Garrett Langley, the company’s chief executive, set out the package in a post on Flock’s own blog on 13 August.

It covers six areas. Privacy, accountability, data ownership, data security, data accuracy and transparency.

Most of the Flock Safety privacy changes become mandatory for law enforcement customers on 1 January, the Associated Press reported.

What Flock announced

The retention change is the headline item. The default holding period for number plate reads drops from 30 days to seven.

Flock’s stated reason is its own usage data. Officers finish more than 90% of searches without a full plate within a week, the post says.

A feature called Evidence Mode lets detectives preserve specific data for active investigations. It rolls out in the coming weeks and is free for customers who adopt the seven-day window.

Cities can also filter what other agencies may search their cameras for. Flock’s own example runs like this. City A allows City B to search only for a stolen vehicle, a missing person or a violent crime.

The accountability tools

A feature called Audit Assistance flags abnormal activity for an administrator to review. It launched 16 weeks ago. More than a third of customers now use it.

It becomes compulsory for every law enforcement customer by the end of the year. A related Proactive Lockout suspends access automatically when behaviour meets the abnormal criteria.

Case codes are the third piece. Officers must attach a records management code to a search before running it, with emergency bypasses flagged for review.

Flock introduced case codes as an option in July 2025. Langley told Engadget he had resisted making them a requirement.

“This is such an obvious way to curb abuse,” he said. He added that he had come round to the view that “we got this one wrong”.

Security, accuracy and transparency

Flock commissioned the security firm Bishop Fox to review its systems this year. A summary of the findings and the fixes publishes in September.

The company has also opened a coordinated vulnerability disclosure programme for researchers. It made multi-factor authentication mandatory at the start of this month.

On accuracy, the post claims fewer than nine human-reported errors for every million alerts. Flock retrains the models weekly. It screens out low-confidence reads before an officer sees them.

The stated principle is that “an alert is a lead, not a conclusion”. More than 1,500 agencies publish a transparency portal showing their policy, retention period and sharing partners.

What prompted it

The Washington Post documented nearly 50 instances of officers charged or accused of unauthorised use. Most involved tracking current or former partners or family members.

Savannah Police Department sacked six employees this month, four of them officers. The department found the searches through Flock’s own voluntary audit function.

Langley addressed one case directly. A woman told the Post that someone used the technology to stalk her.

“I apologize. It kills me that she went through that,” he told CBS News. He added that the company could have done more earlier.

Misreads have also produced stops. Police pulled over Joel Feder of The Drive in Plymouth, Minnesota. A partial plate had gone into an FBI database incorrectly.

Langley told The Drive that “there were a lot of things that went wrong”. He said Feder was not the first person to hit an edge case.

The immigration question

Offence filtering is the part of the announcement aimed at that debate. Customers can block outside searches related to immigration enforcement, according to the Associated Press.

Flock says it has no contract with ICE and never shares data on its own. Its published position is that the agencies controlling the data decide who sees it.

The company removed federal organisations from statewide and national lookup networks in August 2025. In January it added a single toggle letting an agency switch off all federal sharing.

What critics say

The American Civil Liberties Union called the measures retreads of inadequate safeguards. It allowed that the shorter retention window may be a step in the right direction.

Robert Frommer of the Institute for Justice was blunter. He called the package window dressing from a company in panic mode.

“This is window dressing that doesn’t address the fundamental problem,” he told the AP. Police officers are the ones deciding who and when to search, he said. That decision should sit with judges and real warrants.

Andrew Guthrie Ferguson of George Washington University Law School called the shifts better than the opposite. He asked for sustained democratic engagement with the rules, and judicial checks on access.

Chuck Wexler of the Police Executive Research Forum framed it differently. Departments can strike a balance, he said. That balance is more likely to come from department policy than from company changes.

The Center for Democracy and Technology went further with Good Morning America. The approach amounts to the same “Just Trust Us” policy with a fresh coat of paint, it said.

The business behind the announcement

Flock dates from 2017 and runs more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states. Its customers include 6,000 law enforcement agencies and about 1,000 private ones, among them FedEx and Lowe’s.

Annual revenue run rate reached $500m in June, up from $300m in January, Bloomberg reported. A recent round valued the company at $8.3bn.

“We’re not Big Brother. We’re focused on protecting people,” Langley told Bloomberg. Growth now comes from drones, trailers and software rather than new camera cities, he said.

The pressure is measurable. More than 50 agencies or jurisdictions have cancelled, suspended or rejected contracts since January. Others switched their cameras off, the campaign group DeFlock told the AP.

Langley apologised separately in July for calling privacy campaigners terrorists, Gizmodo reported.

The desk has covered how the cameras spread across the US. It has also covered the leaked pitch to turn rideshare drivers into a roaming network.

How Britain handles the same data

The closest comparison runs on the other side of the Atlantic. A Home Office impact assessment puts the National ANPR Service at around 12,700 cameras. They collect roughly 60 million reads a day.

Police hold those records for 12 months. That is 12 times longer than Flock’s old default and 52 times its new one.

The Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 and published national policing standards govern access. In the American case the retention period is a product setting announced by a supplier.

Europe is expanding its own police data capacity too. The Commission has proposed turning Europol into an operational agency. UK shops already run facial recognition wired to police alerts.

What happens next

Three dates are on the record. A plain-English explanation of Flock’s contracts publishes next week. The Bishop Fox summary follows in September, and the audit and case-code requirements land on 1 January.

Flock also sells police drones, which this announcement does not cover. Langley told Bloomberg that the number plate market has stopped growing. The company rarely adds new cities, he said.

Whether the changes reduce abuse will not be clear until agencies report. Flock says recent reviews of that kind coincided with arrests of officers.

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