Police are misusing licence plate readers to stalk women. Flock's fixes have big holes in them.
The company behind 120,000 roadside cameras updated its rules after officers used the system to track women. The changes don't go nearly far enough.
Key points
- Flock Safety operates a network of roughly 120,000 automatic licence plate readers across the United States, the largest such network in the country.
- The Washington Post identified 50 documented cases of officers misusing Flock and competitor systems, most often to stalk or harass women.
- One Wisconsin woman's ex-boyfriend, a police officer, searched for her car 179 times using the system.
- Flock's new rule requires officers to enter a case number before running a search, but the company confirmed it does not verify whether those numbers are real.
- Flock was valued at roughly 8 billion dollars; cities are cancelling contracts and some states are moving to pass laws limiting or banning the technology.
A police officer in Wisconsin searched for his ex-girlfriend's car 179 times using a law-enforcement database. Another woman had no one to report her stalker to, because the stalker was the chief of police. These aren't edge cases. The Washington Post found at least 50 documented instances of officers misusing Flock Safety's network of roadside cameras, or those of its competitors, most often to track women.
Flock, the company behind an estimated 120,000 automatic licence plate readers (cameras that photograph passing cars, log the plate, and record the time and location) spread across the United States, announced policy changes last week. The headline update: officers must now enter a criminal case number before running a search. We covered Flock's shifting access rules in our 13 August story, when the first reports of stalking emerged.
Does the new rule actually stop abuse?
No, not reliably. Flock told MIT Technology Review it does not check whether those case numbers match anything in a department's real records. An officer determined to misuse the system can type in a made-up number and proceed.
That's the core problem. A stronger version of the same idea would cross-reference the number against the department's own files before allowing a search. Flock hasn't done that. The company also flags searches that look statistically unusual, but officers have already shown they can work around earlier Flock safeguards.
What broader concern is this really about?
Flock was sold to police departments as a crime-fighting tool. It's become, by most civil liberties accounts, a mass-surveillance network. Officers in one city can search data collected in another. Agencies can keep that data for months or years, even though Flock's own figures show 90 percent of useful searches happen within a week of an incident. The company recently recommended a seven-day retention limit, but individual agencies are free to ignore it.
Flock's valuation of roughly 8 billion dollars rests on that wide network. Narrowing data retention or restricting cross-city searches would undercut the business model.
The data suggests a narrower system could still do most legitimate work. Flock often cites Amber Alerts, the emergency broadcasts issued when a child is abducted, as its clearest good use. Broad, multi-city searches could be unlocked only when an active Amber Alert or similarly verified emergency exists. That would preserve genuine value without requiring everyone's daily movements to sit in a searchable database.
What happens next?
Some cities are already cancelling Flock contracts. Others are pausing while residents debate what terms they'll accept. State legislatures in several places are drafting bills to limit or ban the technology outright.
The ACLU's senior policy counsel Chad Marlow put it plainly: the best constraint on a surveillance network is law, not a company's own guidelines. Flock CEO Garrett Langley acknowledged he will "probably always have a different view than the ACLU."
For anyone living in a city with Flock cameras, the practical question is whether local government has set firm rules on how long data is kept, who can search it, and what audit trail exists. Most haven't. That gap is worth pushing elected officials to close. A policy tweak that any officer can bypass with a fake number isn't a safeguard. It's paperwork.
