Flock says a new tool will curb police abuse of its cameras, but keeps the details vague

Surveillance technology startup Flock announced a series of new policies and tools on Thursday that it says will help curb abuse of its automated license plate reader systems and hold its law enforcement customers accountable. The company is now recommending police departments retain data for seven days instead of the previous 30, introducing an “Evidence Mode” that lets customers retain data longer in exceptional cases tied to a specific case number, and letting customers limit what data they share with other agencies based on the offense under investigation.

The centerpiece is “Audit Assistance,” a tool Flock launched in April that detects abnormal activity and flags it for administrator review, and can automatically lock out flagged users until an administrator intervenes. More than a third of Flock’s customers have turned it on since launch, and the company is now requiring all customers to enable it by the end of the year. But despite executives touting its capabilities, Flock has not explained in detail how Audit Assistance actually works, what data it’s trained on, or what exactly counts as “abnormal activity.” Flock told TechCrunch the tool is not based on machine learning or AI, describing it instead as a data tool that flags atypical search patterns — for example, a user searching for the same license plate under multiple different case codes — and stressed that a flag doesn’t confirm abuse, only that it warrants further investigation.

Privacy advocates remain unconvinced. The American Civil Liberties Union’s Chad Marlow said Flock has pointed to recent arrests of officers who misused the system as proof the tool works, but argued that “unless we know the number of officers misusing the system, we cannot conclude if Flock and its auditing tools are catching 95% of violators or 5%,” calling for an independent evaluation of its effectiveness. The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Cooper Quintin said it may not even matter whether the tool works technically if there are no real consequences for abuse when the same police agency both commits and investigates it, while the Brennan Center’s Rachel Levinson-Waldman called mandatory audit tools a step in the right direction that still needs outside auditing.

The announcement follows years of reported abuse: earlier this week, three former Georgia sheriff’s deputies were arrested and accused of using Flock cameras to stalk people with whom they’d had a personal relationship, a case the local sheriff credited Audit Assistance with helping uncover.

Why it matters

A company self-policing its own surveillance tool, without independent verification of false-positive or false-negative rates, leaves police departments — and the public whose plates get scanned — to take Flock’s word that abuse is actually being caught.