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The surveillance company Flock told employees at an all-hands meeting Friday that its new people search product, Nova, will not include hacked data from the dark web. The announcement comes a little over a week after 404 Media broke the news about internal tension at the company about plans to use breached data, including from a 2021 Park Mobile data break.
Immediately following the all-hands meeting, Flock published details of its decision in a public blog post it says is designed to "correct the record on what Flock Nova actually does and does not do." The company said that following a "lengthy, intentional process" about what data sources it would use and how the product would work, it has decided not to supply customers with dark web data.
"The policy decision was also made that Flock will not supply dark web data," the company wrote. "This means that Nova will not supply any data purchased from known data breaches or stolen data."
Flock Nova is a new people search tool in which police will be able to connect license plate data from Flock’s automated license plate readers with other data sources in order to in some cases more easily determine who a car may belong to and people they might associate with.
404 Media previously reported on internal meetings, presentation slides, discussions, and Slack messages in which the company discussed how Nova would work. Part of those discussions centered on the data sources that could be used in the product. “You're going to be able to access data and jump from LPR to person and understand what that context is, link to other people that are related to that person [...] marriage or through gang affiliation, et cetera,” a Flock employee said during an internal company meeting, according to an audio recording. “There’s very powerful linking.”
In meeting audio obtained by 404 Media, an employee discussed the potential use of the hacked Park Mobile data, which became controversial within the company
“I was pretty horrified to hear we use stolen data in our system. In addition to being attained illegally, it seems like that could create really perverse incentives for more data to be leaked and stolen,” one employee wrote on Slack in a message seen by 404 Media. “What if data was stolen from Flock? Should that then become standard data in everyone else’s system?”
In Friday’s all-hands meeting with employees, a Flock executive said that it was previously “talking about capabilities that were possible to use with Nova, not that we were necessarily going to implement when we use Nova. And in particular one of those issues was about dark web data. Would Flock be able to supply that to our law enforcement customers to solve some really heinous crimes like internet crimes against children? Child pornography, human trafficking, some really horrible parts of society.”
“We took this concept of using dark web data in Nova and explored it because investigators told us they wanted to do it,” the Flock executive said in audio reviewed by 404 Media. “Then we ran it through our policy review process, which by the way this is what we do for all our new products and services. We ran this concept through the policy review process, we vetted it with product leaders, with our executive team, and we made the decision to not supply dark web data through the Nova platform to law enforcement at all.”
Flock said in its Friday blog that the company will supply customers with "public records information, Open-Source intelligence, and license plate reader data." The company said its customers can also connect their own data into the program, including their own records management systems, computer-aided dispatch, and jail records "as well as all of the above from other agencies who agree to share that data."
As 404 Media has repeatedly reported, the fact that Flock allows its customers to share data with a huge network of police is what differentiates Flock as a surveillance tool. Its automated license plate readers collect data, which can then be shared as part of either a searchable statewide or nationwide network of ALPR data.
