Flock Tightens Police Access to License Plate Data Amid Surveillance Backlash, Regulatory Scrutiny

Flock Safety announced it will roll out mandatory guardrails on its nationwide network of automatic license plate readers, responding to a growing backlash that has cost it contracts with dozens of cities and drawn criticism from civil liberties groups.

The company will require officers to enter a criminal case number before conducting a search, a feature that was optional since last year. It is also making its Audit Assistance tool mandatory, designed to flag abnormal search behavior and lock out suspicious users until an administrator reviews their activity. Administrators can override the system for emergencies such as missing-child cases, but those overrides will be flagged for review.

Flock additionally now recommends agencies hold data for seven days instead of the previous thirty, though departments can overrule that guidance. It also lets individual police departments limit which other departments can search their camera data, for example allowing searches related to kidnapping but not immigration enforcement.

The changes come after a Washington Post investigation found 46 cases in which officers were accused of using Flock’s cameras for unauthorized purposes, including stalking current or former romantic partners. Flock has acknowledged it was aware of 15 such incidents, according to The Verge.

CEO Garrett Langley described the shift as moving from “building things that are optional” to “building more confidence that as a technology company we have a responsibility to enforce guardrails,” as reported by MIT Technology Review. He blamed “misinformation” for much of the customer exodus, saying critics incorrectly believe Flock performs facial recognition or sells data commercially.

Flock’s cameras — more than 120,000 installed across the United States — are used by roughly 7,000 law enforcement agencies, about 40 percent of all police departments, according to the New York Times as cited by Ars Technica. That network covers every state except Alaska.

**Backlash from multiple fronts**

The policy tightening follows a period of extraordinary opposition. Amazon-owned Ring canceled a planned partnership with Flock in February after online backlash. The integration never launched, and Ring said no customer videos had been sent to Flock. The Verge reported that dozens of communities have canceled or suspended Flock contracts, including Los Angeles.

NPR found in February that at least 30 cities dropped Flock contracts in the last year, according to MIT Technology Review, while activist group DeFlock puts the number higher. Some states and municipalities are passing laws to ban license plate readers entirely, and some agencies are switching to competitors Axon and Motorola.

The LAPD suspended its use of Flock’s readers. A Flock spokesperson cited unspecified “misconceptions” for the pause, according to The Verge.

Tucker Carlson has said Flock’s technology is contributing to a “slave state,” MIT Technology Review reported. A Tennessee congressional candidate was charged with four counts of felony vandalism for allegedly shooting Flock cameras. The company also drew criticism after mailing a cease-and-desist letter to a lecture series in Newport Beach, California, that had hosted discussions of its surveillance technology.

**Critics: holes remain**

Civil liberties groups said the new safeguards are unlikely to stop abuse.

A senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Saira Hussain, told SFGate that cops could easily circumvent the case-number requirement by entering any number without triggering the audit tool. “That’s a significant concern, and I don’t think you, as Flock, are going to be able to tech your way out of it,” Hussain said, as reported by Ars Technica.

The ACLU agreed, noting that when Flock previously required officers to enter a reason for a search, some used generic terms like “investigation” or mocked the prompt — at one Oregon department, officers entered “hehehe” 20 times. The ACLU said Flock will not verify case numbers, and described the changes as “a thinly veiled PR attempt to counter communities’ genuine privacy concerns with its mass surveillance system with largely hollow security promises.”

The ACLU also pointed out that Flock has not shared specifics on the accuracy of its automatic auditing tool nor opened it up to independent evaluators. Chad Marlow, a senior policy counsel at the ACLU, told MIT Technology Review that the backlash is driven less by individual abuses than by the sheer scale of surveillance enabled by Flock’s cameras. “Is it worth it to catch a certain number of criminals, return a certain number of stolen cars, to eviscerate Americans’ privacy?” Marlow asked.

Langley, by contrast, maintains that the main reason for losing customers is misinformation. The company’s new rules are “undeniably small and incremental” compared with what the ACLU has advocated, MIT Technology Review noted. Marlow said Flock is “absolutely unwilling to make the actual changes they need to make.”

The growing scrutiny of Flock signals rising regulatory risk for the broader police surveillance technology sector, as privacy concerns, officer misconduct, and community opposition converge.