Flock, the police technology firm operating a nationwide network of 120,000 license plate readers, is tightening restrictions on officer access to its cameras. The move comes as the company attempts to stop a surge in contract cancellations driven by fears over mass surveillance and alleged police abuse.
The new rules target a specific issue highlighted in a recent Washington Post investigation: officers using the system to stalk and harass former partners. The report identified 46 separate cases where officers were accused of misusing the searchable location data.
To address this, Flock is mandating that officers enter a criminal case number before conducting any search. This requirement, which was previously optional, is now enforced to verify that every query has a legitimate purpose.
Civil liberties groups have long argued for such a baseline standard, yet previous safeguards proved easily bypassed. The ACLU recently discovered that when officers were asked to provide a reason, many entered generic terms like “investigation” or mocked the prompt. At one Oregon department, staff entered “hehehe” 20 times. Because Flock does not independently verify these case numbers, the new safeguard faces similar risks of circumvention.
Consequently, the firm is expanding an automatic auditing system designed to flag suspicious activity. This feature, also introduced as an option last year, is now mandatory. It scans officer search logs and alerts administrators to irregular patterns. Flock has not disclosed the accuracy of this tool nor invited independent evaluators to test it.
Beyond preventing individual officer misconduct, the company is adjusting how it manages data retention and access. Flock now recommends that agencies keep records for seven days instead of 30, though departments retain the right to overrule this. Agencies can also restrict which other departments search their camera data, limiting access to specific reasons such as kidnapping investigations while blocking requests for immigration enforcement.
These adjustments arrive as criticism of Flock grows from multiple directions. Tucker Carlson has described the technology as contributing to a “slave state.” Some municipalities have reportedly dropped their contracts due to such concerns. In February, NPR reported that at least 30 cities had cancelled agreements over the last year, though the activist group DeFlock suggests the figure is higher. Several states and municipalities are moving to ban license plate readers entirely, while others are switching to competitors like Axon and Motorola. Flock states these cancellations represent a small fraction of its 5,000 agency contracts.
Chad Marlow, a senior policy counsel at the ACLU who frequently critiques automatic license plate reader vendors, argues the backlash stems less from isolated abuses and more from the sheer scale of surveillance the network enables. “In America, you only get to investigate someone if you think they’ve done something wrong,” Marlow says. He notes that as readers become ubiquitous, officers have increasing latitude to investigate people without first establishing suspicion of a crime, since searching the collected data does not require a warrant. “Is it worth it to catch a certain number of criminals, return a certain number of stolen cars, to eviscerate Americans’ privacy?” he asks.
Flock CEO Garrett Langley attributes the backlash to misinformation. He told MIT Technology Review that customers leave because people mistakenly believe the company performs facial recognition or sells data to commercial buyers. The accuracy of this claim is debated; critics have published accounts of the company repeatedly lying to city councils and other decision-makers about its capabilities.
Langley says the company’s shift in stance reflects a new philosophy. “Our change in stance is more of one from building things that are optional,” he says, “to building more confidence that as a technology company we have a responsibility to enforce guardrails, not provide optionality.”
The new regulations remain small and incremental compared with the changes the ACLU has advocated. Marlow is broadly supportive but notes that determining whether these rules reduce abuse requires the company to open its systems to independent researchers rather than relying on internal studies.
He suggests the backlash has placed the firm at a crossroads. “Flock has come to the table because this incredible, unprecedented nationwide uprising against their company has scared them,” Marlow says. “But at the same time, they are just absolutely unwilling to make the actual changes they need to make in order to legitimately respond to these concerns. So this is the best that the company is willing to do.”
What it means
For police departments, the updates introduce a layer of friction to data access that was previously frictionless. Officers must now justify searches with a case number and risk automated flags for suspicious behaviour. While this may slow down investigations slightly, it attempts to align the tool’s use with legal standards that currently exist for human officers.
For the public, the changes signal that the company is reacting to pressure, though the safeguards rely heavily on officers reporting accurately. Without independent verification of the auditing system or the case numbers provided, the effectiveness of these rules remains uncertain.
