Milo went missing. 

Yet it wasn’t the lost puppy that gave people the jitters — it was the promise behind the story: that a communitywide web of home security systems could transform a neighborhood into a “Search Party.”

The Super Bowl commercial set off public backlash against two leading surveillance companies: Amazon, which owns Ring doorbell cameras, and Flock Safety, which makes license plate reader cameras. Within days, the e-commerce giant announced it was ditching a planned partnership with Atlanta-based Flock.

Privacy advocates said the breakup represented a rare, high-profile retreat from the expansion of surveillance-driven policing — and that school leaders should take note.

“The fact that Amazon is reconsidering their relationship with Flock should be a very large and glaring sign that schools should also perhaps reconsider that relationship,” said Kristin Woelfel, policy counsel for equity in civic technology at the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology.

In an investigation last week, Âé¶čŸ«Æ· revealed that police nationwide routinely tapped into school district Flock cameras to assist President Donald Trump’s mass immigration crackdown, which has also led to public outcry and protest over the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s unprecedented surveillance tactics.

You can also listen to me talk about my latest reporting on the and on on San Francisco’s KALW public radio.

In the news

The latest in Trump’s immigration crackdown: A Georgia elementary school teacher was killed this week while driving to work when a man being chased by federal immigration agents rammed into her vehicle. | 

• Conservative advocacy group Defending Education has built a database of some 700 school districts nationally that have adopted policies restricting federal immigration agents’ access to campuses. | 

• U.S. Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin, who repeatedly denied that federal agents were targeting schools, is stepping down. | 

Instagram and other Meta-owned social media apps have navigated youth safety “in a reasonable way,” company CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified Wednesday in a courtroom filled with parents who have accused the company and other tech giants of hooking their children on the platforms and decimating their mental health. | 

‘Worried that I was going to die’: Georgia high schoolers opened up this week about the horrors of getting shot during the 2024 Apalachee High School shooting that led to the deaths of two teachers and two students. Students’ testimonies came during a criminal trial accusing the alleged shooter’s father of recklessness and failure to prevent the tragedy. | 

Should schools call child protective services on students who are chronically absent? Debate has ensued. | 

• A Georgia father has been arrested on allegations that each of his two sons has missed nearly 400 days of school. One is an elementary school student, while the other is in middle school. | 

In a significant departure from past years, the Education Department’s civil rights division didn’t close any sexual harassment and assault cases involving K-12 schools in 2025, after the Trump administration slashed the agency and purged its caseload. | 

ICYMI @The74

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Âé¶čŸ«Æ· is proud to announce we’ve hired Simon and Max, who joined reporter Lauren Wagner a few weeks ago at our growing Nebraska bureau.

Milo went missing. 

Yet it wasn’t the lost puppy that gave people the jitters — it was the promise behind the story: That a communitywide web of home security systems could transform a neighborhood into a “Search Party.”

The Super Bowl commercial against two leading surveillance companies, Amazon, which owns Ring doorbell cameras, and Flock Safety, which makes license plate reader cameras. Within days, the e-commerce giant announced it was ditching a planned partnership with Atlanta-based Flock.

Privacy advocates said the breakup represented a rare, high-profile retreat from the expansion of surveillance-driven policing — and that school leaders should take note.

“The fact that Amazon is reconsidering their relationship with Flock should be a very large and glaring sign that schools should also perhaps reconsider that relationship,” said Kristin Woelfel, policy counsel for equity in civic technology at the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology. 

In an investigation last week, Âé¶čŸ«Æ· revealed that police nationwide routinely tapped into school district Flock cameras to assist President Donald Trump’s mass immigration crackdown, which has also led to public outcry and protest over the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s

Ring’s planned integration with Flock Safety would have allowed homeowners to share their camera feeds with the police. The company said the collaboration was never launched but it still plans to roll out “Search Party” to homeowners, first for “finding dogs”

In statements, the two companies described the , with Ring saying it

Some 100 school districts across the country have contracted with Flock, according to government procurement records. Their cameras are designed to capture license plate numbers, timestamps and other identifying details, which are uploaded to a cloud server. Flock customers, including schools, can decide whether to share their information with other police agencies in the company’s national network. 

Woelfel’s warning lands amid of automated license plate readers and their use by federal immigration agents to track down targets. Flock audit logs obtained by Âé¶čŸ«Æ· and interviews reveal local police departments nationwide are searching school district-run surveillance networks to aid the DHS in immigration enforcement cases. 

The logs were from Texas school districts that contract with Flock and showed that law enforcement agencies far beyond their borders — including in Florida, Georgia, Indiana and Tennessee — routinely conducted searches on the districts’ campus feeds, tagging reasons such as “Immigration (criminal)” and “Immigration (civil/administrative).” Multiple law enforcement officials acknowledged the searches were done at the request of federal immigration agents, with one saying the local assist was given without hesitation. 

Ring spokesperson Emma Daniels said the company doesn’t contract with school districts directly. The company’s “terminated integration with Flock” is specific to a tool that allows local police “to request video footage from Ring users in a specific area during a defined time period” to help in investigations related to “a car theft, a burglary or other local safety concerns.”

