Before Thursday, Flock’s default was a 30-day retention window that police could extend, sometimes for a fee, with no requirement to justify why. After Thursday, the default drops to seven days, and going longer requires “Evidence Mode” — tying data to an active case rather than an open-ended fishing expedition. That is the one change EFF’s Matthew Guariglia credits as substantive, and it’s notable that Flock’s own justification for the cut is that 90% of plate-less searches already happen within a week, a figure the company supplied and Fox Business and EFF both repeated without independent verification.
The rest of the package is really a hardening of existing optional features into mandatory ones, on a deadline. Audit Assistance — the abnormal-search-flagging tool roughly a third of agencies had turned on, per Flock’s own numbers — becomes mandatory for all law enforcement customers by January 1, 2027, per the company and confirmed by the Associated Press via WRDW. Case codes, optional since July 2025, become mandatory on the same timeline, with an emergency override that gets flagged for review rather than blocked. None of this touches the underlying architecture: no warrant, no judge, just an administrator inside Flock’s own customer base reviewing after the fact.
Flock is converting a self-regulation problem into a self-regulation product — the same company that built an abusable system is now selling the audit tools that catch abuse of it.
The timing is not subtle. The reforms land days after an InvestigateTV investigation and weeks after four Richmond County Sheriff’s Office employees were arrested and fired for running personal searches through the Flock system, according to the AP’s WRDW report. The ACLU’s Chad Marlow and Institute for Justice attorney Robert Frommer both dismissed the package as PR — Frommer called it “window dressing” from a company “in panic mode” — while GW Law’s Andrew Guthrie Ferguson allowed the changes are “better than the opposite” but insisted judicial checks are the actual missing piece.
Watch two things: whether existing customers, who keep their current retention periods under Flock’s own policy, migrate to the new default at all once a price tag for longer storage is attached, and whether Congress moves on bills from Rep. Thomas Massie and Rep. Tim Burchett to defund or ban agencies using the cameras — because EFF’s real argument, that a vendor should never be the one setting privacy policy for a nationwide 119,000-camera network, is a legislative question Flock’s engineering team cannot answer for it.
We should not be letting companies decide how much privacy we deserve.
