Civil liberties advocates warn that addressing Americans’ privacy and surveillance concerns will require durable legal protections, not merely pressure on technology firms.
Flock Safety is feeling the heat from the ongoing public backlash against its controversial tracking technology. Amid mounting contract cancellations and anti-Flock activists targeting automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras across the country, chief executive Garrett Langley recently spoke on Fox News, appealing for a nationwide compromise to shield the company from moves to ban the technology outright.
But while many privacy advocates may relish watching Flock stumble, civil liberties experts caution against losing sight of what truly matters: enacting strong legal protections that endure beyond Flock’s influence.
The spotlight on Flock is justified. As the largest ALPR provider, Flock operates about 120,000 cameras across 49 states, collaborates with more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies, and processes more than 20 billion license plate scans each month. Yet Flock is far from the only ALPR supplier in the field. While the company bears the brunt of public anger, competitors are watching, learning, and waiting to seize any opportunity left by the PR crisis once it subsides.
And whatever comes next could potentially be even more problematic unless government actors begin taking privacy rights seriously, according to Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.
Motorola Solutions, currently Flock’s most significant competitor, “has been expanding its police technology offerings through an aggressive acquisition strategy in recent years,” Stanley notes in a new analysis published on Tuesday. Through the company’s nationwide Digital Recognition Network, more than 500 million monthly plate scans are made available to participating law enforcement agencies.
But unlike Flock, which responded to criticism by adjusting its controversial 30-day default retention policy down to seven days and introducing limits on police access to data, Motorola has made no such changes. Instead, Motorola has no default retention period and imposes no enforced limits on how long customers, including law enforcement, can retain ALPR data. (Flock maintains a maximum one-year retention policy.) For example, the New York Police Department retains data from Motorola’s ALPRs for five years, according to Stanley.
Such extended retention periods for the location data of law-abiding citizens are concerning due to the risk of misuse and mission creep. In fact, Motorola has contracted with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) since at least 2018, and in September 2023 was “awarded a $15.6 million contract…to ‘implement and maintain’ ICE’s tactical communication infrastructure,” giving ICE direct access to Motorola’s surveillance database, as reported by Forbes.
Another competitor, Axon, is also pursuing a top standing in police surveillance. Formerly known as Taser, the company began with the TASER energy weapon and has since expanded its police offerings to include body-worn cameras and digital evidence management software. The company’s newest products include ALPR services, which it started selling through dashboard and in-car camera products in 2021 and fixed cameras planned for 2025, according to Stanley.
Since many Flock customers already have contracts with Axon for body cameras and other products, proponents argue that switching from Flock to Axon may seem easy and appealing for government officials during this period of anti-Flock fervor. But such a move may be ill-advised.
Even though Axon, unlike Flock and Motorola, does not offer nationwide data sharing, the company’s policies on handling ALPR data still fall short of protecting privacy. From lengthy data retention to exploratory use of AI analytics, whatever Axon and many other surveillance competitors’ policies and capabilities may look like now, they simply cannot be trusted to safeguard civil liberties in the long term.
“Communities should not derive comfort from what companies are doing or not doing right now, but instead keep their eye on the longer game by enacting protections into law,” writes Stanley. Whether a community chooses to implement ALPR surveillance or not, Stanley recommends a handful of legal protections, including a retention period of no more than 48 hours, prohibiting nationwide data sharing, storing data locally, and declining AI analytics software.
Mandating such policies—along with requiring police to obtain a warrant before searching ALPR data—can help ensure Americans’ civil liberties remain proactively protected regardless of which surveillance technology company dominates.