Flock spokesperson Holly Beilin said her company was not involved in the “Search Party” feature promoted in the Super Bowl ad and its planned Ring collaboration “had nothing to do with any of our school customers.” Those customers rely on the automated license plate readers to navigate parent custody logistics and in parking lots where “most incidents of violence at schools take place.” In December, district s to investigate a rash of car break-ins in school parking lots.

Immigration and Customs enforcement agents have during school pick-up and drop-off to target immigrant families. 

Beilin said she didn’t know how frequently school-owned Flock networks were being queried on behalf of ICE, but that the company had rolled out that allows customers to disable immigration-related searches on their devices. 

“If school district police, or, frankly any police, decides that that is against their policy, they can turn that search filter on,” Beilin told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·. “So any of those searches would be filtered out.” 

There is no evidence from Âé¶čŸ«Æ·â€™s analysis that the Texas school districts use the devices for their own immigration-related investigations, but the audit logs raise questions about how broadly school safety data are being fed into the far-reaching surveillance tool. 

That school Flock cameras are being accessed by out-of-state police officers for immigration enforcement is “a really serious privacy issue for children and families” Woelfel said. 

“You have to think about what effect it’s ultimately going to have on the community,” she continued. “Even in places without Flock cameras, people are afraid to drop their kids off at school,” because of heightened immigration enforcement and the Trump administration’s policy change that lifted longstanding restrictions against immigration enforcement in or around schools and other “sensitive locations.” 

‘Can’t believe we have that here’

For 16-year-old Zachary Schwartz, a high schooler from San Francisco, backlash to the Ring ad validated something he’s been telling people for months: Flock’s presence in communities nationwide has grown far too vast and most Americans don’t even realize it. 

“You hear about tracking systems in other countries, like China, which are more authoritarian,” Schwartz said. “And it’s like, ‘Whoa, I can’t believe we have that here.” 

Schwartz said he fell down the Flock rabbit hole after watching , which sent him digging into its widespread use in his own city. He learned the San Francisco Police Department shared its feeds with law enforcement officers nationwide, including for immigration enforcement, in apparent . Activists have also elevated concerns about weak cybersecurity safeguards and faulty findings that

Schwartz built a website, , to drive attention to Flock’s presence. He also circulated posters across San Francisco urging residents to learn about the cameras constantly watching them.

“If you’re driving on a major roadway, you’re being tracked in the city,” Schwartz said. “It would be pretty hard to avoid it while going to school if you’re going by car or by a bus.” 

Âé¶čŸ«Æ· reached out to 30 districts to learn more about how they use Flock and whether they’ve assessed how their data are shared. Few responded and almost all declined to comment. Several, including Indiana’s Center Grove Community School Corporation, said they ended their contracts with Flock without providing details about why. 

One district that did respond was Minnetonka Public Schools, 12 miles southwest of Minneapolis, where the Trump administration’s mass deployment of immigration agents last month resulted in the fatal shootings of two citizens, closed Minneapolis Public Schools for two days and forced multiple districts in the Twin Cities area to offer remote learning for students too afraid to come to school.

District spokesperson JacQueline Getty said Minnetonka school officials use Flock license plate readers primarily to ensure people who have been banned from campus don’t trespass on school property. She didn’t elaborate on whether district Flock data are shared directly with outside law enforcement agencies or if their data have been leveraged to assist federal immigration agents. 

“We cooperate with our local law enforcement department when there is a need to do so, such as if our reader pings a stolen vehicle entering our lot,” Getty said in an email. “Our primary goal is campus safety, and the district has benefited from identifying people who should not be on district property.”

At Indiana University in Bloomington, in a January protest criticizing the city’s use of Flock license plate readers. In at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the campus it “uses a limited number” of Flock cameras for campus safety but has “enabled specific settings within our system to prevent searches related to immigration enforcement.” 

‘The future that we really want?’

The controversy comes on the heels of efforts at Flock to security. Security vendor Raptor Technologies announced last year an initiative to implement Flock cameras into a product designed to enhance safety during afternoon dismissal. 

Raptor Technologies, which counts roughly 40% of U.S. school districts as its customers, offers software that screens school visitors.

“By working with both schools and local law enforcement, Flock helps create safe corridors for student travel — whether that’s monitoring activity along walking routes, at bus stops or on nearby roads,” Flock said in . 

In 2024, Raptor suffered a cybersecurity lapse that exposed millions of sensitive records — including districts’ active-shooter plans and students’ medical records — to the internet.

“Raptor Technologies does not share, sell or disclose any data collected on our platform with third parties or government agencies,” a company spokesperson said in a statement after this article was published.

“We do not provide access to our systems or customer records other than as directed by customers or pursuant to a valid government order,” according to the statement. Although Raptor tools integrate with other companies’ security offerings, the spokesperson said it is up to districts to “determine what data, if any, is shared, the scope of what is shared and whether an integration is enabled.”

Schwartz, the San Francisco high schooler, said students learn about mass surveillance at school by reading books like George Orwell’s classic 1984. Yet when government overreach “happens right in front of us,” he said, “many people don’t see it.”

In a place where Bay Area technology companies routinely roll out their latest wares, people are starting to wake up, he said. 

“It also means that we see the future before it happens sometimes,” Schwartz said, “and we can decide ‘Oh, is this the future that we really want?’”

Clarification: Flock’s licensed plate reader cameras were not part of the company’s since-cancelled integration with Ring. The subhead on this story has been updated to make that distinction clearer.