Flock slashes plate-camera data retention to 7 days after abuse reports
America's largest license-plate surveillance network is tightening its own rules after a string of reports that police officers used the system to stalk people — and its CEO is conceding the company got the balance wrong.
Flock Safety is making its anti-abuse safeguards mandatory and cutting default data retention from 30 days to seven, after reports of cops across the country using its license-plate cameras to stalk ex-romantic partners. CEO Garrett Langley's mea culpa — "we got this one wrong" — comes with concrete changes rolling out over the coming weeks: Audit Assistance, the tool that flags abnormal search behavior and locks out suspicious users until an administrator reviews them, becomes a hard requirement after only about a third of agencies turned it on voluntarily. Every search will now need a case code, with an emergency override for situations like a missing child that is automatically flagged for review. And localities that previously shared data on an all-or-nothing basis can now set granular limits — letting another department search for a homicide suspect, for example, while blocking immigration enforcement access.
The changes follow a Washington Post investigation into officers allegedly using Flock for stalking: a Braselton, Georgia police chief searched his ex-girlfriend's license plate more than 500 times over seven months, and a former Riverside County deputy faces allegations he used the data to track women his ex was dating. Flock, which says its roughly 120,000 cameras serve 6,000-plus law enforcement agencies, had long punted oversight to lawmakers, arguing they should mandate the safeguards. Langley says he watched regulation move too slowly and changed his mind — the new policy, which also preserves case-tied evidence under a new Evidence Mode, is the toughest ALPR standard in the country by his own description. It is a striking admission from a company that built the poster child of AI surveillance: the tech spreads faster than oversight, and the fix is coming from inside.
Nebius is expanding its UK footprint, signing a deal with Vantage Data Centers to deploy Nvidia-powered AI infrastructure at a Wales facility that can support roughly 150 megawatts of critical IT load. The agreement puts Nebius gear inside Vantage's Newport site within the Cardiff CWL1 campus — the former Next Generation Data facility, running on 100 percent renewable energy with its own 400 kV substation — and is part of a roughly £1.7 billion ($2.26 billion) commitment to stand up 65 megawatts of Nvidia infrastructure across four UK sites by 2027. It's the first deployment in the South Wales AI Growth Zone, and it follows a blowout quarter we covered yesterday — Nebius cloud revenue jumps 514% to $575M. The pattern is the same across the neocloud sector: the money is there, the bottleneck is finding enough power and enough land to plug GPUs into.
What to watch: whether Flock's mandatory audit trail survives contact with cash-strapped police departments — and whether any state turns the company's voluntary standard into law.
Seven days of plate data, mandatory case codes, locked accounts — does this restore your trust in Flock, or is the surveillance network the problem itself? Tell us in the comments.
