"The Burden of Compliance Shouldn't Stand in the Way of Public Safety"

Just as audit logs are beginning to lead to oversight and surface questionable agency actions and potential violations of law, Flock has now moved to curb that oversight by implementing new features to reduce transparancy and limit oversight.

Update: A few hours after this article was published, Flock appears to have blocked pro-transparency site EyesOnFlock from accessing Flock Transparency Portals.

In 2021, when the company launched its first transparency portal, it wrote:

“We place privacy, transparency, and bias mitigation at the forefront of our product development, and are constantly engineering new features that encourage and align with our ethical principles."

Two years later, the language hadn’t changed much:

Flock Safety enables robust auditing of its platform to promote accountability and transparency. All searches conducted on any LPR device require a search reason and are saved in an indefinitely-available audit trail.

Until now, it used this language to bolster transparency theater and maintain the illusion that the company was amenable to oversight.

Now, another two years later, it has launched a new blog series, Policy Pulse. In it, the company fully abandons its previous performative ethics to adopt an aggresive anti-oversight stance, writing in its inaugural post:

We’re presenting this new blog series, Policy Pulse, because the burden of compliance - navigating this messy lattice of rules and oversight - should not stand in the way of public safety

In part three, still couched in the language of performative transparency, Flock announces new features informed by its new position:

At Flock Safety, transparency is not a bug, but a feature. It’s baked into all the products we ship. For law enforcement agencies, transparency is not a catchphrase. In the past, law enforcement agencies had little choice in how public search audits were exported from the Transparency Portal … Now, that changes … With a single decision, they can … remove both [search reason and case number] entirely.

These new transparency features are aimed at reducing questions, not at providing answers.

The information available through the transparency portals was always limited. The most important questions were never answered: who is looking at the data, and why?

With these new redactions and obfuscations applied, it leaves only the time that a search was conducted.^[1]

As questions continue to be raised, Flock continues to walk back its earlier stated commitment to transparency and oversight — no longer a goal, but a burden.

The company has often said that it’s only a tool-provider, or a passive facilitator of its customers’ actions. In Policy Pulse, however, it goes beyond that, by acknowledging a level of responsibility that it “will not shrink from.”

A responsibility to help its users avoid the burden of compliance.

Flock has always operated a private surveillance network configured in such a way that it optimally avoids public oversight. Policy Pulse is its admission.

The data is owned by the customer, so Flock can’t disclose it. But customers say only Flock has the data, so they can’t disclose it.

License plates and ALPR data are not private or sensitive information, so there is no issue with Flock storing them.

But audit logs that contain queries that could contain license plates numbers are private and sensitive information, so they can’t be disclosed.

For all its waxing philosophically about democracy and sovereignty, the “path forward,” as the new blog series calls it, pretends that the core values of American democracy, and the notion that democratically enacted laws and regulation are a burden “that should not stand in the way of public safety,” can be reconciled. That is not the case.

The path foward is for democratic governments, by the people, for the people, to build public trust by first demanding, and then publishing, a complete and unvarnished view of the activities those governments engage in on behalf of the people they claim to serve.

Not more obscurity, and less democratic oversight.