Flock’s Answer to Its Surveillance Scandals: Trust Us

In a bid to address growing concerns surrounding its surveillance technology, Flock, a company supplying over 120,000 automatic license plate readers, has announced new policy changes. CEO Garrett Langley revealed these updates in a blog post, highlighting the company's commitment to enhancing privacy, accountability, and security.

Among the changes, Flock is now enforcing an optional feature that flags "abnormal activity" for review, reducing the default data storage period from 30 days to seven days, and introducing optional limits on data sharing between police departments. Langley emphasized that these policy updates are a response to listening to both customers and the communities they serve, aiming for a new standard in public safety.

However, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) criticized Flock's measures as "merely retreads of previous inadequate safety measures" they had previously identified. While Flock asserts that its new policies will allow local police to control searches of their data, the ACLU maintains that the company is assuming its system already prevents improper search queries. This assumption, according to the ACLU, is clearly not accurate.

Tom Bowman, policy counsel for security and surveillance at the Center for Democracy & Technology, echoed this sentiment, stating that the policy changes still ask thousands of police departments to police themselves, despite evidence from across the U.S. indicating that this lack of guardrails is unsafe. Consequently, Flock's response to a crisis of trust may merely perpetuate the very issue it aims to address.