Flock reveals changes amid privacy concerns

Well, developing this hour, major changes coming to flock safety. The company that does this is revising how its license plate reader cameras store and provide access to data. And our Kelly Collins live on this. And Kel, this comes after a lot of backlash over privacy and surveillance concerns, right? That's right. And specifically people using these tools, law enforcement officers who have been using these tools to stalk exes, stalk family members, love interests of their exes. It really runs the gamut. And that, of course, is illegal to do. And what these new tools that have rolled out over the last few months and have been voluntary up until this point are showing is that there is quite a bit of abuse that's going on internally inside of police and sheriff's departments. And so what these changes are going to mean is that this abuse is going to be easier to flag to spot and hopefully prevent. That's according to flock, the company that most of the agencies across America are using right now. Although there are other camera surveillance systems that are set up to do this kind of work, but the majority use flock. So we'll just talk about flock. Now this comes after those agencies, they began performing internal audits and this is a voluntary thing. So not every agency has been doing this. But what they've noticed is that while there have been, as I mentioned, major abuses in recent months, there have been dozens of announcements from the agencies that have been running these audits all across the country who've uncovered and had to arrest their own members after they'd allegedly been caught abusing flock search tools and the internal audits. As I mentioned, they have been mandatory, but they are going to be or have been voluntary, but they're becoming mandatory now. But when you have over overreach where an officer is using it for personal gain, I have to believe for everyone we catch, there's going to be dozens that get away with it. Now, among law enforcement agencies who have announced arrest the Haines City Police, they say that Officer Christopher Goodson used this search tool 717 times over the last two years to track his estranged wife's movements. And the Haines City Police only uncovered that in june. Now, flock says that it will make the audit auditory tools mandatory for all of its users. So starting in january flock is going to implement these new guidelines. It includes searches that must be done with a specific case number. So officers won't just be able to throw in any license plate unlinked and be able to search it. They'll be linked to a case number and that's going to make things easier to track for auditors. Data retention drops from seven days to from 30 days rather to seven days. And then agencies will also be restricted on whether or not they can access data from other jurisdictions because that's also been a major problem is that with all of these systems kind of linked across the board, it's made abuse rife and easy for officers who are doing that. Now, flock ceo calls these changes mandatory guardrails to improve accountability. There is also a website that you can use with a search tool to see if you have been quote unquote flocked, whether or not an agency has been searching for your license plate. Now, I will say the caveat is that not all of the data has been uploaded to this site. So they'll give you a couple of some disclaimers on that site. But that website is have I been flocked dot com. And so that's a tool that you can use to see if your license plate has appeared in some of these searches. Interesting, interesting website, Donald. All right, take care. We'll talk later.