Springdale has 142 connected cameras, and growing.
Springdale Police Chief Derek Wright, in writing, August 31, 2026.
Short answer: No
Researchers were able to identify 95% of 1.5 million people from four points on a map.
You cannot truly anonymize precise behavioral data, like your web history or your physical movements, while leaving the granular records intact. The records are what make it useful, and the records are what make it identifiable.
Complex datasets with many variables are sparse and unique. That is what makes them so easy to match against outside public records. The more detail a dataset holds about you, the fewer other people in it look anything like you.
A license plate belongs to a specific vehicle, and vehicles are driven by specific people. Civil liberties groups including the ACLU argue that on that basis the raw data is personally identifiable from the start, and that keeping a searchable multi-city database of where ordinary people drive is mass surveillance whatever the contract calls it.
“Four spatio-temporal points are enough to uniquely identify 95% of the individuals.”
The researchers had fifteen months of movement data for about 1.5 million people, with no names attached. Knowing four times and places a person had been was enough to pick 95 of every 100 of them out of the whole set. A plate read is a time and a place.
Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility. Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, César Hidalgo, Michel Verleysen, Vincent D. Blondel. Scientific Reports, 2013.
“99.98% of Americans were correctly re-identified in any available 'anonymised' dataset by using just 15 characteristics, including age, gender, and marital status.”
This one tested the claim directly. Take the names off a dataset, hand it to a researcher, and see how many people can be put back. The answer was almost all of them.
Estimating the success of re-identifications in incomplete datasets using generative models. Luc Rocher, Julien M. Hendrickx, Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye. Nature Communications, 2019. Figure as reported by the study's own institution, Imperial College London.
It is a defined term. The City of Springdale’s contract says:
“Customer Data permanently stripped of identifying details and any potential personally identifiable information, by commercially available standards.”
And here is what the same agreement lets the company do with it.
“Customer hereby grants Flock a non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free right to use and distribute such Anonymized Data to improve and enhance the Services and for other development, diagnostic and corrective purposes, and other Flock offerings. Parties understand that the aforementioned license is required for continuity of Services. Flock does not own and shall not sell Anonymized Data.”
“Flock shall have the right to collect, analyze, and anonymize Customer Data and Customer Generated Data to the extent such anonymization renders the data non-identifiable to create Anonymized Data to use and perform the Services and related systems and technologies, including the training of machine learning algorithms.”
A contract can be cancelled in August and signed again in March. A written rule stays.
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