30 Days Of What - Michigan's Flock Contract Has 4 Retention Clocks

Our Take

Credit to Magnetic Norse for actually doing the unglamorous work democracy depends on: reading all 172 pages of a public contract instead of taking a press release's word for it. The channel's dig into Michigan's Flock Safety agreement exposes exactly the kind of shell game we've come to expect from ALPR vendors — a headline "30 days of data, rolling purge" that sounds reassuring until you find the very next sentence letting agencies download and keep that data indefinitely, followed by other clauses that never mention 30 days at all. Retention limits are only meaningful if they're actually limits.

The bigger flag is on page 32: language granting Flock a non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free right to use and distribute state driving data, including for training its own machine learning models. Michigan did get a hard definition of "anonymized" into the deal, which is more than most jurisdictions manage, but "anonymized license plate location data" is still a phrase that should make anyone pause. Once a private company has perpetual rights to your state's surveillance data, the retention clock on paper matters a lot less than the uses baked into the contract forever.

This is why reading the actual paperwork — not the vendor's marketing deck — is the whole ballgame. If your city or state has signed with Flock, that contract is very likely a public record too, and it very likely has its own hidden clocks and carve-outs. Check whether cameras are already watching your route on the map, and if you want to push back on a local contract, our take-action page has a starting point.