What Flock’s defenders are missing

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Flock Safety, which operates roughly 120,000 automatic license plate readers across the US, announced platform changes after The Washington Post identified 50 cases of officer misuse — including an ex-boyfriend who searched for a woman's car 179 times and a police chief stalking someone with no one to report him to. The new safeguards require officers to enter a criminal case number before running a search and use software to flag abnormal activity. But MIT Technology Review's analysis identifies two structural problems: Flock confirmed to the publication that it does not verify case numbers, so officers can enter bogus ones; and the reforms entirely sidestep broader questions about how long data is retained, how widely it is shared across agencies, and what a more privacy-preserving architecture would look like. The article frames the core issue as one of design choices, not bad actors: decisions about what to collect, who can search, retention periods, and inter-agency access set the terms of the security-vs-civil-liberties bargain. Accepting that crime-fighting technology has value should not mean accepting any particular implementation of it. A growing backlash has led some cities to cancel Flock contracts and some states to propose laws limiting or banning license plate readers. The article recommends evaluating specific design alternatives — like case number verification integrated with department records — rather than the binary 'cameras or no cameras' debate.