Flock Safety tightens privacy safeguards amid backlash over license plate readers

Our Take

Credit to KOMO News for tracking this one closely, because the headline here is easy to spin as a win. Flock Safety trimming default retention from 30 days to 7, and rolling out tools to flag "suspicious searches," sounds like the company listening to critics. But shrinking the storage window doesn't shrink the network. The cameras stay up, the plates keep getting scanned, and the data still flows into a searchable system that police departments nationwide can query. Seven days of blanket vehicle tracking on every driver who passes a Flock camera is still seven days too many for a device that was never approved by most residents in the first place.

Notice what's actually being "tightened" here: audit tools to catch misuse after it happens, not limits on what gets collected or who's watching. Flock is a private company writing its own accountability rules in response to bad press, not a court order or legislation. That's the pattern nationwide — expand first, apologize for overreach later, and let the press release do the work of quieting a backlash. Meanwhile the underlying problem hasn't moved an inch: a for-profit surveillance vendor is embedded in local policing with almost no independent oversight of how searches get made, who runs them, or why.

If you want to see how far this has spread in your own backyard, check our camera map — the density of these readers around Washington and beyond tells you more than any corporate policy update. And if your city council hasn't had a real public debate about this contract, that's the fight worth having. Head to our take-action page for what that looks like.