Flock Safety announces upgrades to license plate readers

Our Take

KVUE's Austin newsroom digs into Flock Safety's latest round of damage control, rolling out new features in response to mounting reports of officers misusing ALPR data for personal reasons, immigration enforcement, and out-of-state fishing expeditions that have nothing to do with the crime the camera was supposedly installed to solve. Credit to the KVUE team for pressing on the privacy angle instead of just parroting the company's press release.

Here's the thing about "upgrades": they're a tacit admission that the system was broken in the first place. Flock loves to tout new audit logs and reason-for-search fields, but those are self-reported by the same agencies that have already been caught skirting the rules. A dropdown menu asking an officer to explain why they ran a plate doesn't stop them from lying, and it definitely doesn't stop federal agencies from vacuuming up local search data through backdoor sharing agreements. Cosmetic accountability features are not the same as actual oversight, and they don't change the fact that these cameras log every driver's movements by default, guilty or not.

Austin residents who want to know how many of these cameras are already watching their commute can check our camera map, and anyone tired of watching companies mark their own homework should visit our take-action page to push back at the city council level before the next 'upgrade' quietly expands what these networks can do.