Flock Safety's license plate cameras are getting ripped out of cities across the US, and the company's own missteps keep handing critics more reasons why.
Flock has installed more than 120,000 automatic license plate reader cameras nationwide, each one logging a car's plate, make, model, and color. The system networks that data together to track vehicles - and the people driving them - across cities and state lines. Los Angeles and dozens of other communities have now canceled their Flock contracts or switched the cameras off, pushing for tighter limits on who can see the data and how long it sticks around. Amazon-owned Ring dropped its own data-sharing partnership with Flock earlier this year after users balked at the idea of doorbell footage feeding a nationwide police tracking system.
This is not an abstract privacy debate. Flock's camera feeds have turned up exposed on the open web, and reports say footage from US streets has been reviewed by overseas annotators - both facts that undercut any promise that the data stays contained and accountable. Even the LAPD, hardly a surveillance skeptic, has paused its use of the system while officials sort out the rules.
Flock's own CEO has conceded the company "got this one wrong," which is a tough sentence to recover from when the thing you got wrong is a 120,000-camera tracking network.