A police chief in Braselton, Georgia ran his ex-girlfriend’s license plate more than 500 times over seven months. Five hundred searches, tracking her movements through Flock Safety‘s automatic license plate reader network — and nothing flagged it as a problem. That’s because the safeguards were optional. Most agencies hadn’t turned them on. Flock CEO Garrett Langley now calls that a mistake. According to The Verge, he said it plainly: “We got this one wrong.”
What “Getting It Wrong” Actually Looked Like
Four tools that were supposed to prevent abuse sat unused because no one was required to use them.
Flock is correcting that with four structural fixes:
- Audit Assistance monitored search behavior and flagged suspicious patterns, but it was voluntary — only about a third of agencies had enabled it since its April launch. It’s now mandatory across all customers, with automatic lockouts triggered pending admin review.
- Case codes, the basic requirement that officers log why they’re running a search, were also optional. They’re required now.
- Emergency overrides exist, but every one triggers a mandatory post-hoc review.
- Default data retention drops from 30 days to 7, and while departments can still extend that window, a new “Evidence Mode” preserves case-linked searches without keeping everything longer by default.
- Data sharing, previously all-or-nothing, moves to granular controls — a department can authorize access for a homicide investigation while explicitly restricting it for immigration enforcement.
In July alone, Flock’s systems helped locate nearly 1,000 missing people and recover more than 22,000 stolen vehicles, according to The Verge. That’s the infrastructure Flock has always led with, and it’s real. But the same network that finds missing children also let a Riverside County Sheriff’s deputy, per prosecutors, look up the plates of men his ex-girlfriend was dating. The absence of mandatory guardrails was the problem — optional safeguards in a low-accountability industry function about as well as secretly tracking users with a badge.
Langley told The Verge: “You are going to see more officers fired and more officers arrested for abusing police power.” When Audit Assistance was voluntary and agencies did turn it on, documented abuse increased. That’s not alarming. That’s detection working exactly as intended.
Corporate Self-Regulation vs. What Critics Actually Want
The ACLU and EFF are watching closely, and a better interview doesn’t satisfy either organization.
Both groups have accused Flock of misleading officials about its system’s risks and warned the infrastructure could be used to track women seeking abortions. Flock disputes some of this, citing technical nuance and jurisdiction-specific officer prohibitions. But the core architecture — centralized, searchable logs of vehicle movement at national scale — doesn’t become meaningfully safer because the CEO gave a more candid interview.
Langley says he’s asking for “a fair shot.” That’s reasonable. But if mandatory auditing surfaces the volume of abuse that critics suspect has long existed, the pressure won’t fall on Flock. It’ll land on legislators who still haven’t written any of this into law. Corporate policy is a ceiling. Real protection requires statute.
