 The threats to personal privacy posed by Flock Safety’s national network of 120,000 automated license plate readers (ALPRs) are generating national pushback. As dozens of communities cancel their contracts with Flock – and Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) calls on Congress to ban Flock – the company’s CEO, Garrett Langley, is undertaking a charm offensive to defend his product by pointing to the technology’s benefits. In a Saturday interview on Fox News with Kayleigh McEnany, Langley said Flock’s network has helped locate 10,000 missing persons. He claimed that if Flock cameras had been in the right part of Arizona, the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie would not be a mystery. The Need for Guardrails Langley said that two priorities must be followed in future regulation. The first priority is to put limits on police departments’ retention of Flock data. Langley said we should all ask, “So how long is this data stored?” Flock now recommends a default retention period of seven days. Langley noted that this is a tighter standard than the 21-day limit imposed by the strictest state legislation. The second priority, Langley said, is “accountability” for abuses of this technology by a few bad apples in law enforcement. “Today, it is too often that in Flock and other technologies, there is no regulation. There is no accountability. And we think that’s wrong.” In response to recent stories about police officers misusing Flock for stalking, Langley pointed to Flock’s change to an “audit assistance tool,” which monitors the ways in which Flock is used. Flock and AI McEnany asked Langley about a Wired report on the integration of a powerful new AI tool that allows Flock’s system to use ALPR data and other records to identify drivers (and, by implication, their movements and associations). Langley acknowledged that AI is “incredibly powerful, but also a very dangerous tool.” He promised not to move “recklessly” into AI. “It requires more third-party attestation; more support from the community.” Langley added that a consumer might be irritated by an AI agent that flubs a flight reservation. But when one calls 911, he said, “it has to work. There’s no space for hallucinations.” Langley pledged to seek community support to confirm that AI has appropriate “guardrails.” Promises Made, But How Will They Be Implemented? It is a welcome sign that Flock’s CEO acknowledges that his technology needs guardrails and regulation – an implicit admission that its unregulated use poses risks to Americans’ privacy. It is also a welcome sign that Langley acknowledges that AI is a “dangerous tool” and that it must operate with near-perfect accuracy. The devil – if not a host of devils – is in the myriad details. For example, the ACLU questions whether Flock’s new audit tool could boomerang and expand surveillance. And the guardrails for AI are, as of today, speculative. It is not enough to eliminate false positives that could misidentify innocent people as suspects to be targeted by law enforcement. The combination of AI and Flock technology is precisely the kind of tool that enables the surveillance state of the People’s Republic of China. Congress should consider a law that prohibits federal and state agencies from using AI to search ALPR databases in order to track Americans’ daily movements without a probable-cause warrant. Otherwise, our daily lives and associations – personal, romantic, political, commercial, and religious – will be an open book. But we should all welcome Langley’s openness to further discussion. Comments are closed.
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