no opportunity to do so, until after the motion had already gone through, according to activists.

“You gave us no chance to rebut,” Palmer later told city council. A stream of disappointed privacy advocates followed. Pavel Ivanov, a Russian-origin resident who felt this kind of surveillance ruined the country he left, spoke next: “Absolutely agree.” Kellen Lask, a software engineer, complained, “Normally I get days or weeks to talk about a system like Axon’s,” before urging city council members to press their new vendor harder for answers about encryption and data ownership. A buzzer cut him off.

Privacy experts warn that Axon hasn’t faced the same scrutiny as Flock, which is a newer startup that has heavily marketed its product, in contrast to its competitor’s lowkey approach. Analysts also argue that Axon’s expansive infrastructure in police departments across the country could pose a significant surveillance threat. An AI-driven platform, known as Fusus, combines Axon cameras and other city-owned or private visual feeds to “connect the dots across your entire data ecosystem”, Axon’s site notes.

“We’ve never had that before – the power of AI and the power of linking these things together,” said Andrew Ferguson, a law professor at George Washington University. “If you’re only focused on a tool and a company, and not a system of surveillance … then you’re kind of missing the bigger picture. It’s important that if communities cancel their contracts that they don’t rush into contracting with a different vendor.”

Axon did not offer comment by press time.

Cities grapple with surveillance creep

About 40 miles (64km) from Longmont, Denver approved swapping out Flock’s cameras for Axon’s in March. Axon’s ALPRs in the city will store data for 21 days, which is less than the company’s default 30-day retention period. Flock also typically stored ALPR data for 30 days but reduced that to one week, as part of its sweeping operational changes last week.

The switch to Axon doesn’t seem that different for Denver resident William Beckett. “We’re still recording every single license plate that goes by – regardless of suspicion of a crime, or without a need for a warrant,” he said.

On the east coast, Syracuse, New York also replaced Flock’s ALPRs with Axon’s. Two local privacy activists tell the Guardian that they want to ban all ALPRs.

“Flock has been made to be the villain in this. It’s not just Flock: it’s the idea that there we are being over-surveilled,” said Gen Garcia, chair of Syracuse DSA’s international solidarity committee. They have filed a public records request for the new contract but haven’t yet received one.

The Syracuse activists say they don’t believe that cameras installed by private companies, such as a local Lowe’s and Home Depot, are so far affected by the city’s move away from Flock. They are trying to get elected officials to ban Flock cameras altogether, or at least force the company to make sure these cameras face away from public streets. They also point out that it took more than three months after lawmakers officially dropped Flock for the cameras on municipal land to come down; Syracuse police department officials “moved to unplug” them after a May deadline for the company to collect them passed with no action, according to local news outlet Central Current.

Two cities in Wisconsin, Oshkosh and Verona, faced similar trouble with getting its cameras collected by Flock after voting to cancel its contract. In Oshkosh, the readers are still up – four months after the agreement was revoked, according to resident and activist Cari Tetzlaff. She points out that Flock spent money on sending employees to defend the company at municipal committee meetings, “yet they can’t send a staff member to come collect these cameras”.

In the absence of action by Flock, the city sent its own personnel to cover the uncollected cameras with garbage bags. Activists had proposed the idea of blinding the cameras to their elected officials after hearing from neighboring communities facing the same problem. Evanston, Illinois, and Dayton, Ohio, encountered the same issue and blinded their cameras with trash bags, too.

“It feels negligent for Flock to leave their cameras mounted in cities that don’t want them there,” Tetzlaff said. “We’ve had many storms this summer. The garbage bags can blow off.”

What’s next for the anti-surveillance movement?

The gold standard for protecting drivers’ privacy is to not use ALPRs at all, according to the ACLU. The best guardrails include warrant requirements and strict limits on how long scans of license plates can be stored, the organization said. New Hampshire caps retention at three minutes. Privacy advocates say police officers don’t need more than a few minutes to compare plates against Flock’s “hotlist” of suspects, or to find specific license plates already on their radar.

“The longer you keep data, the longer it has predictive value,” said Daniel Schwarz with the New York Civil Liberties Union. “We all move in certain patterns.”

Local momentum has not yet translated into federal law, although Congress is considering bills that would restrict and regulate ALPR use.

In the meantime, many cities across the US are trying to establish transparent local review boards to assess proposed and current uses of surveillance cameras and other tech. More than two dozen municipalities – predominantly in California and Massachusetts – already have such agreements, according to the ACLU.

In Longmont, Palmer is planning to apply to serve on a new technology advisory citizen board, which the city council discussed in June but has not yet formally created. While the board would only be able to advise elected officials, advocates are hopeful that public scrutiny will be effective and are planning to stack the group with tech experts and ethicists.

Activists are going to keep the pressure on, but wish they had thought bigger from the start. Shakeel Dalal, a Longmont resident, said: “One thing I wish we have done more effectively from the very beginning was to make clear that it’s not just Flock, it’s data governance. And I think if we had sent that message more clearly, we might be in a different place from where we are today.”