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Following revelations that rogue police officers used car-tracking software from Flock Safety as a tool for stalking, the $8.4 billion startup said Thursday it planned to roll out new measures to prevent abuse of its license plate camera data.
The Atlanta-based company, which was founded in 2017 and has deployed more than 120,000 cameras around the US, is making the changes after The Washington Post reported this month that police officers have used its technology to stalk women with no connection to any investigations. It fueled broader concerns over the constant surveillance the cameras afford and fears over the data reaching federal immigration officials, reigniting debates over what constitutes public safety. Dozens of Flock cameras across the country have been targeted and destroyed.
Flock is shortening its standard data retention period from 30 days to seven, cutting how far back anyone could retrace a car’s movements. The company will also flag abnormal searches from within police departments, locking out those users and alerting their managers. And officers won’t be able to run a search for license plate data without having a case number attached to the query.
“We’ve listened,” Garrett Langley told Semafor, adding that communities “have a higher expectation of Flock than maybe even I was holding us to.”
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The additional safeguards still leave gaps, in part because police departments aren’t Flock’s only customers: Businesses and homeowner associations can also buy the cameras — giving private citizens more tools to investigate crimes that happen in their community, but also opening up more opportunities for abuse, often with less oversight.
Langley said that he wanted to fight back against a “misconception that we are some evil entity that has these diabolical plans… the reality is we just want people to be safe.”