I have a confession: I sometimes lie awake thinking about my laptop.
Not what’s on it. Well, not only what’s on it. I think about the little fingerprint sensor on the keyboard that so conveniently unlocks my entire digital life.
I’ve occasionally had the absurd thought: What if someone used my limp body to log into the motherboard of all my information?
It may sound like the setup to a bad spy comedy, but unfortunately the convenience of biometric security comes with a rather uncomfortable caveat: unlike a password, we can’t change our fingerprints. So, if I’m indisposed, who makes sure this security checkpoint remains secure?
That little thought keeps coming back to me, especially when I think about the rapid expansion of surveillance technology in our communities.
Take Flock Safety’s automated license plate readers, p. 14. There are legitimate reasons law enforcement wants these tools. They can help locate stolen vehicles, missing people, and criminal suspects. But once we create a system capable of recording where our vehicles travel, tracking our routines and routes, the question becomes less about what the technology can do and more about watching the people who control it.
Who has access? Who checks the searches?
Who makes sure an officer doesn’t use the system to track an ex-lover, a neighbor, or someone they simply don’t like? (Because these things have already happened.)
And perhaps most importantly, as “deletion” is one of the safeguards most often mentioned: Who makes sure the data is really, truly deleted?
Flock says that searches are logged for auditing, and license plate data is automatically and permanently deleted after the applicable retention period. Its default retention period is about to be updated to seven days, down from a standard of 30 days, although agencies can have different requirements.
That’s reassuring, up to a point.
But “automatically deleted” raises another question: Who independently verifies that it happened?
It’s a little like going to a website and clicking “Reject All” or “Reject Non-Essential” on its cookie policy popup. We’re told our wishes have been respected. But how would the average person ever know if they have been or not?
And this isn’t merely philosophical.
Because in Roseville, California, as reported by Business Insider on July 31, police records showed that of the 1,427 alerts involving stolen or felony vehicles in 2023 and 2024, Flock cameras misread license plates an astonishing 71% of the time. Fortunately, Roseville requires officers to independently verify an alert before taking enforcement action, and the department stated that none of the erroneous alerts resulted in a mistaken stop or arrest.
Yet Max Isaacs, director of technology law and policy with the Policing Project at New York University’s School of Law, told Business Insider that “a 71% misread rate is really beyond the pale.” He stated that “in the absence of concrete rules that directly address the problem of misreads, this technology is not safe to be deployed in communities.”
Other communities have reported the potential issues. Numerous outlets have documented wrongful stops and arrests stemming from erroneous license plate reader information, including a recent case in Brookfield, Wisconsin, where a stale Flock alert reportedly led officers to conduct a guns-drawn traffic stop on an innocent woman and her passengers. The woman involved, Amber Newell, told Fox6 News on Aug. 6 that this was actually the second guns-drawn stop she’d experienced that week. Her daughter was now scared of riding in the car.
That’s the part that keeps me up at night.
Technology doesn’t have to be perfect. Humans aren’t perfect. But when we willingly give imperfect technology enormous amounts of power, we need safeguards that are stronger than a policy sitting in some filing cabinet. We need independent audits. We need transparent retention and deletion policies. We need meaningful consequences for misuse. We need to know who can access what data, when and why they can access it, and where the ethical oversight is.
And before we install another camera, create another database, or expand another surveillance network, we must collectively ask one simple question:
Who watches the watchers?
Because if the answer is “trust us,” I’m not ready to hand over my license plate — or my fingerprint.
