Data sources & coverage

Honest limits beat inflated claims.

What this product is about

FlockWatch’s commercial report product is designed around public audit logs of ALPR / Flock system searches — not live camera feeds and not a complete nationwide vehicle travel history.

Primary corpus (v1)

Live plate checks query the public FOIA search-audit corpus documented at flockwatch.ryehowardstone.com (CC BY 4.0). Lookup uses the official plate-keyed API: results with readable plates are returned only when the caller already supplies that plate. We do not crawl plate indexes.

Reports attribute the corpus and include FOIA source links when present. This is independent of Flock Safety.

Have I Been Flocked?

Have I Been Flocked? is a related public explainer/search experience. We do not scrape it or treat it as our production API.

Finding Flock (locations)

Camera-location context may cite Finding Flock OSM-derived data under ODbL obligations. Locations are not vehicle sightings.

Flock Safety APIs

Flock’s customer APIs are restricted to authorized integrations and are not used here.

Current runtime modes

rye (default): live plate-keyed corpus API.
mock: DEMO corpus for UI / Stripe sandbox — always labeled DEMO.
not_configured: hard off switch.

Status meanings

MATCHED — matching entries found in the available corpus under stated rules.
NO_MATCH_IN_AVAILABLE_DATA — no match in current available data (not “never searched”).
SOURCE_UNAVAILABLE — source error/timeout (never converted to no-match).
SOURCE_NOT_CONFIGURED — production source not connected.
INSUFFICIENT_COVERAGE — coverage too thin for a reliable conclusion.