Who Is Watching You? Surveillance in Peachtree City and the Privacy Threats That Should Actually Worry You

On February 8th, a man walked into the Amoco gas station on Highway 85 South in Fayetteville and demanded cash at gunpoint. By the time Fayette County deputies arrived, the suspect had already fled. Witnesses gave a general direction of travel, and a lookout went out to surrounding agencies.

Surveillance cameras captured clear footage of the suspect and his silver car with a temporary drive-out tag, which was helpful but not decisive on its own. What made the difference was the network of Automated License Plate Reader cameras, or ALPRs, owned by Fayette County agencies through a system built by Flock Safety. 

Officers searched the ALPR database for silver vehicles with drive-out tags entering the area around the time of the robbery and found a match. About 90 minutes later, police spotted the car near Highways 74 and 54 and initiated a brief pursuit that ended at a dead end near Dividend Road and Paschall Road, where 23-year-old Kenny Richards was arrested without incident. A firearm was recovered from the vehicle.

That is the system working exactly as intended. An armed robbery, a fast suspect, and a resolution before most of us even knew it happened. 

But it raises questions worth considering. What exactly are these systems? How are they watching us? And should we care about our privacy?

What Is Flock Safety?

Flock Safety is a Georgia-based technology company that manufactures and deploys ALPR cameras for law enforcement agencies and private communities across the country. The cameras are small, typically mounted on poles along roadways, and they photograph the rear of every passing vehicle, capturing the license plate, time, date, location, and visual characteristics such as color, make, body type, and even bumper stickers or roof racks.

The system then compares each plate it reads against what law enforcement calls a “hot list,” a regularly updated database of plates tied to stolen vehicles, outstanding warrants, missing persons, sex offenders, and suspended registrations. When a plate matches, the system sends a real-time alert to officers. If there is no match, the image is simply stored on Flock’s cloud servers for later investigative use.

It is worth being clear about what Flock cameras are not doing. They are not recording video of your daily activities. They are not capturing audio. They are not logging who is in your car or what you are doing. 

They are, in the most literal sense, taking a photograph of your license plate as you drive on a public road.

How Peachtree City Uses Its Surveillance System

To better understand the day-to-day reality of how this technology works locally, I sat down with Peachtree City Police Department Captain Brad Williams, who works closely with the surveillance tools the department relies on every day.

According to Williams, the city currently has about 33 active ALPR cameras. Beyond those, the department operates roughly six live-view cameras at parking lots and key intersections, a mobile surveillance trailer purchased through SPLOST funds that typically stays near the Home Depot and Walmart shopping areas and used at large special events, and camouflaged trail cameras at city parks and other locations where permanent infrastructure is not in the budget. The trail cams exist because parks have long been a target for smash-and-grab break-ins. Criminals know that someone heading out for a run is probably gone for an hour and is not carrying a wallet in their gym shorts. They break a window, grab a purse, and are gone. The cameras give officers at least something to work with in places where there would otherwise be zero leads.

Williams pointed to the Fayetteville robbery as a textbook example of the system in action. The gas station camera captured the suspect’s vehicle but could not read the plate number. Without the ALPR network, that would have been a dead end. Instead, officers were able to search by vehicle characteristics and narrow down a match within the hour.

The department also uses the system proactively with neighboring jurisdictions. When another community flags a vehicle involved in a crime, that plate gets entered into a shared hot list, and officers get an alert if the car passes through Peachtree City. Williams noted that if Peachtree City has a burglary and Locust Grove had one the same night, investigators can search for vehicles that appeared in both places during the same time frame. That kind of cross-referencing would have been nearly impossible not long ago.

There are real safeguards in place, and they are worth knowing about. The department’s Standard Operating Procedure on ALPRs, signed by Chief Janet Moon in July 2025, requires officers to visually confirm a plate match and independently verify the alert through state crime databases before taking any enforcement action. This two-step verification exists because the technology is not perfect. A camera might misread a J as an I, or the state database might have a lag of several hours, meaning a vehicle flagged as stolen that morning may have already been recovered.

The department also has access to facial recognition software, though only a handful of investigators in the Criminal Investigation Division are licensed to use it, strictly for generating leads in felony cases. The SOP requires quarterly audits of those accounts and ties every facial recognition search to a case number so supervisors can review what was searched, when, and why. Williams emphasized that none of these systems talk to each other automatically. All the analytical work connecting the dots is human-driven. 

