Flock's New Guardrails Can't Fully Stop Cops From Abusing License Plate Cameras
Flock Safety, the company behind a massive network of automated license plate readers used by thousands of police departments, is adding features meant to flag when officers search the system for non-work reasons—like tracking an ex-partner. The tools include audit trails and usage alerts designed to make misuse easier to detect after the fact.
But security and policy researchers argue this doesn't fix the underlying problem: individual police agencies control their own access rules, auditing practices, and disciplinary follow-through. Flock can generate logs, but it can't force a department to review them, punish an officer, or even tell the public when abuse happens. Several documented cases of officers using the cameras to stalk people occurred despite existing oversight mechanisms.
The episode highlights a familiar pattern in surveillance tech: vendors ship monitoring and audit features as a selling point, while the actual accountability depends entirely on customer institutions that often have little incentive to expose their own misconduct.