Flock Safety reduces data retention period to seven days following numerous incidents of police misuse.

      Garrett Langley, the CEO of the company, detailed the package in a blog post on Flock's official site on August 13. It encompasses six areas: privacy, accountability, data ownership, data security, data accuracy, and transparency. According to the Associated Press, the majority of Flock Safety's privacy updates will be mandatory for law enforcement clients starting January 1.

      What Flock disclosed

      The most significant change involves record retention. The default duration for storing license plate reads will decrease from 30 days to seven. Flock's rationale for this adjustment is based on its usage data, indicating that police officers complete over 90% of searches without a full plate number within a week, as mentioned in the post. A feature named Evidence Mode will allow detectives to retain specific data for ongoing investigations and will be available for customers who switch to the seven-day retention period in the coming weeks without additional cost. Cities will have the ability to control what data other agencies can search their cameras for. For example, City A can permit City B access only for searching stolen vehicles, missing persons, or violent crimes.

      The accountability tools

      A feature called Audit Assistance identifies unusual activity for administrative review and was launched 16 weeks ago, with over a third of customers currently utilizing it. By the year's end, it will be mandatory for all law enforcement customers. A related feature, Proactive Lockout, will automatically suspend access when behavior is categorized as abnormal. Case codes form the third component; officers are required to attach a records management code to a search before execution, with emergency bypasses flagged for review. Flock began offering case codes as an option in July 2025, and Langley shared with Engadget that he initially opposed making them a requirement. He stated, “This is such an obvious way to curb abuse,” expressing that he has since recognized the need for this change.

      Security, accuracy, and transparency

      Flock engaged Bishop Fox, a security firm, to assess its systems this year, with a summary of the findings to be published in September. Additionally, the company has launched a coordinated vulnerability disclosure program for researchers and mandated multi-factor authentication as of the beginning of this month. Regarding accuracy, the post claims there are fewer than nine human-reported errors for every million alerts. Flock retrains its models weekly and filters out low-confidence reads before they reach officers. The guiding principle is that “an alert is a lead, not a conclusion.” More than 1,500 agencies provide a transparency portal detailing their policies, retention periods, and sharing partners.

      What prompted it

      The Washington Post documented almost 50 cases of officers facing charges or accusations for unauthorized use, primarily for tracking current or former partners or family members. Recently, the Savannah Police Department terminated six employees, including four officers, after uncovering the searches through Flock's voluntary audit function. Langley addressed a specific case where a woman reported being stalked using the technology, expressing his regret and acknowledging that the company could have acted more proactively.

      Misreads have also resulted in erroneous stops. For instance, police stopped Joel Feder from The Drive in Plymouth, Minnesota, due to a partial plate incorrectly entered into an FBI database. Langley noted to The Drive that “there were a lot of things that went wrong,” adding that Feder was not the first to encounter such an issue.

      The immigration question

      The announcement included provisions for offense filtering, allowing customers to restrict searches related to immigration enforcement, as reported by the Associated Press. Flock maintains it has no contracts with ICE and does not share data independently. Its stance is that the agencies controlling the data determine who has access. The company removed federal entities from statewide and national lookup networks in August 2025 and added an option in January enabling agencies to disable all federal sharing.

      What critics say

      The American Civil Liberties Union criticized the measures as minor adjustments to insufficient safeguards, although it acknowledged that the reduced retention window may represent progress. Robert Frommer from the Institute for Justice was more blunt, describing the package as superficial measures taken by a company in crisis. He asserted, “This is window dressing that doesn’t address the fundamental problem,” emphasizing that the decision on who and when to search should rest with judges and real warrants. Andrew Guthrie Ferguson from George Washington University Law School viewed the changes as preferable to the opposite and called for ongoing democratic engagement with the rules and judicial checks on access. Chuck Wexler from the Police Executive Research Forum offered a different perspective, suggesting that departments could achieve a balance more effectively through their policies rather than relying solely on company-driven changes. The Center for Democracy and Technology criticized the approach further, likening it to a renewed “Just Trust Us” policy.

      The business behind the announcement

      Founded in 2017, Flock operates over 120,000 cameras across 49 states. Its customers include approximately 6,000 law enforcement agencies and about 1,000 private entities, such as FedEx and Lowe