ACLU Torches Flock Safety’s PR Stunt — ‘Don’t Take The Bait’

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Flock Safety rolled out a slate of new privacy “safeguards” Thursday — and critics aren’t buying it for a second.

The automated license plate reader company, whose tens of thousands of surveillance cameras blanket communities across America, announced new measures to curb police abuse after reports of officers using the system to stalk ex-girlfriends and spy on innocent citizens.

But civil liberties groups and privacy advocates say the move is pure optics — a PR smokescreen that doesn’t address the core threat: a private company building a mass surveillance state right under Americans’ noses.

“As long as Flock continues to value profits over privacy and continues to treat legitimate privacy concerns as mere PR issues, we are going to continue to see more Flock efforts like today’s that seek to create headlines about positive reforms when few if any impactful changes are actually made.”

That’s Chad Marlow, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who told the Daily Caller that Flock’s announcement is fundamentally a crisis-management exercise.

Flock cameras are automated license plate readers (ALPRs) that sweep up private driver data and upload it to a searchable database accessible to participating law enforcement agencies nationwide — without a warrant. The surveillance powers have enabled numerous abuses, including one instance in which a police chief used Flock to stalk his ex-girlfriend.

Flock announced Thursday the company is now recommending that police agencies retain surveillance data for 7 days instead of 30, and has introduced “Evidence Mode” and “proactive lockout.”

“When a user’s activity meets defined criteria for abnormal behavior, Flock will automatically suspend access pending administrator review. The goal is to intervene before misuse becomes recurring or widespread,” the company said in a blog post.

Flock will also require customers to use “Audit Assistance” — a feature that had already been available for the past 16 weeks — that flags “abnormal activity” in the Flock data system.

The company concluded: “These changes reflect years of work and deliberation. They are not the end of that work, but simply the continuation of our commitment to both safety and privacy.”

Critics are less than impressed.

John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, warned Americans: “Don’t take the bait.”

“Flock’s PR team is trying to reframe the conversation towards police departments & a ‘bad apples’ narrative, and away from Flock themselves. The core issue is that Flock is a private company trying to create a mass surveillance system, and grow so fast that America can’t uninstall them.”

In a separate post, Scott-Railton argued the U.S. might well be on its way toward a Chinese-style surveillance state.

“American history tells us: Mass surveillance always gets abused. It’s a matter of time and political pressure,” he said. “And we’re even less protected from mass surveillance run by private companies. Remember, the onramp for mass surveillance in China was claims about crime reduction numbers. Now they are a political surveillance state.”

The ACLU published Marlow’s full analysis breaking down Flock’s latest announcement. In one example, Marlow pointed to Flock’s claim that local police can now decide which offenses other customers can search their data for.

“This is not new. Flock has attempted this before, and the security measure failed because users were easily able to circumvent the system’s requirement that police input the purpose of their search,” Marlow noted.

“Given that Flock’s latest announcement still appears more focused on addressing a perceived PR problem than the significant harms its products create, this is hardly the step forward Flock wants us to think it is,” he concluded.

Flock Safety founder and CEO Garret Langley also received a torrent of criticism in replies to his X post announcing the supposed guardrails.

“Garrett my buddies and I want come by your house later and set up some cameras, we just wanna make sure there’s no crimes in your neighborhood, will you allow us to do that? I pinky promise we will protect your privacy,” Harrison Berger, a correspondent at The American Conservative, replied.

Flock Safety has triggered widespread backlash among Americans, activist groups such as DeFlock, and civil rights organizations. Patriots across the country have already begun taking direct action against the cameras.

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