Flock Safety, a company facing increasing scrutiny of its nationwide car-tracking technology, announced several updates on Thursday it said would improve privacy protections and prevent misuse.
The company’s network of 120,000 cameras, which can read license plates, are used by 7,000 law enforcement agencies across the country. Police departments say the systems help solve crimes. But reports of misuse by law enforcement, along with anxiety over the technology’s ability to surveil ordinary people, have led to protests and prompted some cities to end their contracts with the company.
“I realized we had a responsibility to do more,” said Garrett Langley, chief executive of Atlanta-based Flock.
Some cities, including Los Angeles and Dayton, Ohio, have stopped using Flock cameras in order to prevent immigration authorities from gaining access to their data. To provide more local control, the company said on Thursday, it will allow individual police departments to restrict what other law enforcement agencies can see — allowing access to data to find stolen vehicles, for example, but not for immigration violations, the company said. It also is shortening the default time for data retention to a week, down from 30 days, though departments could change those settings.
Reducing the time that data is retained is a positive development, said Chad Marlow, senior policy counsel from the American Civil Liberties Union. But he noted that it was easy for police departments to keep the data longer.
The heightened local control, too, is “good in theory,” Mr. Marlow said, but has never been proved to work. A similar program was rolled out last year to block impermissible searches, he said, but Flock customers quickly found a workaround.
“When you put all this together, what you see is Flock treating privacy issues as public relations issues,” he said. “Flock is giving this response because it knows its company is in serious, serious trouble.”
Mr. Langley said the updates had been in the works for months. Although Flock announced steps to assuage privacy concerns, critics still view legislative changes as the ultimate avenue to rein in surveillance tech like Flock’s.
“What we need are laws,” said Barry Friedman, law professor and faculty director of the Policing Project at New York University. “The government should never be collecting our information without a law that gives it authority.”
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