Flock adds privacy safeguards to license plate reader system
The short version: CBS19 reports Flock is adding case-number requirements and audit tools after officers were caught misusing ALPR data — but audits only work if someone's watching.
Our Take
Credit to CBS19 for covering this: Flock is rolling out case-number requirements and audit tools for its license plate reader searches, a direct response to documented cases of officers running plates for personal reasons that had nothing to do with an actual investigation. That this "safeguard" is being added now, years into deployment across thousands of communities, tells you everything about how this technology actually got built — cameras first, guardrails as an afterthought once the abuse became public.
Requiring a case number sounds like accountability, but it's only as good as who's reviewing those numbers and how often. A mandatory field is trivial to fill in with a bogus reference if nobody's cross-checking it against real case files. Audit logs are the same story: they only matter if an agency, a city council, or a journalist actually pulls them and asks hard questions. Self-policing by a company whose entire business model depends on more cameras staying online is not the same thing as independent oversight.
The bigger issue this video sidesteps is that these fixes treat misuse as an occasional bad-apple problem rather than a structural one. A nationwide network that logs every driver's movements was always going to attract people who abuse access — that's not a bug, it's the predictable outcome of building the database in the first place. Check our camera map to see how far this network already reaches near you, and visit our take-action page if you want to push back on it.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of CBS19, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.