The company is imposing new guardrails on its police tech after reports that officers are abusing it and cities are dropping contracts. But the changes leave glaring loopholes.
The police-tech giant Flock is announcing today that it will change officers’ access to its nationwide network of license plate readers, in an apparent effort to quell a growing backlash and win back contracts lost amid concerns about mass surveillance and police abuse.
Several changes aim directly at a problem that has made recent headlines: officers abusing Flock’s technology to stalk and harass current or former romantic partners. Flock’s 120,000 cameras form a nationwide network that police departments can use, giving officers access to an enormous pool of searchable location data. A recent Washington Post investigation found 46 cases in which officers were accused of using Flock's cameras for unauthorized purposes like stalking.
To combat that, the company will start requiring officers to enter a criminal case number before conducting a search. The system was launched as an option last year but is now required. It’s meant to verify that each search has a legitimate purpose.
This is a baseline standard that civil liberties groups have asked for, but officers have found ways around similar safeguards. The ACLU recently found that when Flock required officers to enter a reason for a search, some used generic terms like “investigation” or mocked the prompt entirely; at one Oregon department, officers entered “hehehe” 20 times. Because Flock won’t verify case numbers, officers could circumvent the new safeguard just as easily.
But Flock is now expanding an automatic auditing system that is supposed to catch those who try that, the firm announced today. The feature analyzes officer search activity and flags to administrators anyone with suspicious searches. This was also introduced as an option last year but is now mandatory. Flock has not shared specifics on how accurate the automatic auditing tool is, nor opened it up to independent evaluators.
Beyond trying to prevent officer abuse, Flock is making changes meant to address broader backlash about how much data its network collects and who can search it. The company now recommends that agencies hold onto data for seven days rather than 30 (though they can choose to overrule this). Departments can also now limit other departments’ searches of data from their cameras to those made for certain stated reasons; for example, they might allow investigations related to “kidnapping” but not for purposes of “immigration enforcement.” It’s another safeguard that depends on officers to accurately report why they’re conducting a search.
The changes come as a backlash against Flock has started to come from all angles. Tucker Carlson has said its technology is contributing to a “slave state.” Some cities have reportedly dropped Flock contracts because of such protest, though it’s difficult to estimate how many: In February, NPR found that at least 30 cities had dropped in the last year, but the activist group DeFlock puts the number higher. Some states or municipalities are passing laws to ban license plate readers altogether, while some that allow them are switching away from Flock to the other industry leaders, Axon and Motorola. Flock has said these cancellations represent a small number of the 5,000 agencies that have contracted with the company.
Chad Marlow, a senior policy counsel at the ACLU who has become a sort of nemesis to Flock and other companies making automatic license plate readers, says the backlash is driven less by individual abuses—though those don’t help—than by the sheer scale of surveillance that Flock’s cameras enable.
“In America, you only get to investigate someone if you think they’ve done something wrong,” Marlow says. As license plate readers grow more ubiquitous, officers have increasing latitude to investigate people without first establishing suspicion of a crime, since searching the troves of data the readers collect does not require a warrant. He adds, “Is it worth it to catch a certain number of criminals, return a certain number of stolen cars, to eviscerate Americans’ privacy?”
Flock CEO Garrett Langley traces the backlash to a different issue. “If you look at the main reason we’ve lost customers, it’s misinformation,” Langley told MIT Technology Review. He says people mistakenly believe Flock does facial recognition or sells the data it collects to commercial buyers. (The misinformation charge cuts both ways, however; the ACLU and other critics have published accounts of the company repeatedly lying to city councils and other decision-makers about what its technology can do.)
Though the company has taken steps in response to public concerns, “our change in stance is more of one from building things that are optional,” Langley says, to “building more confidence that as a technology company we have a responsibility to enforce guardrails, not provide optionality.”
Flock’s new rules are undeniably small and incremental compared with what the ACLU has advocated. Marlow is broadly supportive of them but notes that judging whether they reduce abuse would require the company to open its systems to independent researchers for the first time rather than citing internal studies.
More broadly, though, he says the backlash is putting the company 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.”
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Facts Only
* Flock announced changes to officer access to its nationwide license plate reader network.
* Officers are now required to enter a criminal case number before conducting a search.
* An automatic auditing system was introduced to analyze officer search activity and flag suspicious searches.
* The company recommends agencies hold data for seven days, rather than thirty.
* Departments can limit searches of camera data based on stated reasons.
* A recent Washington Post investigation reported 46 cases where officers were accused of using Flock cameras for unauthorized purposes like stalking.
* Some officers reportedly entered generic terms or mocked prompts when prompted to enter search reasons.
* At one Oregon department, officers entered "hehehe" twenty times as a test.
* At least 30 cities reported dropping Flock contracts in the last year.
* The company CEO attributes customer loss primarily to misinformation regarding the technology's capabilities.
Executive Summary
Full Take
The situation reveals a tension between corporate positioning and public demand for civil liberties. The incremental changes implemented by Flock, such as mandatory case number entry and auditing, represent a minimal response to a massive external backlash driven not just by individual abuses but by the perceived scale of ubiquitous surveillance itself. The analysis suggests that implementing guardrails is less about curing systemic overreach and more about managing reputational risk and retaining contracts amid a broader societal rejection of mass data collection.
The tension manifests between the system creators, who prioritize optionality and flexibility, and external critics, like the ACLU, who advocate for more substantial structural changes. The dynamic suggests that institutional resistance to fundamental shifts in power—where searching extensive location data becomes normalized without warrants—often stalls at surface-level adjustments rather than addressing the underlying philosophical question of privacy versus public safety. Furthermore, the narrative shift from individual misconduct to systemic concerns about "slave states" reflects a pattern where specific incidents are used to frame an entire technological infrastructure as inherently corrosive, which allows entities to adopt defensive postures that manage optics without fundamentally altering power dynamics.
What is the point of internal auditing when external accountability remains elusive? What structural changes would be necessary for these incremental rules to move beyond mitigating immediate abuse toward genuinely respecting privacy rights? And if the core issue is the scale of surveillance rather than isolated misuse, how can technology companies shift from offering "optionality" to proactively enforcing systemic ethical boundaries?
Sentinel — Human
The text is a well-structured journalistic analysis that synthesizes company actions, civil liberties concerns, and public reaction, exhibiting strong human editorial judgment.