Flock Safety, a police tech company that tracks Americans’ vehicle movements, has announced several new safeguards to its products. The changes include shrinking the period for how long it holds people’s movement data by default from one month to one week. In cases where an officer wants to hold data longer, they will be prompted to enter a case number.

Addressing Police Abuse and Privacy Concerns

The company also plans to fully deploy a system called Audit Assistance, which will lock out a user whose searches display “abnormal activity.” These changes aim to help address privacy concerns and stem officer abuse of the cameras, which have prompted some cities to cancel their Flock contracts.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a longstanding Flock critic, has downplayed the new changes as minor. Chad Marlow, senior policy counsel at the ACLU, expressed concerns that Flock is a mass surveillance company that collects billions of license plate scans every month on people who have done nothing wrong.

Flock makes a range of high-tech surveillance products, including a nationwide fleet of Automatic License Plate Readers. These pole-mounted cameras log cars as they pass popular roads and intersections, creating a massive database of each car’s movement, license plate number, make, model, and time of travel.

While the system has been championed by many police forces, privacy concerns have grown. Law enforcement offices that contract with Flock do not need a warrant to access travel information and can opt to share their data with local law enforcement offices, statewide, or nationwide, creating a database of Americans’ real-time movements accessible to a range of police officers that spans much of the country.

Original reporting: NBC Connecticut (Hartford) — read the source article.