Notes ·
Flock Discovered Privacy After the Backlash Became Expensive
Flock Safety announced a new collection of privacy and accountability controls this week.
The changes sound substantial:
- Default retention drops from 30 days to seven.
- Audit Assistance becomes mandatory for law enforcement.
- Abnormal searches can automatically lock an officer out pending review.
- Searches will require case codes.
- Cities get more control over what kinds of investigations other agencies can use their cameras for.
Those are improvements.
They are also arriving after years of evidence showing why they should have existed from the beginning.
More than 50 officers have now been accused of abusing Flock systems, including officers using the nationwide camera network to track romantic partners and former partners. In one case, a Georgia police chief reportedly searched his ex-girlfriend's plate more than 500 times.
Savannah recently fired four officers and two civilian employees after an audit discovered 127 inappropriate searches.
San Francisco found 299 improper searches of its Flock data by federal and out-of-state agencies. Separate public records previously showed more than 1.6 million out-of-state searches of San Francisco data, despite California law restricting that sharing.
And some of Flock's supposedly new safeguards are not actually new.
Flock introduced a search-reason system before. Police discovered they could enter vague explanations such as “investigation,” and one department's records even contained “hehehe,” while the searches continued. Making a weak control mandatory does not automatically make it effective.
Audit Assistance has also existed for months. Flock says only about one-third of its customers voluntarily enabled it. Now that highly publicized stalking cases are accumulating, everyone will be required to use it.
Even the seven-day retention policy needs an asterisk.
Existing customers can keep their current retention periods, and agencies can preserve records longer through a new Evidence Mode. Flock itself says communities remain free to choose longer retention periods.
The ACLU calls the shorter default potentially positive, but says the overall announcement appears more concerned with Flock's PR problem than fixing the underlying civil-liberties problem. It wants the auditing technology independently evaluated because nobody outside Flock knows whether it catches most abuse or only a small fraction of it.
I think that skepticism is justified.
Flock spent years building a searchable national database of people's movements while arguing that customers and lawmakers were responsible for deciding how it should be controlled. Now its CEO says the company “got this one wrong” and accepts more responsibility for preventing abuse.
That realization comes after cities started suspending contracts, officers started getting fired and arrested, journalists documented misuse, lawsuits appeared, and communities began demanding the cameras come down. More than 80 cities have either dropped Flock or publicly considered doing so.
That looks less like Flock suddenly discovering privacy and more like damage control after the consequences finally reached the company.
The new safeguards should still be implemented. Seven days is better than 30. Automatic lockouts are better than expecting someone to manually inspect thousands of searches. Requiring case numbers is better than allowing unrestricted curiosity searches.
But none of those controls changes the fundamental architecture.
Flock still operates a network of more than 120,000 cameras capable of turning individual sightings into searchable histories of where vehicles have traveled.
The problem was never just that a few officers behaved badly.
The problem is that Flock built a system where behaving badly was extraordinarily easy.
Now that everyone can see that, the company is installing guardrails around the surveillance machine and asking us to trust it again.
I'm not there yet.