Flock is tightening its rules in response to a growing surveillance backlash
2026-08-20 · MIT Technology Review
Flock Tightens Rules Amid Growing Backlash Against Surveillance
Background: Officer Misuse and Rising Opposition
Police-tech giant Flock announced today that it will tighten officers’ access to its nationwide network of license plate readers. The move appears aimed at quelling growing public backlash and recovering contracts lost due to concerns about mass surveillance and police abuse.
The company’s 120,000 cameras create a vast national network that police departments can query for searchable location data. A recent Washington Post investigation identified 46 cases in which officers were accused of using Flock’s technology for unauthorized purposes, primarily stalking or harassing current or former romantic partners.
New Measures Against Officer Abuse
To address this specific problem, Flock is introducing two significant changes:
- Mandatory Criminal Case Number Requirement: Officers must now enter a criminal case number before conducting any search. The feature was launched as optional last year but has now been made mandatory to ensure each query has a legitimate law enforcement purpose.
- Mandatory Automated Auditing System: The company is expanding and making mandatory an automatic auditing feature that analyzes officer search activity and flags suspicious patterns to administrators. Like the case number requirement, this was previously optional.
Civil liberties groups have noted limitations in these safeguards. The ACLU previously found that when officers were only required to state a reason for a search, many used generic terms such as “investigation” or even mocked the system by entering “hehehe” (one Oregon department recorded this phrase 20 times). Since Flock does not verify the validity of case numbers, officers could potentially circumvent the new rules with similar ease.
The company has not disclosed the accuracy rate of its automated auditing tool nor opened it to independent evaluators.
Addressing Broader Surveillance Concerns
Beyond preventing individual abuse, Flock is implementing changes to respond to criticism regarding the scale of data collection and who can access it:
- Data Retention Recommendation: The company now recommends that agencies retain data for seven days rather than the previous 30 days, although departments may choose to override this suggestion.
- Cross-Department Search Restrictions: Agencies can now limit other departments’ ability to search data from their cameras to queries made for specific, stated reasons. For example, a department might permit searches related to “kidnapping” investigations but prohibit those for “immigration enforcement.”
These controls still rely heavily on officers accurately self-reporting the purpose of their searches.
Widespread Backlash and Company Response
Opposition to Flock has emerged from multiple directions. Conservative commentator Tucker Carlson has claimed the technology contributes to a “slave state.” Multiple cities have reportedly dropped contracts following public protests. NPR reported in February that at least 30 cities had terminated agreements in the past year, while activist group DeFlock estimates the number is higher. Several states and municipalities are passing laws to ban license plate readers entirely, while others are switching from Flock to competitors Axon and Motorola.
Flock maintains that these cancellations represent only a small fraction of the 5,000 agencies it has contracted with.
Chad Marlow, senior policy counsel at the ACLU and a prominent critic of automatic license plate reader companies, argues that the backlash is driven less by individual cases of abuse than by the sheer scale of surveillance the network enables.
“In America, you only get to investigate someone if you think they’ve done something wrong,” Marlow said. As license plate readers become ubiquitous, officers gain increasing ability to investigate people without establishing probable cause or obtaining a warrant, since searching the collected data does not require one.
Flock CEO Garrett Langley attributes customer losses primarily to “misinformation.” He told MIT Technology Review that people wrongly believe Flock offers facial recognition or sells collected data to commercial entities. Critics, however, have accused the company of repeatedly misleading city councils about its technology’s capabilities.
Langley described the company’s shift as moving from “building things that are optional” to “building more confidence that as a technology company we have a responsibility to enforce guardrails, not provide optionality.”
ACLU Assessment and Company’s Crossroads
The ACLU has offered measured support for the changes but emphasizes that verifying their effectiveness in reducing abuse would require Flock to open its systems to independent researchers for the first time, rather than relying on internal studies.
Marlow believes Flock stands at a critical juncture: “Flock has come to the table because this incredible, unprecedented nationwide uprising against their company has scared them. 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.”