Flock Safety announces policy changes amid surveillance camera backlash

Tech surveillance company Flock Safety has announced new policy changes. This is amid a growing public backlash after law enforcement officers have been accused of misusing the camera system. So joining me to discuss this surveillance network and all the changes here is Harry Moggins, a data privacy expert. Harry, it's good to have you. Welcome. Thank you for having me. So just for context, because we know people don't follow every single headline, talk a little bit about what some of these policy changes are. How do they differ from what Flock was doing previously? Sure. So Flock was a private company, so they didn't have a whole lot of rules and guidelines. And the backlash has been pretty severe, as it should be. So ahead of proposed legislation in a few different states, I think Flock's getting scared. This is not leadership on their behalf. This is them trying to get ahead of some inevitable legislative changes. So as of yesterday, they announced that the guardrails for police departments that were optional previously are now gonna be mandatory, which means usually three main things. Before a search is conducted across the Flock network, a police officer has to encode it with a case ID number, which means it can't just be idle curiosity or phishing. It has to be tied to an active case. Second, when an unusual activity is detected across Flock's network, if there's searches that don't quite line up with what they're expecting, or if things are strange or unusual, they have to lock down the account immediately. So it's a proactive shuttering of suspicious activity on their searches. And third, the other third and final change is the retention period is being dropped to seven days. So if they're tracking a timeline of where a vehicle's been or a person with a facial recognition, they can only keep it for up to a week as of January 1st, which all great changes. Yeah, okay. So I wanna ask you a little bit about that because, and you're right, there has been this public backlash. And I know everything is very political these days, but it seems like I'm seeing backlash from people on both sides of the aisle. So we're just talking about public backlash in general. Do you think these changes are enough to make people feel better about this kind of security? I think it's a step in the right direction. So it's unusual because in the privacy space, we got asked about Flock a lot. And somewhat unorthodox view is I think Flock has a lot of potential to do good. What a lot of people are talking about is, Flock is a surveillance network that's very invasive, that violates privacy. So it needs these guardrails to keep people protected and keep their civil liberties intact. But to disregard it entirely is probably not the solution either. If we can catch violent crimes, if we can track felons that are on the run or our crimes against children, children abduction cases, AMBER alerts, any technology that can be used to help those cases is a positive thing. The risk and the backlash is primarily rooted in the fact that this company, up until recently, has pretty much gone completely unregulated. They can do whatever they want as a private company. It allows police departments to circumvent warrants. It's just a complete violation of privacy. So it's really good to finally see some positive changes. Yeah, and it almost sounds like when you said they're a private company, there hasn't been a lot of regulation on this. It almost sounds like you're saying that states and cities still need to work on their own kind of regulation. Is that true? They do. You see a lot in the news about individuals and going and spray painting the cameras or cutting down the poles, which is candidly entertaining news, but it's not the solution. Vandalism of the cameras does not solve anything at all. It just gets you arrested. The solution is going to city council meetings. It's talking to your senator. It's pushing for these guardrails and legislation to force them to actually take accountability for violating privacy. In Philadelphia, they just said when the House reconvenes in September, they're introducing legislation that's going to allow a citizen to actually file a lawsuit in the event they feel their privacy was violated. And just in Illinois, 50 police departments already have, excuse me, across the country, 50 police departments already have canceled four privacy-related concerns. So the backlash is real and it's starting to grow. Yeah, and I know we see a lot of different information, especially on social media about what these cameras can and can't do. I want to hear it from an expert here. What exactly are they seeing and hearing? It's gotten worse. So in the very beginning, they were license plate readers. The car drives by on a public road. They use OCR to figure out optical character recognition. They read the numbers in the letters of your license plate. And then they stitch it together on a loose timeline. That was the beginning. It was more innocuous. It made a lot of sense and that got them a foot in the door. Now they've expanded it. A few weeks ago, they made a change where a lot of the cameras, if not all of them, don't just scan the license plate. They're full frame, full video tracking every single thing going on on the roads. The cameras are going beyond roads. Now you see them in public parks. You see them on sidewalks. You see them on biking lanes doing facial recognition on people. Flock has partnered with a defense contractor to put digital fingerprinting technology into a lot of their cameras, where when you drive by, they zap your car with kind of a scanning technology that figures out, here's the low energy Bluetooth of your phone. Here's your Apple Watch. Here's any computers you have in the car. And they map this digital blueprint of the electronics in your car to fingerprint it and track you beyond a license plate. And I think the scariest of all is a technology they have called Flock Nova, where when they read your facial recognition or they find your car, they actually connect it with data broker data or dark web breach data and your full identity. And they know your hobbies, your interests, your age, your political affiliation, your religious preferences. They know everything about you just by you walking down a sidewalk or driving a car. It's terrifying. Yeah. And you can see why the public, there's some backlash and maybe more regulation needs to take place. We have to leave it there, Harry. We're out of time. Thank you so much for this context and for teaching us more about this. Appreciate you this morning. Thank you. All right. 750, we'll be right back.