The Los Angeles Police Department is reworking its partnership with Flock Safety, an automatic license plate reader company, with enhanced privacy protections, less than a week after announcing it would not renew its contract due to concerns about the firm’s data ownership practices.
Los Angeles is one of dozens of American cities that have discontinued its use of Flock cameras in the last year. Flock uses optical character recognition to identify numbers and letters on license plates. While this technology has been used to identify vehicles in the cases of theft or to locate missing persons, the company has increasingly been accused of privacy violations, including using the data collected for immigration enforcement.
