New Guardrails Announced Amid Growing Criticism
Flock Safety, which operates a nationwide network of more than 119,000 automated license-plate-reader (ALPR) cameras used by law enforcement agencies, announced a set of privacy and accountability reforms on August 13, 2026, according to Fox Business. The changes come as the company faces mounting criticism from privacy advocates and elected officials over mass surveillance concerns and reports of officers misusing the technology, including cases documented by Wired in which police reportedly used Flock data to track romantic partners.
Flock CEO Garrett Langley discussed the changes publicly, telling Fox Business’s “Varney & Co.” that the reforms were a direct response to backlash the company has faced over its car-tracking cameras. Some local officials have gone further than criticism: Knox County, Tennessee, Mayor Glenn Jacobs has called for a national moratorium on further deployment of Flock’s camera network, according to Fox Business.
Shorter Retention, Mandatory Audit Controls
The centerpiece of the announcement is a reduction in Flock’s standard data-retention window from 30 days to seven. The company said that roughly 90% of all searches conducted on its platform already occur within a week of data capture, arguing the shorter window would have limited practical effect on law enforcement’s ability to use the system while narrowing the amount of location data stored on Flock’s servers at any given time. For cases requiring longer retention, Flock is introducing an “Evidence Mode” feature that lets agencies preserve specific data for extended periods under state or local policy.
Flock is also making its “Audit Assistance” feature — which flags abnormal search behavior and can lock a user out of the system in real time pending administrator review — mandatory for all law enforcement customers rather than optional; the company said roughly a third of agencies had turned the feature on voluntarily before the change. Separately, Flock is making the previously optional requirement to log a case code with every search mandatory going forward, with an override reserved for emergencies such as missing-child cases. “A search without a reason is a search that shouldn’t happen in the first place, and now Flock’s system automatically treats it that way,” the company told Fox Business.
New Controls Over Cross-Agency Data Sharing
The company is also giving individual agencies more granular control over which types of cases they will share camera search access for with other jurisdictions. In comments to Fox Business, Flock gave the example that “City A could allow City B to search its cameras for a stolen vehicle or violent crime while blocking searches related to immigration enforcement” — an option aimed at addressing concerns that Flock’s interconnected camera network could be used for purposes individual municipalities have not authorized.
Civil liberties groups were not satisfied by the announcement. The American Civil Liberties Union said in a statement reported by Fox Business that the reforms “seem to be a thinly veiled PR attempt to counter communities’ genuine privacy concerns with its mass surveillance system with largely hollow security promises, rather than an earnest effort to address them.” Flock, for its part, has pointed to its own figures on the technology’s investigative use, telling Fox Business that its cameras were involved in roughly 1 million investigations last year and were tied to the location of about 10,000 missing people — figures that reflect the company’s own reporting and have not been independently verified.
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