Flock Admits It Got This Wrong: Stalking People Is Being Made Harder by Default

Flock, the company that builds video surveillance and automated license-plate reader systems, has announced a review of a number of its settings following a string of reports about abuse by police officers. In an interview with The Verge, the company's CEO Garrett Langley admitted: “We got this wrong.”

The trigger was a series of investigations into how law enforcement officers used Flock's tools to spy on former lovers. According to The Washington Post, the police chief of Braselton, Georgia, ran his ex-girlfriend's license plate more than 500 times over seven months. In California, prosecutors accused a former Riverside County sheriff's deputy of using Flock to check the plates of men she was dating.

What's changing

Over the coming weeks, Flock will make its previously optional Audit Assistance feature mandatory: it flags “anomalous search behavior” and automatically blocks a suspicious user until an administrator reviews the case. All queries will now require a case number to be entered — an administrator can waive that requirement in emergencies (for instance, when searching for a missing child), but such requests will be automatically flagged for review.

The default retention period for footage from cameras and plate readers is being cut from 30 days to seven — closer to what critics such as the ACLU had asked for. Departments will still be able to extend retention or use the new Evidence Mode to tie data to a specific case. Granular sharing settings have also appeared: it's now possible, for example, to let another agency search the database for a murder suspect while blocking access for immigration enforcement.

A shift in rhetoric

Langley used to shift the responsibility for regulation onto lawmakers, and once called DeFlock — a site that tracks the spread of the company's technology — a “terrorist” group (he later apologized). Now the tone has softened: the CEO admits that regulation is moving too slowly, and that the case-number tool itself is “an obvious way to curb abuse.”

The statistics are telling, too: since April, when Audit Assistance became available as a voluntary feature, only a third of the company's client agencies turned it on — and it was precisely there that the detection of abuse predictably rose. Langley predicts that “there will be more firings and arrests of police officers for abuse of authority.”

Civil rights advocates are cautious. In its own analysis, the ACLU noted that the changes look more like a fix for a “PR problem” than for real threats; it called the shorter retention period “a step in the right direction,” but with a caveat — everything depends on implementation. The organization is calling for an independent assessment of how effective the new tools are. Langley himself is only asking for a “fair shot,” and makes no secret of it: mandatory restrictions benefit Flock as well, since they will force competitors to adopt similar measures.

Source: The Verge