Too Little, Too Late: Flock Admits Their Technology Needs Reforms

Flock Safety, the embattled vendor of mass surveillance technology, has rolled out a handful of new reforms intended to appease the justified nationwide anger that has seen scores of towns cancel or suspend their contracts with the company for automated license plate readers (ALPRs). The reforms are a combination of long overdue changes along with some cosmetic fixes that fail to address the fundamental dangers of this technology. We should not be letting companies decide how much privacy we deserve. So, what do these reforms actually do? The most consequential is Flock’s default setting of an optional 7-day retention period for ALPR data, down from its original default optional 30-day retention period. This means if police want to retain data beyond the duration of their retention setting, they need to access “Evidence Mode,” i.e., when the desired data is associated with an active investigation and not just a fishing expedition. This is significant because, in at least some circumsta