In the United States, there’s practically no escaping from mass surveillance company Flock Safety’s 120,000 license plate reading cameras spread across 49 states.
The company has partnered with 6,000 law enforcement agencies and 1,000 private customers, leading to terrifying false arrests and even crooked cops stalking innocent women. Just last week, 404 Media reported that the Flock had been planning to infiltrate the dash cams of Uber and Lyft drivers’ cars to scan license plate numbers of nearby vehicles at unprecedented scale.
In short, it’s no wonder people are being celebrated for physically cutting down Flock’s surveillance towers as the controversy surrounding privacy and civil rights continues to grow. At least 54 cities across the US have voted to cancel, non-renew, or reject Flock’s automatic license plate readers since the beginning of the year, highlighting a major PR crisis for the company.
Consequently, Flock CEO Garrett Langley is now in full damage control mode. The narrative he’s pushing: that it’s all a big misunderstanding. In a new interview, he told Bloomberg that “we’re not Big Brother” — definitely not a thing that Big Brother would say, right? — and that “we’re focused on protecting people.”
The company is still trying to paint itself as the good guy, promising to help law enforcement to fight crime, while underplaying egregious instances its tech being misused.
Flock also announced that it’s making changes to its platform amidst major scrutiny from lawmakers and civil liberties groups in an apparent attempt to address privacy concerns. Langley promised that law enforcement customers will have to use an audit tool to flag abnormal behavior and that Flock is reducing the data retention window of footage from 30 days to seven.
Critics, however, are unconvinced, with the American Civil Liberties Union saying calling the moves a “step in the right direction” but downplaying other changes as “merely retreads of previous inadequate safety measures.”
“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,” Institute for Justice senior attorney Robert Frommer told the Associated Press.
Despite the brewing crisis, Flock is raking in the cash, with annual revenue rates ballooning from $300 million in January of this year to $500 million in June, as Langley told Bloomberg.
Beyond its surveillance network of over 100,000 cameras, the company is hoping to unleash drones, surveillance trailers, and gunshot-detecting hardware — efforts that likely won’t convince an already extremely wary public.
That’s not to mention glaring technological issues plaguing its license plate readers, which remain startlingly ineffective at the task they were designed to do. According to a recent investigation by the police department of Roseville, California, its cameras mistook one license plate number for another an astonishing 71 percent of the time between 2023 and 2024.
While it’s unclear whether the company’s AI models have improved at all since then, the risk of false positives remains high. In one disturbing recent incident, our sister site The Drive‘s director of content Joel Feder was wrongly tracked by the company’s cameras over “stolen” plates.
Feder was ambushed and boxed in by several police vehicles and was accused of not being able to afford the “six-figure luxury SUV” he was driving. As it turns out, the local Flock camera network had failed to register the correct license plate number, mistakenly pinning local law enforcement on him.
Feder’s account was directly referenced in Flock’s announcement this week.
“The central point is simple,” reads the announcement. “An alert is a lead, not a conclusion, which should be confirmed by an officer.”
More on Flock: Flock’s Secret Surveillance Plan Will Make You Gasp
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