What Are We Getting Out of Being Tracked?

The honest answer is quite a lot.

Williams told me that virtually every major crime the department has solved in recent memory involved the ALPR system in some way. The cameras help locate stolen vehicles, identify vehicles associated with child predators, and intercept suspects before they commit additional crimes. They have also been critical for finding missing persons. When an Alzheimer’s patient wanders off and the family provides a tag number, that plate goes into the system nationwide, and the person can be located far more quickly than in the days when officers were driving around hoping to spot the car. 

Williams also said that criminals have started adapting. Some remove their plates before entering the city. Others borrow vehicles or take routes they think avoid cameras. That tells you something about the system’s effectiveness. When people change their behavior to avoid getting caught, the tool is working even in the cases where it does not produce an arrest.

I asked Williams whether he had heard significant pushback from residents about the system. He said he had not. The few people who have sat down with him and asked about it came away satisfied once they understood the cameras photograph the back of a car on a public road.

He then said something that probably reflects how a lot of people feel, even if they would not say it out loud. Talking about his own Alexa, his own Ring cameras, and the fact that he knows data is being gathered on him all the time, he said, “I’m a pretty boring guy. I’m not, like, no national secrets going on there.”

I think most of us feel that way. And at the local government level, where the data collection is narrow and the oversight is documented, that instinct is mostly justified. But the full picture is more complicated.

Where Should We Actually Be Concerned?

Benjamin Franklin once wrote, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” That quote is arguably overused in surveillance discussions like this, but it is a warning still worth repeating. 

On the local government side, the picture is fairly reassuring. But what about the private companies whose cameras and devices are already inside our homes? That is where the conversation gets more interesting.

If you watched the Super Bowl this year, you may have seen this ad from Ring, the Amazon-owned doorbell camera company, promoting a new feature called “Search Party.” 

Search Party from Ring | Be A Hero In Your Neighborhood

The idea is that Ring cameras across a neighborhood would work together as a single network to help locate lost pets. It sounds harmless enough. But viewers immediately recognized what that technology really represents. If a network of private cameras can collectively scan a neighborhood for a dog, it can scan for a person just as easily. The backlash was swift.

Those concerns also resurfaced criticism of a partnership Ring had announced months earlier with Flock Safety, the same company whose cameras Peachtree City uses for license plate reading. The partnership was not about license plates, though. It was designed to make it easier for law enforcement agencies that already use Flock’s software to request doorbell camera footage from Ring users in a specific area after a crime. Users would be notified and could choose whether to share, but the concern was about where that footage might end up. Reporting from 404 Media revealed that ICE has been able to access Flock Safety’s data in its investigations. Had the Ring partnership gone through, there would have been a legitimate basis to worry that footage shared by a Ring user for a local burglary case could end up in the hands of federal officials, even if that was never what the homeowner intended. That is the kind of scope creep that rightly makes people uneasy.

Ring canceled the partnership on February 13th, confirming that the integration never actually launched and no user footage was ever shared with Flock Safety.

But here is what matters locally. Before the Flock partnership was even announced, Ring already had a system in place for law enforcement to request footage from homeowners. Peachtree City’s police department had an account with what Ring called its “Neighbors” portal. When a crime occurred, officers could draw a circle around the area on a map and send a request to Ring users nearby, asking if anyone had footage they were willing to share. It was entirely voluntary. Users had to opt in to receive those requests, and even then, the notification came as an email that was easy to miss or ignore. 

Williams told me the system never produced much. Most people either were not opted in, had not paid their Ring subscription in years, or simply did not see the email buried in a pile of junk. Officers still had to drive the neighborhood and look for cameras the old-fashioned way. The department never had the ability to log into anyone’s Ring camera, and they still cannot. So while the national debate over Ring and Flock Safety generated plenty of heat, the practical reality for a city like ours is that the partnership was solving a problem we were not really experiencing in the first place.

However, that does not mean there is nothing to worry about. It just means we have been worrying about the wrong things. The surveillance threats that deserve far more of our attention are not coming from law enforcement partnerships that never got off the ground.

