Flock Safety, the surveillance company building a warrantless dragnet of Americans’ movements, announced Thursday it will shrink its default data retention from 30 days to seven and require cops to enter case numbers for searches. It’s a PR stunt to preempt real regulation while the warrantless tracking of law-abiding citizens continues unabated.
The fox is guarding the henhouse. Flock profits off scanning billions of license plates every month without a warrant, facilitating nationwide data sharing. Now, facing canceled city contracts and a wave of public vandalism, CEO Garrett Langley is promising to police the police, asking Americans to trust the mass surveillance company to audit its own users.
Under the new policy, Flock will mandate "Audit Assistance," a system that flags "abnormal activity" and locks out users for review, and require case codes for every search. An emergency override exists for situations like a missing child, but those searches are automatically flagged. The company is also introducing "Evidence Mode," allowing data connected to a case number to bypass the seven-day auto-delete. Agencies can also keep data longer if state or local laws require it.
Langley framed the overhaul as the "toughest license-plate-reader policy in the country," telling The California Post that "communities need my help" and that "sadly, police abuse has been a problem for longer than people want to talk about." He admitted that "not enough cities are running audits," so Flock is stepping in to "force it." The New York Post gave top billing to Langley’s "drastic new change" spin, while NBC Chicago noted the canceled contracts and vandalism driving the pivot.
But the ACLU isn’t buying it, and neither should anyone who values the Fourth Amendment. Chad Marlow, senior policy counsel at the ACLU, cut through the corporate spin: "My biggest concern was and will continue to be that they are a mass surveillance company that collects billions and billions of license plate scans every month on people who have done nothing wrong."
Flock operates roughly 120,000 cameras nationwide. Law enforcement does not need a warrant to access this travel information, which can reveal where people live, work, and worship. Officers have already been repeatedly accused of using the tech to stalk individuals. Seven days of default retention is a far cry from the ACLU’s recommended 48 hours, and "Evidence Mode" ensures cops can keep the data indefinitely with a case number.
A corporate press release doesn't fix a warrantless dragnet. Flock is offering to tighten the leash on its own customers to stave off legislation, but the core offense remains: a private company is logging the movements of virtually every car in America and handing it to the government without a warrant. Until the Fourth Amendment is respected, the tracking continues.
