Flock's Ambitious Efforts to Combat Police Abuse

Surveillance technology startup Flock has announced a series of new policies and tools aimed at curbing police abuse of its automated license plate camera reader systems. While the move is welcomed by many, questions remain about the effectiveness and transparency of Flock's "Audit Assistance" tool.

Flock is now recommending police departments retain data for seven days rather than the previous 30 days. The company has also introduced "Evidence Mode," which can be turned on when customers need to retain data for longer periods in "exceptional cases" and requires a specific case number. Furthermore, customers will now be able to set limits on the data they share with other customers based on the type of offense that's under investigation.

One of the key changes highlighted by Flock is the tool called "Audit Assistance." Flock launched the tool in April, and since then, more than one-third of its customers have turned it on. The company is now requiring all customers to enable it by the end of the year.

Flock said Audit Assistance "detects abnormal activity and flags it for Administrator review," according to a blog post released Thursday. If that happens, the tool can automatically lock out users who have been flagged until an administrator intervenes.

Despite its stated importance, Flock has not explained in detail how Audit Assistance actually works. Several executives have touted the capabilities of Audit Assistance, but their comments provide little insight into the tool's inner workings.

For instance, Flock's head of trust and compliance Ashley Haber said in a video that the Audit Assistance can flag "what may look like an odd search history from a specific user," helping customers understand how their users are operating the system. However, Flock co-founder Paige Todd said "Audit Assistance actually flags unusual patterns early. Think a user searching the same plate repetitively for more than 30 days."

Major Patrick Krieg of the Dunwoody, Georgia Police Department, a Flock customer, described the feature in a press release as "an algorithm that has notified us of any type of bias." Flock describes Audit Assistance as a feature that can "surface atypical activity early and review it quickly with a clear, documented workflow."

However, what's unclear is how this "algorithm" actually works, what data is it trained on, and if it was developed using a large language model. TechCrunch has asked Flock for answers about these questions, but the company has not provided detailed information.

According to Flock, Audit Assistance is not based on machine learning or AI. The company told TechCrunch that "It is a data tool that flags atypical search patterns for further review. One example that would trigger a flag is if a user searches for the same plate using multiple different case codes, as this could potentially indicate abuse. A flag does not mean that it is definitely abuse — it only means it warrants further investigation."

Numerous questions remain unanswered, including whether Flock has any statistics or data that shows how effective the tool is, what its false positive and false negative rates are, and if it has been audited by a third party?

Privacy experts and Flock critics are not impressed by Audit Assistance. The American Civil Liberties Union senior policy counsel Chad Marlow wrote that "there is no evidence that the tool works consistently" to address abuse. Marlow argued that Flock needs to have its auditing tool analyzed by an independent evaluator to determine its actual effectiveness.

Cooper Quintin, a security researcher and senior public interest technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told TechCrunch that it may not even matter whether Audit Assistance works. If it does work, law enforcement will figure out ways to get around it, he said.

Rachel Levinson-Waldman, the director of the Brennan Center's Liberty and National Security Program, told TechCrunch that making Audit Assistance mandatory is a step in the right direction, but the tool itself "needs to be audited" because there's not enough information about how it works in practice.

Flock's announcements come after years of reported incidents of its customers repeatedly abusing its technology. Earlier this week, three former Georgia sheriff's deputies were arrested and accused of using Flock cameras to stalk people with whom they had a "personal relationship at the time," as the Bibb County Sheriff's Office said in a press release. In this case, the Bibb County sheriff David Davis specifically called out Flock's new tool Audit Assistance for uncovering the misuse.