Surveillance company Flock Safety announced several operational changes in response to a torrent of criticism and overwhelming public opposition to its mass government surveillance product.
Flock’s threat to privacy stems from its operation of more than 120,000 automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) nationwide, which includes broad location data collection and sharing. While one proposed change to Flock’s operations might constitute a positive development, most of the other changes seem to be following Flock’s playbook of treating legitimate privacy concerns as mere public relations problems. Several of the proposed changes Flock is touting are merely retreads of previous inadequate safety measures.
ALPR companies like Flock violate our privacy across the country by taking photos of every vehicle passing their cameras, logging detailed information about them into a massive nationwide database, and making it possible to track those vehicles and apply AI to uncover their occupants’ private patterns of life. The ACLU is fighting alongside communities to cancel local ALPR contracts and push lawmakers to protect our rights from this surveillance nightmare. Below, the ACLU details and responds to Flock’s announced changes.
Flock reduces default data retention time period, but the devil may be in the details.
Flock announced it is reducing its standard data retention from one month to one week, conceding for the first time that “roughly 90 percent of all searches on Flock already happen within a week” of the data’s collection.
“For cases that need more time, Flock is launching Evidence Mode: when a search is tied to a case number, that data is preserved instead of aging out after 7 days,” Flock said in its statement. “Agencies can still set retention to whatever their state or local policy requires. Evidence Mode will be provided to customers at no cost.”
Our Response: While Flock has not shortened the default retention period to the ACLU’s recommended 48 hours, its proposal may be a step in the right direction. Whether this is a real change or just another Flock PR move, however, will depend on how its “Evidence Mode” operates.
If “Evidence Mode” only retains hit result data that police determine may be evidence in an active investigation of a specific case, then the change may be a positive one. But if “Evidence Mode” triggers the retention of any ALPR data that is searched, then the new mode could indefinitely retain all the ALPR data Flock collects and shares nationally. This would make Flock’s data retention problem even worse. Even if “Evidence Mode’s” data retention hold only applies to hits returned on a given search, it would still retain significant amounts of location data on persons and vehicles who law enforcement do not suspect have engaged in any wrongdoing.
While Flock doesn’t establish state or local ALPR data retention periods, its system empowers governments to choose their own retention periods. For states and localities that want and permit longer data retention periods, all they have to do is ask. Although Flock may not technically be the one unlocking the door to months of people’s private location data, it is responsible for building the door and handing out the keys.
Flock claims to provide more local control over what their ALPR data can be searched for; it has repeatedly failed to effectuate such limitations in the past.
Flock claims that its changes will provide “more local control,” meaning local police can decide what types of offenses other Flock customers can search their data for. “For example,” Flock said, “City A could allow City B to search its cameras for a stolen vehicle or violent crime while blocking searches related to immigration enforcement.”
Our Response: This is not new. Flock has attempted this before, and the security measure failed because users were easily able to circumvent the system’s requirement that police input the purpose of their search.
For example, on June 12, 2025 Flock started claiming its new “Proactive Search Term Tool” would block any “impermissible” searches, such as abortion-related searches in states like Illinois that prohibit sharing reproductive healthcare data. But police officers quickly realized they could just input “investigation” or even “hehehe” as a search reason and it would be approved. Flock later switched from an open text box to a drop-down menu of reasons, but that just offered police a list of acceptable purposes they could choose from, whether it was accurate or not. Until Flock demonstrates they can develop a reliable, workable system to prevent improper searches, this promise of local control provides nothing more than a false sense of security.
Flock claims the universal roll out of its audit assistance tool will detect police misuse, but the effectiveness of its audit tool has never been independently evaluated.
Flock’s next change makes its “Audit Assistance” tool, which the company claims “flags abnormal search behavior,” a standard feature for all its customers. Flock lauds the effectiveness of its audit tool by simply stating that “identification of [police officer] misuse went up” after it established its audit tool.
Our Response: While providing “Audit Assistance” to all departments makes sense, there is no evidence that the tool works consistently to address what the Washington Post observed is a growing pattern of police officers turning Flock into a personal stalking tool. While dozens of officers have recently been arrested, fired, or otherwise disciplined for misusing Flock for personal reasons, Flock claims these arrests are proof its auditing tool works. However, unless we know the number of officers misusing the system, we cannot conclude if Flock and its auditing tools are catching 95 percent of violators or 5 percent. Flock needs to have its auditing tool analyzed by an independent evaluator to determine its actual effectiveness. Until then, we don’t know if the tool is a real security measure or just window dressing.
Flock claims requiring the reasons for a search will prevent abuse, even though that same intervention failed miserably before.
Perhaps the oddest part of Flock’s announcement is its claims that “now every search will require” police to input a case code, a previously optional requirement it first rolled out in July 2025. While claiming that a “search without a reason is a search that shouldn’t happen in the first place,” Flock’s announcement fails to note how easily users have circumvented “search reason” security measures in the past or how its new policy improves the quality of the feature. This leaves the public wondering how making an ineffective voluntary security measure mandatory will improve its functionality.
Our Response: Until Flock demonstrates through independent evaluation that its search reason requirement is an effective, air-tight security measure, it’s reasonable to assume its past failures are prologue.
Transforming an exceptionally dangerous mass surveillance system into one that is fully protective of civil rights and civil liberties is a difficult, if not impossible task. That is even more the case with a company like Flock, whose nearly $1 billion in venture capitalist funding has locked it into an operational model that seeks to trade our privacy for massive profits. Given that Flock’s latest announcement still appears more focused on addressing a perceived PR problem than the significant harms its products create, this is hardly the step forward Flock wants us to think it is. Change may still come as Flock faces this ever growing threat to its corporate viability, and we will continue to analyze the company’s proposals fairly and honestly, but we certainly won’t be holding our breath.