Framingham, MA Flock Contract Cancelled After Public Backlash

Framingham, MA has cancelled its contract for Flock Safety cameras after months of extensive public backlash due to privacy and civil liberties concerns.

Framingham is just the latest in a list of over 30 cities that have cancelled their contracts, citing similar reasons.

Framingham Police Department Administrative Lt. Rachel Mickens told Boston.com "We will continue to balance technology and public safety needs with transparency, accountability, and the privacy concerns of the community."

The Flock system will be shut off on June 30. The city and Flock will coordinate to remove the cameras.

Mayor Charlie Sisitsky told Boston.com in the same article "There is no evidence of inappropriate access or sharing of data." This directly contradicts the previous behavior of Flock and police officers relying on their cameras.

The cameras work by scanning license plates of cars in order to track down stolen vehicles or ones whose owner is suspected of a crime.

Rather than being localized to a specific city, though, there have been multiple cases of Flock cameras used to track someone down that's nowhere near the city, like one case where a Texas cop searched nationwide for a woman who got an abortion, abusing his access to 83,000 cameras all over the U.S.

The cameras often mess up and the wrong person gets arrested, like what happened to a man who was arrested and thrown in jail for a month even though later it was proven he was 5 miles away at the time.

As the Flock network has grown, false positives like this have gotten more common, and the police often fail to do the minimum amount of police work it would take to verify the innocence of these people.

Officers also often abuse their access to the national Flock Safety camera network to stalk their exes, not even in relation to a crime.

Flock have even outright lied to cities and installed cameras without permission.

The cameras have been shown to have incredibly lackluster security as well. They were shown to run Android 8, an OS from 2017, and had exposed USB ports for hackers to attach a malicious USB device to and take them over.

They can also be tricked into connecting to a malicious Wi-Fi network and have their credentials captured since they're sent in plaintext. Hackers could easily be using these cameras as their own personal spy network and likely no one would know.

Clearly, the public outcry against Flock is working. Hopefully more cities will cancel their contracts, every bit helps.