flock safety – Bredemarket

Skagit County: No Data to Scrape (For Now)

My Friday post about Sedro-Woolley, Stanwood, and Flock Safety is already out of date.

Original post: Flock Safety data is public record

That post, “Privacy: What Happens When You Data Scrape FROM the Identity Vendors?”, discussed the case involving the two cities above and a private resident, Jose Rodriguez. The resident requested all Flock Safety camera output during particular short time periods. The cities semantically argued they didn’t have the data; Flock Safety did. Meanwhile the requested data was auto-deleted, technically making the request moot.

But not legally.

“IT IS HEREBY ORDERED, ADJUDGED AND DECREED that Plaintiff’s motion for Declaratory Judgment that the Flock camera records are not public records is DENIED.”

So the police attempt to keep the records private failed. Since it’s government material, it’s public record and accessible by anyone.

Update: the cameras are turned off

Now here’s the part I missed in my original post, according to CarScoops:

“[I]t turns out that those pictures are public data, according to a judge’s recent ruling. And almost as soon as the decision landed, local officials scrambled to shut the cameras down….

“Attorneys for the cities said they will review the decision before determining whether to appeal. For now, their Flock cameras aren’t coming back online.”

Because CarScoops didn’t link to the specific decisions by the cities, I investigated further.

Update 2: the cameras were turned off a long time ago

I sought other sources regarding Stanwood, Sedro-Woolley, and Flock Safety, and discovered that CarScoops did not state the truth when it said “almost as soon as the decision landed, local officials scrambled to shut the cameras down.”

Turns out Stanwood shut its cameras off in May, awaiting the judge’s eventual ruling.

“Fourteen Flock cameras were installed in Stanwood this February. Since May, they have been turned off.

“In November 2024, the Stanwood City Council approved a $92,000 contract with Flock Safety to install the cameras….

“The city is seeking a court judgment on whether Flock footage is public record or if it is exempt from the state Public Records Act.”

Moving on to Sedro-Woolley:

“The city of Sedro-Woolley is no longer using cameras that read license plates while it seeks a court ruling on whether images recorded by the cameras are considered public records.

“Police Chief Dan McIlraith said the seven Flock Safety cameras that went live in Sedro-Woolley in March were disabled in June.”

How to turn the cameras on again

From my perspective, the only way I see the Flock Safety cameras being turned on again is if the cities of Stanwood and Sedro-Woolley take the following two actions.

First, the cities need to establish or beef up their license plate recognition policies. Specifically, they need to set the rules for how to reply to public records requests. (And no, “stall for 30 days until the records are auto-deleted” doesn’t count.)

Second, and only after a policy is established, implement some form of redaction software. Something that protects the privacy of license plates, faces, and other personally identifying information of people who are NOT part of a criminal investigation.

And yes, such software exists. Flock Safety itself does not offer it—apparently it never, um, envisioned that a city would be forced to release all its data. But companies such as Veritone and CaseGuard do offer such software offering automatic redaction.

If you are a police agency capturing video feeds, plan now.

Privacy: What Happens When You Data Scrape FROM the Identity Vendors?

There is a lot of discussion about data scraping, an activity in which Company 1 takes the information publicly posted by Company 2 and incorporates it into its own records.

In the identity world, this takes the form of a company “scraping” the facial images that were publicly posted by a second company, such as a social media company.

I think that we all know of one identity company that is well-known (a euphemism for “notorious”) for scraping facial images from multiple sources. These not only include government-posted mugshots, but also content posted by private social media firms.

Needless to say, the social media companies think that data scraping is completely evil and terrible and identity vendors that do this should be fined and put out of businress. The identity vendor is question has a different view, even stating at one point that it had a (U.S.) First Amendment right to scrape data.

But what happens when someone wants to scrape data FROM an identity company?

A Skagit County court case

404 Media links to a Skagit County, Washington court case that addresses this very issue: in this case, data captured by Flock Safety.

