As if we weren’t already tracked enough, malls and stores across the U.S. might soon deploy drones to catch shoplifters.
Controversial surveillance company Flock Safety, which supplies drones and other invasive tech to police departments, announced on Thursday that it is now offering its drones to private security firms.
Drone use in policing is on the rise, and this move makes it likely that private companies will soon adopt the same tech. But as drones become normalized for public and private security, privacy advocates warn they could push the U.S. closer to a surveillance state.
“Security leaders are being asked to protect more with less across bigger footprints, tighter budgets, and real staffing constraints,” Rahul Sidhu, Flock Safety’s VP of Aviation, said in a press release.
The company says each drone dock can cover roughly a 3.5-mile radius with flight times up to 45 minutes, providing rapid response for warehouses, rail yards, hospitals, ports, malls, and business centers.
In its press release, Flock Safety pitched its drones specifically to retail stores, arguing that organized retail crime remains high. It cited an industry report showing that retailers saw a 93% increase in shoplifting incidents in 2024, and said the drones’ quick response could help reduce related costs over time. Of course, it’s worth noting that retailers’ claims of a shoplifting epidemic were largely debunked in 2024, but that didn’t stop police departments from going on a shopping spree for new toys.
Keith Kauffman, Flock’s drone program director, told the MIT Technology Review how the drones could work in practice.
When a store’s security team spots shoplifters leaving the scene, they can activate the drone, which is docked on the roof. Equipped with video and thermal cameras, the drone can track thieves escaping on foot or in a vehicle. Its video feed can then be sent to the company’s security team and transmitted directly to local police.
Flock’s technology is already in use in many police departments. Just this week, its license plate cameras were credited with catching a murder suspect in El Paso and locating a missing teen in Boulder, Colorado.
But not everyone is thrilled with the company’s tech. The city of Evanston, Illinois, ordered Flock Safety this week to uninstall 18 license plate readers after Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias discovered that Flock had given U.S. Customs and Border Protection access to the readers’ data. And in August, Congress launched an investigation into what one member called Flock’s “role in enabling invasive surveillance practices that threaten the privacy, safety, and civil liberties of women, immigrants, and other vulnerable Americans.”
ACLU Senior Policy Analyst Jay Stanley has warned in recent years that the expanding use of drones in policing and private security requires strict privacy guardrails, including limits on when and where drones can be used and how video and other sensor data are handled.
“We don’t want to end up in a nightmare scenario where drones are used for mass surveillance and the experience of having police flying cameras buzzing overhead becomes routine in people’s daily lives,” Stanley wrote in a recent blog post.