How expanding web of license plate readers could be ‘weaponized’ against abortion

Flock Safety, a rapidly expanding company that sells license plate readers to police and neighborhoods across the US, has an ambitious mission: to eliminate crime.

Since being founded in 2017, Flock says it has contracted with more than 1,200 law enforcement partners in more than 40 states. It provides its services to more than 2,000 neighborhoods, and is expanding the products it offers beyond license plate readers to include a gunshot detection system.

Now, privacy advocates are warning that the extensive surveillance network could be weaponized against people seeking abortions in states that have enacted bans and restrictions on the practice following the US supreme court's decision to repeal federal abortion protections, including by allowing police to monitor abortion clinics and the vehicles that are seen around it.

Technology like Flock's could be used to "criminalize people seeking reproductive health and further erode people's ability to move about their daily lives free from being tracked and traced", said Chris Gilliard, a tech fellow at Social Science Research Council, an independent non-profit research organization.

Flock says the supreme court's decision on abortion and warnings about how law enforcement may use its services in abortion-related prosecutions haven't prompted it to reconsider its mission: "Flock's mission as a business is to eliminate crime," Josh Thomas, the vice-president of external affairs at Flock, said. "Our position at Flock remains consistent in response to the Dobbs decision. Our perspective is that we do not enact laws, and our mission is not specific to any particular laws."

Thomas said the company "trusts" and "provides technology for" the "democratically elected governing bodies, and their chosen law enforcement personnel, to enforce the laws that they enact".

"We expect cities in California may operate differently than cities in Texas or Illinois or Rhode Island," he continued. "So it would be inaccurate to characterize Flock as being for or against any particular issue. We support local governments enforcing their local laws."

License plate reader companies are just one of several tech companies that are facing scrutiny for the ways in which they provide data or technology to law enforcement seeking to prosecute abortion cases. In August, for instance, Facebook came under fire for providing Nebraska police with the private messages between a mother and daughter who were being investigated for allegedly conducting an illegal abortion.

The information collected by companies like Flock is particularly alarming, experts say, because it can help police paint a deeply detailed picture of the movements of specific vehicles and individuals.

License plate readers, which are usually installed on streetlights, highway overpasses or police squad cars, capture the details of passing cars and help police keep track of the vehicles that pass through certain locations or neighborhoods.

The information is collected in a database, which police can search to see where certain vehicles have been or what cars have been in a certain area during a specific time frame.

Flock's website says its products help capture "objective evidence" that is then run through machine learning-enabled software that allows the company to, for instance, help police identify vehicles that may be traveling with the suspected car. The company says police can also upload their own image of a car and the software "will match it to vehicles recorded by Flock Safety cameras in the past 30 days".

In addition to contracting directly with hundreds of police departments, Flock says in its privacy policy that it may share data the company stores with any government agency in response to legal requests like subpoenas or warrants.

Flock's Talon platform, its national law enforcement search network, also allows police departments it works with to share their license plate footage with hundreds of other police departments across the country. Therefore, law enforcement in a state where abortion is legal can share data with police in a state where abortion is banned. For instance, in California, the Vallejo police department, which has detected nearly 400,000 vehicles in the last month, shares its license plate reader data with law enforcement in Texas and Arizona.

Flock says it does not own the data and points out that residents can see how the city collects data through Flock's transparency portal.

"The cities and/or law enforcement agencies own the data and they decide - not Flock - with whom they share their footage and how they wish to enforce their laws," Thomas said.

Dave Maass, the director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties organization, said he hoped current and prospective Flock clients in places where abortion is legal will scrutinize the company's stance on abortion laws and "ask themselves the question: can I trust this company with our people's data"?

Many surveillance companies pitch their services as a way to increase public safety, but "Flock Safety's position illustrates how surveillance isn't actually about benefiting society or protecting people - it's about enforcing the political goals of those in power," he argued.