Flock announces changes amid backlash over its license plate reader
network
[August 14, 2026]
By SARAH RANKIN and CLAUDIA LAUER
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Flock Safety, the surveillance technology company
increasingly under scrutiny from lawmakers from both parties, civil
liberties advocates and citizens across the U.S., announced Thursday
that it is making changes to its platform intended to quell privacy
concerns and address documented abuses of its system by some members of
law enforcement.
The company operates a vast nationwide network of automated cameras that
record the license plate numbers and other characteristics of all
passing vehicles every day. Thousands of law enforcement agencies in 49
states can search and share Flock's data across jurisdictions to aid
their investigations.
Police have credited the technology as an important crime-fighting
innovation that has helped locate missing people and track suspects in
violent crimes. But some critics say its pervasiveness amounts to
unconstitutional warrantless mass surveillance. Dozens of cities and
agencies have nixed their relationships with Flock amid concerns that
the data can be accessed for immigration enforcement or used in
unauthorized tracking, after a flurry of examples surfaced of law
enforcement officers misusing the technology for personal searches.
CEO says changes will drive accountability
In an interview, Flock CEO Garrett Langley said many of the product
changes will make what were once optional guardrails mandatory for its
users to implement by Jan. 1.
Among them: All law enforcement customers will have to implement an
audit tool that's intended to flag abnormal search behavior. When the
system detects abnormal behavior, the user would be locked out pending
an internal review, the company said in a description of the changes
provided ahead of Thursday's announcement.
Flock, which says its customers own the data that the cameras record, is
also shortening the standard data retention window from 30 days to
seven. It said it will allow data to be preserved for longer when it is
evidence tied to a case number.
Law enforcement users will now also be required to enter a code from
their records management system tying each search to a specific case
before it is run, something Langley said civil liberties advocates have
long been calling for. Overrides for emergencies would be automatically
flagged for review, the company said.
Customers will also be allowed to decide which offense types — such as
homicide or arson — outside agencies can search their data for, which
would allow a customer to block outside searches related to immigration
enforcement, the company said.
Langley said that change will give individual cities and departments
control to use the system in a manner “consistent with community
values.”
Critics say updates still leave room for abuses, supporters urge
balance
Critics of the company reacted skeptically to the changes, which they
said appeared designed to address the growing bipartisan anger about the
cameras but could still leave room for police to abuse the system.
The American Civil Liberties Union said in a blog post that the
shortened evidence retention window could be “a step in the right
direction,” but it characterized the other changes as “retreads” of
inadequate safety measures.
Robert Frommer, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, a public
interest law firm that's led closely watched litigation over the
technology, called the changes “window dressing” from a company in
“panic mode.”
“This is window dressing that doesn’t address the fundamental problem,
which is that police officers are the ones deciding who and when to
search, and that should be done by judges with real warrants,” he said.
Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a professor at the George Washington University
Law School whose scholarship has focused on policing, big data
surveillance and the Fourth Amendment, said Thursday’s shifts were
“better than the opposite” but called for further scrutiny of the
technology in the form of “sustained democratic engagement with the
rules and judicial checks on access at a minimum.”
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A Flock Safety license plate reader is seen along a public road,
Thursday, Oct. 16, 2025, in Houston. (AP Photo/David Goldman, File)
Ferguson said he’s been surprised to see the “growing community
backlash” against Flock specifically, given that the technology
isn't new and other companies sell it as well. But Flock and the
movement against it have “captured people’s sense that maybe they
don’t want to be surveilled all the time,” he said.
More than 50 agencies or jurisdictions have canceled, suspended or
rejected a contract or deactivated their cameras since the beginning
of the year, according to a tracker maintained by DeFlock, a
grassroots group formed to track the use of license plate reader
technology and push back against it. Cameras around the country have
also been vandalized.
In Congress, Republican representatives filed at least two bills
aiming to restrict the use of the technology in July.
Ian Adams, an associate professor of criminology at the University
of South Carolina currently working on a Flock-related research
study, said many of the concerns raised about how the company's data
can be used are not new concerns in law enforcement.
“Anyone with policing experience could have reasonably foreseen that
what have been termed as ‘curiosity searches’ by officers, searches
for private reasons not related to police work, were going to be a
problem this technology faced,” he added, noting that other
technologies and platforms like the FBI’s Criminal Justice
Information had faced those issues.
Law enforcement experts said it's a common tension of “policing in a
democracy” — balancing useful technology that officers say helps
solve and prevent crime with the community's interest and right to
privacy.
“It's a balancing act. A community has a legitimate interest in how
information is used, but it also has a legitimate interest in the
effectiveness of a police department in preventing crime,” said
Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research
Forum, a Washington-based nonpartisan think tank. “I think a balance
can be struck, but it's more likely to come from department policy
than company changes.”
Successes and failures have captured attention
Flock, based in Atlanta, Georgia, often posts to its website what
the company deems to be everyday examples of success stories for its
cameras, including finding missing seniors and catching car thieves.
But the tech has also been used in high-profile cases that have
garnered national attention, such as the search for a suspect in a
fatal shooting at Brown University and in tracking and arresting a
former North Carolina police officer who authorities say had made
threats that he planned to carry out a mass shooting at a festival
in Louisiana. A grand jury declined to bring charges in that case in
June, and state authorities said the former officer's family had
taken him to a treatment facility out of state where he does not
face further charges.
Abuses have also drawn widespread attention. The Washington Post
reported earlier this month finding nearly 50 instances of police
officers charged or accused of using the cameras for unauthorized
purposes, many for tracking current or former romantic partners or
family members.
Just this week, six employees — including four officers — of the
Savannah Police Department in Georgia were fired after they were
accused of searching for friends and family using the tool and
allowing an officer from an outside agency to use the city’s
cameras.
The Savannah department said it was made aware of the misuse through
Flock’s voluntary audit function.
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Lauer reported from Philadelphia.
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