Flock Safety, the surveillance technology company increasingly under scrutiny from lawmakers, civil liberties advocates and citizens across the U.S., announced Thursday it is making changes to its platform intended to quell privacy concerns and address documented abuses of its system by some members of law enforcement. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing Associated Press.

Flock Safety is one of the nation's largest providers of automated license plate readers, which document plate data and other vehicle characteristics as automobiles pass Flock's cameras. The thousands of law enforcement agencies that contract with the company can search and share that data across jurisdictions to inform investigations.

Police have credited the technology as an important crime-fighting innovation that has helped locate missing people and track suspects in violent crimes. But dozens of cities and agencies have nixed their relationships with Flock amid concerns that the data can be accessed for immigration enforcement or used in unauthorized surveillance, after a flurry of examples surfaced of law enforcement officers misusing the technology for personal searches.

In an interview, Flock CEO Garrett Langley said many of the product changes will make what were once optional guardrails mandatory for its users to implement by Jan. 1. Among them:

  • 01All law enforcement customers will have to implement an audit tool that's intended to flag abnormal search behavior. When the system detects abnormal behavior, the user would be locked out pending an internal review.
  • 02Flock is also shortening the standard data retention window from 30 days to seven. It said it will allow data to be preserved for longer when it is evidence tied to a case number.
  • 03Law enforcement users will now also be required to enter a code from their records management system tying each search to a specific case before it is run. Overrides for emergencies would be automatically flagged for review.
  • 04Customers will also be allowed to decide which offense types — such as homicide or arson — outside agencies can search their data for, which would allow a customer to block outside searches related to immigration enforcement.

Langley said that change will give individual cities and departments control to use the system in a manner "consistent with community values." Critics of the company reacted skeptically to the changes.