New Hanover Feeds Your Plate to Texas. There Is No Law There Stopping a Sale.

We proved this the hard way: we combined the audit logs of five North Carolina agencies whose Flock records name who searched them, and counted every search. The result was 3.9 million searches in three months, nearly 90% of them from outside North Carolina. The number-one searcher was Houston, Texas, with 306,799. The number-one state was Texas, with 608,961. New Hanover County is on the same network, and its own audit logs 2.98 million searches — with the searchers blacked out.

North Carolina wrote rules. Texas wrote none.

North Carolina law tells its own agencies they may not sell plate data and may share it only with law enforcement. Texas has no license-plate-reader law at all — no ban on selling the data, no limit on how long it is kept, no required audit, no rule about who may see it. So whatever a Texas agency decides to do with a North Carolina plate, Texas law does nothing to stop it.

Here is what that means in plain terms. When a Houston officer runs a search on the shared network, what comes back is not one photo — it is your vehicle’s travel history, every camera that has seen it, and, through a feature Flock calls Convoy, the other cars that move with you. That record is now in Texas’s hands, under Texas’s rules — which is to say, under no rules. Nothing there stops a Texas agency from keeping it, sharing it with a private company, or selling it.

Of the ten states searching our cameras, only one bars a sale

We looked up the law in every one of the top ten states whose police search North Carolina’s cameras. Exactly one — Kentucky — clearly forbids selling the data. The other nine, Texas at the top of the list, do not. New Hanover County paid for these cameras to keep its own residents safe. What it built instead is a pipeline that pours those residents’ movements into states that will not promise not to sell them.

Nobody voted for this

No one in New Hanover County voted to put your car on a Texas police department’s screen. The county’s roughly $219,000 Flock contract was signed at the Sheriff’s request, without a public hearing or a recorded vote of the commissioners — and the same board can end it at any time, without cause. On Monday, September 21, the commissioners who fund this meet again, and the public can be heard.

Read the full investigation — who is searching North Carolina’s cameras, and under whose rules. Then do one thing: sign the petition, and show up on August 17. Your plate is already in Texas. The question is whether it stays there.

Search figures are DeFlockILM’s own count of the Flock Network Audits produced by five North Carolina agencies (March–May 2026); see the full investigation and its methodology. The statutory comparison is verified against primary sources and the LAPPA 50-state survey as of August 2026; Kentucky (KRS 189.632) and North Carolina (G.S. § 20-183.32) expressly prohibit sale. This page is opinion and general information, not legal advice. First published August 1, 2026.