GoKawiilFrom Florida to Washington state, local governments across the country are canceling their contracts with Flock, the company behind the controversial AI-enabled license plate readers, in response to public outcry. But ending the contracts doesn’t necessarily mean the cameras will come down immediately — or that the information they’ve gathered will be deleted anytime soon.
Even as state and local governments decide to rein in their surveillance capabilities, uncertainty remains about what Flock can and will do with data that has already been collected. Each jurisdiction’s contract is different, but many of them let Flock retain data long after it’s been collected. “Let’s say they terminate,” said Saira Hussain, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has reviewed dozens of municipal Flock contracts. “What happens to the data, and how long is it able to be searched? That question appears to be unresolved.”
The backlash against Flock was slow to mount, but now it’s everywhere, and it’s bipartisan. Founded in 2017, Flock pitched its cameras — which are sold not only to local governments but to private businesses and citizens — as an unobtrusive tool to enhance public safety. Early in the company’s history, some cities even offered grants for homeowners associations that wanted to install Flock cameras in their neighborhoods. Flock’s footprint has grown quickly. The company has installed more than 120,000 cameras across the US.
This rapid expansion, along with alarming reports of misuses of Flock’s surveillance network, has fueled a new wave of opposition, making Flock a kind of shorthand for privacy invasion. In recent months, activists in big cities and small towns have urged local governments to end their contracts, citing concerns about privacy, harassment, and mass surveillance. Local leaders have said the public pressure — coupled with Flock’s data-sharing and retention policies, and what the company can do with the information its cameras collect — spurred them to end the contracts.
Lawmakers in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, unanimously voted to end the city’s Flock contract after learning that Flock reportedly tried to sell anonymized data collected in Sheboygan back to the city’s public works department. Elsewhere in the state, the mayor of Stevens Point not only ended its contract with Flock but also covered up the 10 cameras scattered throughout the city. “We really have no way of auditing where the Flock data goes once it’s collected,” Mayor Mike Wiza said on a local radio show. “Our community is not comfortable using these cameras without some assurances that it’s being used in a manner we have authorized.” (Flock maintains that it doesn’t sell consumer data.)
Local leaders across the country say they were misled about how Flock data could be used, and some have admitted that they didn’t realize the degree to which the data would be accessed by third parties.
In Bridgewater, Virginia, the town council put bags over its Flock cameras after voting to cancel its contract. Bridgewater is home to fewer than 7,000 people, but the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism found that because of the town’s information-sharing agreement with Flock, data collected in the town was searched 7 million times by law enforcement in 12 months.
The EFF, which sued the city of San Jose, California, over its usage of Flock cameras, argues that these information-sharing agreements violate the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable search and seizure.
“Through these searches, police are able to identify patterns of where people live and work, where they may drop off their kids to school, who they associate with, where they worship, seek reproductive care, seek an immigration consult,” Hussain said. “What we’re talking about here is a mass surveillance technology that is by design intended to identify where people are going and track people’s movements.”
Like many movements against law enforcement overreach, the backlash against Flock began with stories about particularly egregious abuses. There have been several reports of law enforcement officers using Flock to track exes and romantic partners. In response to these and other concerns, Flock recently rolled out new guardrails, including a new requirement to run case codes — which were previously optional — for all searches. Flock is also mandating a feature called Audit Assistance, which flags “abnormal” queries.
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