Flock Just Changed Its Rules — Here's The Catch #surveillance

Our Take

Credit to The AI Guide for laying out the timeline plainly: nearly 50 documented cases of officers using Flock's plate-reading network to track women, months of reporting from outlets that don't usually cover ALPRs, and now a company scrambling to look responsible. Cutting default retention from 30 days to seven and tightening who can search the database sounds like progress, and maybe it is a small one. But notice what didn't change — the 120,000+ cameras, the 6,000 police agencies, the private customers like FedEx and Lowe's feeding into the same pool. The infrastructure of mass tracking stays exactly where it was.

This is the pattern with Flock every time a scandal breaks: promise a policy tweak, let the news cycle move on, keep expanding. A default setting is not a hard limit — agencies can and do configure around defaults, and audit trails only matter if someone's actually reading them. The stalking cases weren't a bug in the system; they were the system working as designed, just pointed at the wrong target by the wrong person. Nothing in this announcement stops the next officer from doing the same thing before anyone notices.

If you want to know whether one of these cameras is already logging your plate, check our map. And if your city council or police department hasn't had a public conversation about Flock's presence in your town, our take-action guide has what you need to force one.