内容来源：https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/08/17/1142200/what-flocks-defenders-are-missing/

内容总结：

美国车牌识别监控巨头Flock近期宣布平台功能调整，旨在防止警察滥用系统进行非法追踪，但分析指出其改进措施存在明显漏洞，且未回应公众对大规模监控的担忧。伴随多起警察利用该技术骚扰女性的案件曝光，部分城市已解除合约，多州正立法限用或禁用相关设备。支持者认为该技术有助于破案，但批评者强调，问题的核心在于Flock的系統设计选择——决定收集哪些信息、谁可搜索、数据存储时长及共享范围——这些选择在安全与公民自由之间划定了界限。例如，新规要求搜索者输入案件编号，但Flock承认不核实编号真实性，形同虚设。针对寻人场景，文章建议仅在激活安珀警报等紧急情况下开放跨区域数据访问，而非默认允许大规模监控。同时，Flock虽建议数据保留七日，但各地机构实际可自定存储期限。法律专家指出，限制监控的最佳途径并非依赖企业自律，而是通过立法明确规则。随着城市和社区重新评估技术使用边界，未来可能出现由公众主导的、更平衡的监控政策。

中文翻译：

Flock的捍卫者们忽视了些什么

随着各城市重新审视这项技术，我们有必要追问：该公司的设计选择如何塑造了破案与保护公民自由之间的权衡取舍。

本文最初发表于《算法》（The Algorithm），即我们每周发布的AI通讯。若想第一时间在收件箱中收到此类文章，请在此订阅。

Flock，这家以在美国各地部署约12万个自动车牌识别摄像头而闻名的警用科技巨头，上周四宣布了其平台的一些变更。这些更新旨在防止警员将平台用于非法或不正当目的。

其中包括跟踪骚扰。《华盛顿邮报》近期确认了50起警员滥用Flock及其竞品系统的案例，通常是为了跟踪和骚扰女性。威斯康星州一名女性声称，她担任警员的前男友曾搜索她的车辆179次。另一名女性遭到警察局长跟踪，却无人可举报。

Flock的回应措施旨在确保警员的每一次搜索都有正当理由，例如使用软件标记异常搜索，并要求搜索者输入刑事案件编号。

然而，这些变更存在重大漏洞。例如，警员可以输入虚假的案件编号，就像他们此前撒谎绕过Flock的其他安全措施一样。这些政策也没有解决公民自由和隐私团体提出的一些更广泛的担忧——即Flock正将一种以打击犯罪为卖点的工具变成大规模监控网络。这些批评引发了越来越多的抵制，已有一些城市取消合同，一些州试图通过立法来完全限制或禁止车牌识别摄像头。

在此背景下，最近出现了若干为Flock辩护的观点：如果这些摄像头有助于破案，那有什么大不了的？运气好的话，它们或许能帮助抓到绑匪；即使没抓到，它们也不过是拍了我的车的照片，没人会费心去看。

暂且不论Flock的系统究竟在多大程度上真正破获或预防了犯罪这个悬而未决的问题，这些辩护都忽略了一个更重要的问题：Flock选择了构建什么样的打击犯罪系统？它的网络之所以以现在的方式运作，是因为一系列关于收集什么信息、谁可以搜索、保存多长时间、共享范围有多广的决策。这些决策设定了安全与公民自由之间交易的条件。相信技术应当在破案中发挥作用，不应意味着盲目接受这笔交易的条件。

以Flock新增的搜索前必须输入案件编号这一要求为例。这一设计旨在确保搜索具有合法目的。但Flock向《麻省理工科技评论》确认，它并不验证这些案件编号，因此警员只需输入一个虚假编号即可。我们可以设想另一种系统：要求案件编号与警察局的记录相匹配——这或许是更深入的整合，但也是强得多的保障，并且能留下更有用的审计追踪。

再来看寻找被绑架者或失踪人员这一Flock引用最多的使用场景。解决这类案件的工作将极大地受益于Flock的全国摄像头网络。但如果美国人希望警员仅为此目的使用该网络，我们可以按这种方式设计：与正在进行的安珀警报或类似紧急事件关联的搜索，或许可以访问周边城市更大范围的数据。这既能在紧急情况下保留网络的价值，又无需让人们接受大规模监控。

