On August 13, Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley announced that the company is cutting its default retention period for license-plate-reader data from 30 days to seven, making misuse detection mandatory for every law-enforcement customer, and requiring a case code on every search by the end of the year. The Next Web has the fullest write-up. The announcement followed a Washington Post investigation that documented nearly 50 instances of officers charged with or accused of running unauthorized searches.
The politics of automated license plate readers are being covered thoroughly elsewhere, and by people closer to it than me. I want to pull out one line from the announcement that anyone who stores other people's data should read twice.
The line
"Our analysis shows that over 90% of searches without a full plate are done within a week."
Flock set the 30-day default nine years ago, and by its own account believed it struck a balance. Fine. But read the sentence again as an engineer rather than as a civil-liberties question: for nine years, a network now spanning more than 120,000 cameras kept a rolling record of vehicle movements for 30 days, and the company's own telemetry says roughly 23 of those days were serving under 10% of the queries.
