Flock is Having a bad PR Day
Well, probably we should say another bad PR day.
Their PR is so bad that they are having to lay off employees as customers cancel their contracts.
A researcher just revealed a map showing more than 300,000 devices in their network, including 170,000 cameras. This is a bit more than the 120,000 cameras they admit to. Credit: My Privacy Blog
But that is only one bit of bad news for the massive surveillance company.
The Troy, NY city council passed local law 3 which caps Flock’s data retention at 72 hours. It also limits searches to felonies. The mayor has threatened to veto the law. The council voted 6 to 0 in favor of the bill, so if the mayor vetoes it, the council could easily override that veto.
While this does not affect data that Flock stores for other cities, it does require the police department to delete their data after 72 hours unless it has been flagged for a criminal investigation.
Assuming the mayor vetoes it, the council overrides the veto and no law is passed at the state level overriding local laws, it will become a template for other cities. What happens is, of course, a very hot political potato, so we will watch this one.
Credit: My Privacy Blog
And San Francisco has a new law capping Flock surveillance data retention a 30 days. This is down from 12 months. It also requires every search to be tied to an incident or dispatch number, adding a paper trail. This comes after the police department admitted that Flock surveillance data had been improperly accessed hundreds of times by out of state and federal agencies. California already has a state law that prohibits data sharing with the feds but reducing the retention period is meaningful. But the bigger issue is that there is no penalty in state law from breaking the law. A city could fire someone as a result of the hundreds of times law enforcement breaks the law, but they don’t have to. Credit: My Privacy Blog
What politicians are discovering is that people are mad as hell and they are not going to take it any more, meaning that they could be on the unemployment line – a place no politician wants to be.
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