Flock Safety, a United States surveillance technology company, has recently been under constant pressure over allegations of police abuse of its system. The CEO of the company, Garrett Langley, stated that the United States needed to find a “compromise” between privacy and public safety, rather than focusing only on one of them.
Cases of abuse giving rise to controversy
The Washington Post had previously combed out 46 cases of police officers being accused of unauthorized use of Flock technology, including for private purposes such as stalking their wives, girlfriends or predecessors. This has led to a shift in external concerns about licence plate recognition and automatic monitoring systems from abstract risks to verifiable realities.
In an interview with the CBS News, Langley apologized for the experience of one of the victims, stating that the other had suffered painfully. At the same time, however, he states that police abuses were not caused by Flock and that the company only exposed the problem earlier and developed tools to track unusual visits.
Two-party politics are starting to pressure.
The controversy surrounding Flock has spread from civil rights organizations to bipartisan US politicians. For its part, the Democratic Party of Michigan's candidate for federal senator Abdul El-Sayed accused his opponents of supporting the large-scale installation of a Flock camera; Senator Bernie Sanders sent a direct message against "AI Mass Surveillance" and called for an end to Flock.
On the Republican side, a bill has recently been introduced by three Republican members of the House of Representatives to prohibit the Federal Government from purchasing automated monitoring systems for the recognition of faces, biometrics or licence plates, and the text of the bill refers directly to “including the Flock Safety camera”.
The company has adjusted the preservation rules.
Faced with criticism, Flock has adjusted some of the product settings, including reducing the default data retention time from 30 to 7 days and requiring users to enter the case number before accessing the data.
However, neither of these restrictions is absolute. The police can still extend the data retention time through a set-up called Evidence Mode. The American Civil Liberties Union ACLU states that, while seven days is still above its recommended 48 hours, this adjustment may be a step in the right direction, depending on how “Evidence Mode” actually works.
Langley also indicated that the cantonal regulators should promote legislation to explicitly criminalize the illegal use of Flock data. At the same time, he argued that the current lack of adequate regulation and accountability in relevant technical areas, including Flock, was not reasonable.