The Gap Between Public Safety and Private Profit

We should be clear about something. Much of what we do online is already being monitored. Google knows what you search. Amazon knows what you buy. Your phone knows where you go. We have accepted this as the cost of convenience, trading privacy for free email, targeted shopping recommendations, and turn-by-turn directions. 

But the difference between a Flock camera at a Peachtree City intersection and the technology we voluntarily carry in our pockets comes down to accountability. Local police departments operate under a paper trail of standard operating procedures and public audits. If an officer misuses the system, there is a documented record of the search and a clear line of authority to hold them responsible.

The same cannot be said for the companies building the next generation of consumer surveillance. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is perhaps the clearest example. Its entire business model is built on harvesting personal data for advertising revenue, and it operates with a level of autonomy that would be unthinkable for a local police department.

On the same day Ring canceled its Flock partnership, the New York Times reported that Meta is planning to add facial recognition technology to its Ray-Ban smart glasses. The feature, internally called “Name Tag,” would allow anyone wearing the glasses to identify people they encounter and pull up information about them through Meta’s AI assistant. An internal Meta document obtained by the Times stated that the company planned to launch the feature during a period of political distraction, noting that civil society groups who would normally push back would have their resources focused elsewhere. These are not obscure prototype glasses sitting in a lab somewhere. EssilorLuxottica, which manufactures the glasses with Meta, disclosed this month that it sold more than seven million pairs last year.

Let that sit for a moment. A company that has already paid over $7 billion in privacy-related settlements—including $725 million for the Cambridge Analytica scandal and $1.4 billion for unauthorized biometric data collection— is now planning to put facial recognition into a pair of sunglasses that over seven million people already own.

Meta is also developing what it internally calls “super sensing” glasses that would continuously run cameras and sensors to record the wearer’s entire day. Think of it as a wearable surveillance system that never turns off. Meta’s own employees have questioned whether the rollout would comply with the company’s existing FTC settlement. One internal risk review director told colleagues that Mark Zuckerberg wanted to “push the bounds” of that agreement.

That is the privacy conversation we should be having. Not the license plate camera on a public road. Not the Ring doorbell partnership that never launched. The conversation should be about what happens when a company with a $7 billion track record of privacy violations puts facial recognition on a pair of sunglasses and calls it a feature.

Protecting What You Can Control

I believe that being in a public space means accepting a degree of visibility. You can be seen, photographed, and recorded, and that has always been true. A camera on a pole taking a picture of your license plate is an extension of that basic reality. But there is a meaningful difference between being observable in public and being identifiable. When a pair of glasses can match your face to your name, your social media profile, and your personal information without your knowledge or consent, that is not observation. That is surveillance by a private company for its own commercial purposes, and it is happening without any of the guardrails we expect from law enforcement.

And it does not stop when you go inside. The same companies that want to identify you on the street are already deeply embedded in your daily internet activity. These are the spaces where your right to privacy should be strongest, and they are the spaces most routinely violated by companies whose entire business model depends on harvesting your data.

You cannot change what Meta or Google decide to build. But you can make it harder for them to profit off your life. Here are some practical steps.

• Use a VPN to encrypt your internet traffic and prevent your internet service provider from logging every site you visit. Services like Mullvad and Proton VPN are well regarded for their privacy-first approach.
• Switch to a privacy-focused search engine like DuckDuckGo or Kagi, which do not build advertising profiles based on your searches.
• Review the permissions on your phone apps and revoke access to your location, microphone, and contacts for any app that does not need them. Both iPhone and Android make this straightforward in their settings.
• Use a browser like Firefox or Brave that blocks third-party trackers by default, rather than Chrome, which is built by the largest advertising company in the world.
• Turn off the listening features on smart home devices like Alexa and Google Home when you are not actively using them. Both devices have physical mute buttons for a reason.
• Be selective about what you post on social media. Every photo, check-in, and status update feeds the data profiles that companies like Meta use to build and monetize your digital identity. Consider limiting who can see your posts and opting out of personalized advertising in your account settings.

The surveillance infrastructure in Peachtree City is doing what it was designed to do and doing it with accountability. We should keep holding our local government to that standard. 

The far greater threat is not the camera on the pole. It is the phone in your pocket, the glasses on someone else’s face, and the corporations that have spent decades monetizing your life.

If you care about your privacy, focus your energy there. That is where it is needed most.