Flock Safety, the company behind a large automated license-plate camera network used by police and cities, said on August 13 it is tightening how long footage is kept and how agencies share it. The recommended default retention drops from 30 days to seven. A new Evidence Mode can keep clips longer, but only when a case number is attached. Agencies can also limit what they share with other Flock customers by the type of offense under investigation.
The change that Flock is pushing hardest is Audit Assistance. The feature launched in April. The company says more than one-third of customers already use it, and every customer will have to turn it on by the end of the year. Flock describes it as a data tool — not machine learning and not a large language model — that flags unusual search patterns for an administrator. One example the company gave TechCrunch: searching the same plate under several different case codes. A flag is not a finding of abuse. It is a prompt for a human review, and the tool can lock the user out until an admin steps in.
Flock says the system has already helped customers catch misuse. Critics are not convinced that proves much. The ACLU’s Chad Marlow wrote that without an independent test, nobody can tell whether the tool catches most violators or a small fraction. The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Cooper Quintin told TechCrunch that if there are no real consequences, an in-house flag is only a fig leaf. TechCrunch also noted that Flock has not published false-positive rates or a third-party audit of the detector itself.
