San Francisco tightens restrictions on use of controversial Flock cameras

Our Take

Credit to ABC7 News Bay Area for digging into San Francisco's updated rules on Flock Safety's ALPR network. Cutting retention down to 30 days is a real, measurable win for the people who pushed back on this system, and it proves something advocates have said all along: these policies are negotiable, not set in stone by the vendor. That matters because Flock's default settings are built for maximum data hoarding, not privacy, and cities that don't fight for shorter windows get whatever the company's sales team hands them.

But let's be clear-eyed about what a 30-day limit actually does. It doesn't stop the cameras from scanning every plate that rolls by, it doesn't change who can query the database during that month, and it doesn't address the quiet reality that Flock's network lets agencies search data shared by other jurisdictions far outside city limits. A retention cap is a speed bump, not a wall. The bigger questions — audit transparency, ICE and out-of-state access, and whether blanket plate surveillance should exist at all — are still wide open in San Francisco and everywhere else these cameras are going up.

If you want to see how far this surveillance net already reaches in your own area, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not wait for your city council to quietly tighten the rules after the fact, our take-action page has concrete steps for pushing back before the cameras go up, not after.