Editorial Standards

Flock IT is a watchdog archive covering automated license plate readers and mass vehicle surveillance in the United States. This page explains, plainly, how our coverage is produced and what rules it follows.

How stories are made

Our systems continuously monitor public reporting — local news, wire services, government proceedings — for ALPR-related events. Related reports are grouped into a single story, and a draft article is written with AI assistance from those reports alone: only facts present in the cited sources, attributed to the outlets that reported them. No draft publishes itself. A human editor reads, edits, and approves every article before it appears, and decides what never runs at all.

AI disclosure

We are transparent about our tools. Article drafts are AI-assisted and human-edited. Illustrative images are AI-generated, are always captioned “AI-generated illustration,” and depict generic scenes — never real people, real logos, or the specific events described. We do not present generated imagery as documentary photography.

Sourcing

Every article carries a Source Record listing each report it draws on. Facts are attributed to their outlets by name. When a claim rests on a single source, we say so in the text and flag it during review rather than presenting it as settled.

Corrections

When we get something wrong, we fix it. Corrected articles are updated in place; articles we can no longer stand behind are retracted and labeled as such, not quietly deleted. Send corrections to info@flockit.org — they are read by the editor.

Independence

Flock IT runs no trackers and has no commercial relationship with any surveillance vendor or law-enforcement agency. We accept sponsorships only from companies aligned with our mission and our readers' commitment to safety and privacy — sponsors buy clearly labeled placement, never reader data and never editorial influence (see the Masthead for how that works). Our archive includes stories where ALPR technology genuinely helped, because a record that only cuts one way is advocacy, not evidence.