Too Little, Too Late: Flock Admits Their Technology Needs Reforms
Flock Safety, a major provider of automated license plate reader systems, has announced a set of reforms in response to widespread backlash that led many municipalities to cancel or pause their contracts with the company. Critics, including civil liberties advocates, say the changes address some long-standing problems but leave the core privacy risks of mass vehicle surveillance intact.
Why this matters: Flock's cameras are already running in hundreds of towns, quietly logging where your car goes and when. Letting the company decide how much of that data to keep, who can see it, and what the defaults look like is not a privacy policy. It is a company protecting its contracts. Towns cancelled deals because residents pushed back. That pressure worked. But reforms designed by a surveillance vendor to save its business relationships are not the same as reforms designed to protect people. Local officials still need to ask whether they want this infrastructure at all, not just whether its settings look slightly better.
Who should care: Privacy officers · Cybersecurity · General readers · Policy
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