Flock CEO Garrett Langley says the company “got this one wrong” by leaving key controls on police searches of its license-plate-reader data optional. Flock now plans to require those controls after reports that officers used its tools or data to stalk former partners and other people, The Verge reported.
The reversal is specific, not a wholesale retreat from Flock’s surveillance business. Langley told The Verge he had changed his view on how much responsibility Flock bears for law-enforcement use of its systems. The company had previously argued that lawmakers and local officials should set the guardrails. Its new policy puts some of those guardrails in the product whether agencies ask for them or not.
What did Flock change after its CEO said it got this wrong?
Over the coming weeks, Flock will require a feature it calls Audit Assistance. The tool is designed to identify what the company calls abnormal search activity, lock a suspicious user out immediately, and send the activity to an administrator for review.
Users will also have to provide a case code before searching. The point is straightforward: tie a search to an actual investigation rather than leave an officer with an unstructured lookup box and good intentions. An administrator can waive that requirement in an emergency, such as an effort to find a missing child, but Flock says those overrides will be flagged for later review.
Langley’s admission concerned the decision to leave the case-code protection voluntary. “We should make it a requirement,” he told The Verge.
Audit Assistance will shift from optional to required.
Case codes will be required for searches, subject to administrator-approved emergency overrides.
The default retention period for data from Flock devices, including automatic license plate readers, will fall from 30 days to seven days.
Agencies will gain more detailed controls over which outside agencies may search their data and for what purpose.
Automatic license plate readers capture vehicle images and plate information that police agencies can search. Flock’s proposed sharing controls would let a locality permit another department to look for a homicide suspect, for example, while blocking use for immigration enforcement, according to The Verge.
The seven-day period is a default, not a hard ceiling. Departments can choose longer retention, and Flock’s Evidence Mode can preserve searches connected to a particular case number. That distinction matters: the announced change reduces the company’s standard setting but does not prevent an agency from keeping material longer.
The changes followed reports of alleged officer misuse. The Verge cited reporting that a Georgia police chief searched an ex-girlfriend’s plate more than 500 times over seven months, and a California case in which prosecutors alleged a former sheriff’s deputy used Flock data to stalk and harass an ex-girlfriend.
Audit Assistance launched in April as a voluntary feature, and only about one-third of Flock agencies had enabled it, The Verge reported. Langley said agencies using it found more abuse. That is a company executive’s assessment, not evidence that the required version will stop misuse or answer the broader privacy objections raised by Flock’s camera network.
This story draws on original reporting from The Verge.
