Flock Safety, the police tech company that tracks Americans’ vehicle movements through a line of cameras, announced Thursday that it would implement several new safeguards to its products.The changes that Flock outlined include shrinking the period for how long it holds people’s movement data by default, going from one month to one week, the company said in a press release.In cases where an officer wants to hold data longer, they will be prompted to enter a case number.To address potential police abuse of Flock’s data on people, the company also plans to fully deploy a system it began testing earlier this year, called Audit Assistance, that will lock out a user whose searches display “abnormal activity,” the release said.The changes are meant to help address privacy concerns and to stem officer abuse of the cameras, a spokesperson told NBC News, which have prompted some cities to cancel their Flock contracts amid a national wave of vandalism against them.
But the American Civil Liberties Union, a longstanding Flock critic, downplayed the new changes as minor.“My biggest concern was and will continue to be that they are a mass surveillance company that collects billions and billions of license plate scans every month on people who have done nothing wrong,” said Chad Marlow, senior policy counsel at the ACLU.Add NBC News to GoogleFlock cameras vandalized across the country as the debate around them continues03:26Flock makes a range of high-tech surveillance products, but is best known for its nationwide fleet of Automatic License Plate Readers, pole-mounted cameras that log cars as they pass popular roads and intersections, creating a massive database of each car’s movement, license placement number, make and model and time of travel.While the system has been championed by many police forces, privacy concerns have grown.Law enforcement offices that contract with Flock do not need a warrant to access travel information and can opt to share their data ...