Flock's CEO Just Apologized. 46 Cases Say It's Late

Our Take

Credit to the channel 🇺🇸MY TAKE for connecting the dots here: Flock Safety quietly cut its default plate-retention window from 30 days to 7, right around the same time its CEO issued a public apology. That's not a coincidence, it's damage control. When a company changes a core privacy setting only after mounting scrutiny, it tells you the original default was never about public safety necessity — it was about how much data they could justify holding.

The 46 cases referenced in the video are the real story. Apologies are cheap and retroactive; they don't undo the months or years that plate data sat in a database, searchable by officers with little oversight, shared across agencies, or in some documented instances, misused outright. A shorter retention window is a step, but it's a policy tweak, not accountability. Nothing about a default setting change addresses who accessed the old data, why, or what happened to people swept up in searches that had nothing to do with a warrant or an active investigation.

This is exactly the pattern we track: quiet infrastructure expansion, followed by scandal, followed by a PR-friendly fix that leaves the surveillance architecture fully intact. The cameras are still there. The network still grows. If you want to see how close this system is to your own neighborhood, check our camera map, and if you want to push back on it locally, our take-action page has concrete next steps.