As public outcry against surveillance technology company Flock Safety goes viral online, and as lawmakers from across the political spectrum seek to ban the national network of license-plate readers, the firm announced new guardrails Thursday to calm a growing bipartisan chorus of critics.
The company said the changes are designed to prevent police misuse of the cameras, 120,000 of which are installed along roadsides and in other public locations in communities nationwide through contracts with some 7,000 law enforcement agencies.
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Among the changes is a truncated data retention policy, which governs how long a person’s information is stored in the company’s database, and an auditing system designed to thwart police misuse of the tool.
The “Audit Assistance” tool will block users whose searches of the camera network are flagged as “abnormal activity,” while the new “Evidence Mode” feature, set to go live in the coming weeks, will allow local police to retain data beyond the retention window only in “exceptional cases that take longer” to close. Otherwise, data will be deleted every seven days by default, rather than the current 30 days.
But Flock’s critics across the political spectrum, from the left-leaning American Civil Liberties Union to far-right Freedom Caucus members, have blasted the changes as little more than a public relations stunt.
The changes offer a “thinly veiled” effort to sidestep “communities’ genuine privacy concerns” with the company’s AI-powered surveillance capabilities without offering “an earnest effort to address them,” the ACLU said in a media release.
Chris Anders, a Republican state legislator from West Virginia and chair of its Freedom Caucus, accused the $8.4 billion company of “trying to protect their golden calf,” while maintaining a private surveillance network, backed by venture capital, that violates constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.
“They’re trying to protect their wallets,” Anders, who is leading an effort to ban Flock cameras in West Virginia, told Straight Arrow. He said the changes don’t go far enough because police officers are not required to secure a warrant from a judge before using Flock to track suspects.
“They’re going to try to protect themselves, they’re going to try to appease the masses,” he said. “But the fact of the matter is, I’m sorry, it’s unconstitutional. Get a warrant. That simple.”
Why is Flock announcing changes?
Flock has long faced criticism from civil rights groups, and investigative reports over the past year have revealed a range of alleged abuses by police officers. The company also faced criticism over reports revealed that police officers were using the technology to assist the Department of Homeland Security in federal immigration cases.
Since then, the company has found itself at the center of a heated debate over privacy and public safety, with people across the political spectrum posting on social media about alleged privacy violations and abuse allegations. This year, city councils in 23 municipalities have voted to sever ties with Flock, according to a recent analysis by The Washington Times. In July, the police department in Los Angeles, California, let its Flock contract expire after an audit found the license plate readers were incorrectly flagging vehicles as stolen. In January, city officials in Staunton, Virginia, cut ties with Flock after vocal opposition from residents in the 25,000-person city.
In some cases, officials have moved to immediately replace Flock cameras with a comparable system from a competitor.
Flock did not immediately respond to an email from Straight Arrow seeking comment.
The company maintains that its license-plate readers are a practical crimefighting tool that allow law enforcement to search a national camera network by a car’s license plate number and other features. Some police departments say the tools are invaluable. In one frequently cited instance, police credited Flock cameras for helping them solve a child abduction case involving a 1-year-old who was taken from his mother at gunpoint in Georgia. Flock was also given credit for helping police track down a man later convicted of attempting to assassinate President Donald Trump.
The changes come just a few days before a “national week of action” against automated license plate readers, with activists from more than 400 communities nationwide planning protests against Flock and its competitors.
“Abuse of Flock technology, at any level, is unacceptable,” the company said Thursday in a blog post. But ultimately, the company said, individual law enforcement agencies own their own data and can do with it as they see fit.
“Nine years ago, we set out to build a company that would make communities safer,” the company said. “Today, Flock technology assists your officers in more than one million crimes solved annually.”
Critics maintain the devices create an atmosphere of pervasive surveillance, especially when they’re located in sensitive places like near schools and playgrounds. Dozens of law enforcement officials have been accused or convicted of using Flock for stalking. In one high-profile case, a Texas police officer was accused of leveraging Flock to surveil a woman suspected of self-administering an abortion.
As Flock criticism goes viral online, the devices have faced destruction in the real world. They’ve been vandalized, shot at and, in some instances, ripped from the ground.
Chad Marlow, a senior policy counsel at the ACLU focused on privacy and surveillance, framed the debate as “some police departments and some technology vendors against everybody else.”
Libertarians are concerned about “the government overreaching into people’s lives,” Marlow told Straight Arrow, while many Trump supporters argue that Flock “is what the deep state looks like to them.” Progressives, meanwhile, are concerned about how “policing surveillance and mass surveillance has always been disproportionately deployed against vulnerable communities.” For centrists, he said, “it’s just the ick factor.”
“But they all arrived at the same conclusion,” Marlow said, “which is that mass surveillance in this country has gotten out of control and it needs to be reined in.”
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