Flock Cameras Will Now Keep Your Car's Photos For 7 Days By Default, Not 30 - Jalopnik
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The proliferation of Flock cameras has been met with so much backlash that hating on them has become one of the few things liberals and conservatives can bond over. In response to privacy concerns, Flock is now moving to cut the default and recommended time its system stores your picture from 30 days to seven. "Today, we're cutting our default to seven days," said Flock CEO Garrett Langley in a recent video update. "That means that every image our cameras capture is, by default, purged from the customer's database after one week." Apparently, 90% of Flock searches without a full plate are done within a week of the image being captured.
The keywords to highlight here are that it is Flock's default and recommended retention period that's being shortened. This implies that individual jurisdictions and law enforcement agencies can indeed choose a shorter or longer retention period if they really want to, something they had the freedom to do already when the default was 30 days. Another little tidbit that limits how meaningful this reduction in retention time is: "Existing customers will keep their current, democratically approved retention periods," meaning if your town already has Flock cameras up, this default reduction doesn't even apply.
What even is 'abnormal' activity?
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And, of course, in the alleged interest of maintaining effective crime fighting, Flock's announcement also introduced "Evidence Mode," which, according to Flock, lets detectives "preserve specific ALPR data as evidence for an active investigation in cold storage, consistent with existing laws and policies." To combat police abusing the system, such as using Flock cameras to stalk your own wife, the company will now require all law enforcement users to adopt Audit Assistance by the end of 2026, which actively detects and flags "abnormal activity" for Administrator review. A new proactive lockout function will also apparently suspend access for officers once "defined criteria for abnormal behavior" are met.
Translation: The cameras Flock sells to police will keep your photo for a lot less time out of the box. But jurisdictions can still opt to keep your photos for a month if they so choose, and they can keep them indefinitely if they decide there's a reason to. If Flock cameras are truly here to stay, we're all for any step toward an implementation that maintains privacy and discourages abuse as much as it can. But for now, this doesn't exactly sound like the privacy game-changer Flock PR perhaps wants you to believe it is.