The case is CITY OF SEDRO-WOOLLEY and CITY OF STANWOOD, Washington Municipal Corporations vs. JOSE RODRIGUEZ. The following are findings of fact:

“On April 10, 2025, Defendant, Jose Rodriguez made a Public Records Request to the Snohomish Police Department. He requested all of the city’s Flock cameras pictures and data logs between 5 pm and 6 pm on March 30, 2025.”

This particular record does not indicate WHY Rodriguez made this request, but 404 Media provided a clarification from Rodriguez himself.

“I wanted the records to see if they would release them to me, in hopes that if they were public records it would raise awareness to all the communities that have the Flock cameras that they may be public record and could be used by stalkers, or burglars scoping out a house, or other ways someone with bad intentions may use them. My goal was to try getting these cameras taken down by the cities that put them up.”

The City of Stanwood (don’t know its relation to Snohomish) answered Rodriguez in part:

“Stanwood PD is not the holder of the records you’re seeking; you may be able to request the records at FlockSafety.com.”

Incidentally, this is a common issue with identity databases using vendor softwares; who owns the data? I’ve addressed this before regarding the Milwaukee Police Department.

Now some legal talent may be able to parse what the word “holder” means, especially in regard to data hosted in the cloud. Perhaps Stanwood PD was trying to claim that since the records weren’t on site, it wasn’t the “holder.”

Anyway, the defendant subsequently made a similar request to the City of Sedro-Woolley, but for a different date. Sedro-Woolley didn’t provide the images either.

Then it gets weird.

What happened to the data?

“The Flock records sought by Defendant from Stanwood and Sedro-Woolley have been auto-deleted.”

Well how convenient.

And the listed statements of fact also contain the following:

“The contract between Flock and Stanwood sates that all Flock images generated off Flock cameras located in Stanwood are the property of Stanwood.

“The contract between Flock and Sedro-Woolley states that all Flock images generated off Flock cameras located in Sedro-Woolley are the property of Sedro-Woolley.”

The judge’s ruling

Fast forward to November 6, when Judge Elizabeth Neidzwski ruled on the cities’ claim that the Flock camera data was not a public record.

“IT IS HEREBY ORDERED, ADJUDGED AND DECREED that Plaintiff’s motion for Declaratory Judgment that the Flock camera records are not public records is DENIED.”

404 Media noted that the cities argued that they resisted the request to…protect privacy.

“In affidavits filed with the court, police argued that ‘if the public could access the Flock Safety System by making Public Records Act requests, it would allow nefarious actors the ability to track private persons and undermine the effectiveness of the system.’ The judge rejected every single one of these arguments.”

Of course, there are those who argue that the police themselves are the “nefarious actors,” and that they shouldn’t be allowed to track private persons either.

But the parties may take the opposite argument

This is not the only example of conflicting claims over WHO has the right to privacy. In fact, if the police were filming protestors and agitators and wanted the public’s help in identifying them, the police and the protestors would take the opposite arguments in the privacy issue: the police saying the footage SHOULD be released, and the protestors who were filmed saying it SHOULD NOT.

Privacy is in the eye of the beholder.

My Thoughts on the Amazon Ring-Flock Safety Partnership

Amazon didn’t get a lot of good news today, and there was another negative news item that people focused on the AWS outage probably missed.

Anthony Kimery of Biometric Update wrote an article entitled “Ring’s partnership with Flock raises privacy alarms.” I offered the following commentary on LinkedIn’s Bredemarket Identity Firm Services page.

Perhaps I’m industry-embedded, but this seems fine to me. Consent appears to be honored everywhere.

“Under the deal, agencies that use Flock’s Nova or FlockOS investigative platforms will soon be able to post Community Requests through Ring’s Neighbors app, asking nearby residents to share doorbell footage relevant to an investigation.

“Each request includes a case ID, time window, and map of the affected area. Ring says participation is voluntary and that residents can choose whether to respond, and agencies cannot see who declines. Users can also disable the feature entirely in their account settings.”

On the other hand, Senator Ron Wyden doesn’t trust Flock at all and says that “abuse of Flock cameras is inevitable.”

Heck, abuse of citizens by the U.S. Senate is inevitable, but citizens aren’t demanding that the Senate cease operations.