Flock announces changes to cameras amid backlash
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Flock Safety, the surveillance technology company increasingly under scrutiny from lawmakers from both parties, civil liberties advocates and citizens across the U.S., announced Thursday that it is making changes to its platform intended to quell privacy concerns and address documented abuses of its system by some members of law enforcement.
The company operates a vast nationwide network of automated cameras that record the license plate numbers and other characteristics of all passing vehicles every day. Thousands of law enforcement agencies in 49 states can search and share Flock's data across jurisdictions to aid their investigations.
Police have credited the technology as an important crime-fighting innovation that has helped locate missing people and track suspects in violent crimes. But some critics say its pervasiveness amounts to unconstitutional warrantless mass surveillance. Dozens of cities and agencies have nixed their relationships with Flock amid concerns that the data can be accessed for immigration enforcement or used in unauthorized tracking, after a flurry of examples surfaced of law enforcement officers misusing the technology for personal searches.
The Washington Post earlier this month reported finding nearly 50 instances of police officers charged or accused of using the cameras for unauthorized purposes, many for tracking current or former romantic partners or family members.
Just this week, six employees -- including four officers -- of the Savannah Police Department in Georgia were fired after they were accused of searching for friends and family using the tool and allowing an officer from an outside agency to use the city's cameras.
In an interview, Flock CEO Garrett Langley said many of the product changes will make what were once optional guardrails mandatory for its users to implement by Jan. 1.
Among them: All law enforcement customers will have to implement an audit tool that's intended to flag abnormal search behavior. When the system detects abnormal behavior, the user would be locked out pending an internal review, the company said in a description of the changes provided ahead of Thursday's announcement.
Flock, which says its customers own the data that the cameras record, is also shortening the standard data retention window from 30 days to seven. It said it will allow data to be preserved for longer when it is evidence tied to a case number.
Law enforcement users will now also be required to enter a code from their records management system tying each search to a specific case before it is run. Overrides for emergencies would be automatically flagged for review, the company said.
Critics of the company reacted skeptically to the changes, which they said appeared designed to address the growing bipartisan anger about the cameras but could still leave room for police to abuse the system.
Robert Frommer, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm that's led closely watched litigation over the technology, called the changes "window dressing" from a company in "panic mode."