Does Flock actually delete your footage? #tech #news
The short version: A Faster PC digs into Flock's retention policy shift from 30 to 7 days, raising questions about what that change really means for accountability.
Our Take
Credit to A Faster PC for asking the question most people never think to ask: when Flock says your data gets "deleted," what does that actually mean in practice? The shift from a 30-day retention window to 7 days sounds like a privacy win on paper, but shorter retention doesn't address the core problem — these cameras are still scanning and logging every plate that passes, building a searchable record of where you've been, even if that record cycles out faster now.
Retention periods are also just policy, not law. Flock and its police customers can change the default window, carve out exceptions for "active investigations," or extend hold times at will, and there's little public auditing to confirm data is actually purged on schedule rather than archived, shared, or pulled into a federal data-sharing network first. A shorter retention number is a nice talking point for Flock's PR team, but it doesn't change the fact that a private company is sitting on a rolling database of your movements that police departments across the country can query.
If you want to know whether these cameras are already watching your commute, check our camera map, and if your city or state hasn't put real limits on retention, sharing, or audit access, see what you can do on our take action page.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of A Faster PC, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.