最后，还有Flock收集多少数据以及保存多久的问题。Flock基本上作为一个全国性网络运作：一个城市或州的警察可以搜索另一个地方收集的数据，各机构可以将数据保留数月甚至数年。然而Flock自己表示，90%的搜索发生在事件发生后一周内。这暗示了另一种可能的交易：仅在数据对破案真正有用时、以真正有用的范围来保存和共享数据。（该公司最近将建议保留时间改为七天，但实际上各机构可以随意保留数据多久。）

简言之，Flock可以将其监控设计得更加收窄。如果这样做，公司的一些批评者可能仍不会罢休。美国公民自由联盟（ACLU）的高级政策顾问查德·马洛半开玩笑地对我说，按他的标准，最可接受的Flock合同是“永远不被签署的那一份”，并强调限制监控的最佳方式不是Flock的新指导方针，而是新的法律。（Flock首席执行官加勒特·朗利则表示，他“可能永远会与ACLU持不同看法”。）

而收窄其技术范围将威胁到该公司面向警察局的整个卖点。车牌识别摄像头自20世纪90年代就已存在，用于收费和罚单。Flock的商业模式——以及近期800亿美元的估值——依赖的是将其摄像头打造成一个收集大量数据的大规模网络，为警察局提供一种现代化方式来理解不仅自己还有他人的数据。

Flock可能很快就被迫改变。城市已经取消了与该公司签订的合同。有些城市转向了竞争对手，另一些城市则在居民思考希望如何使用这项技术、制定警察必须遵守的新规则时暂停观望。最终的结果可能是，各个社区自行决定如何在这笔交易中平衡——技术如何用于破案，以及人们需要接受多大程度的监控才能实现这一点。

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英文来源：

What Flock’s defenders are missing
As cities reconsider the technology, it’s worth asking how the company’s design choices have shaped the trade-off between solving crimes and protecting civil liberties.
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here.
Flock, the police-tech giant known for its network of some 120,000 automatic license plate readers around the US, announced some changes to its platform last Thursday. The updates are meant to prevent officers from using the platform for illegal or illegitimate purposes.
That includes stalking. The Washington Post recently identified 50 cases in which officers misused systems from Flock and its competitors, often to stalk and harass women. One woman in Wisconsin alleged that her officer ex-boyfriend searched for her car 179 times. Another woman was being stalked by the chief of police, with nobody to report him to.
Flock has responded with practices aimed at ensuring that officers have a proper cause for every search, like using software to flag abnormal searches and requiring searchers to enter a criminal case number.
The changes come with big loopholes, though. For example, officers can enter bogus case numbers, just as they’ve lied to get around other Flock safeguards. The policies also don’t address some of the broader concerns from civil liberties and privacy groups that Flock is turning what was sold as a crime-stopping tool into a mass surveillance network. These criticisms have led to a growing backlash that already has some cities canceling contracts and some states trying to pass laws to limit or ban license plate readers entirely.
Amid all this, there have recently been several arguments defending Flock: If these cameras help solve crime, what’s the big deal? On a good day they might help catch a kidnapper, and if not, they’re simply snapping pictures of my car that nobody will bother to look at.
Putting aside the unanswered question about the extent to which Flock’s systems actually do solve or prevent crime, this all skips over a more important question: What kind of crime-fighting system has Flock chosen to build? Its network works the way it does because of a series of decisions about what information to collect, who can search it, how long to keep it, and how widely to share it. Those decisions set the terms of the bargain between security and civil liberties. Believing that technology should play a role in solving crime should not mean blindly accepting the terms of that bargain.
Consider, for example, its new requirement that officers enter a case number before running a search on Flock’s platform. This is meant to ensure that searches have a legitimate purpose. But Flock confirmed to MIT Technology Review that it doesn’t verify those case numbers, so an officer can simply enter a bogus one. One could imagine a system that instead requires case numbers that match the police department’s records—a more intrusive integration, perhaps, but also a far stronger safeguard and one that leaves a more useful audit trail.
Or what about finding people who have been kidnapped or have gone missing, the use case that Flock cites more than any other? Efforts to solve these crimes would hugely benefit from Flock’s nationwide network of cameras. But if Americans want officers to tap into that network only for this purpose, we could design it that way: Searches tied to an active Amber Alert, or a similar emergency, could perhaps access larger amounts of data from surrounding cities. That would preserve the network’s value in emergencies without requiring people to accept mass surveillance.
Finally, there’s the question of how much data Flock collects and how long it’s kept. Flock mostly operates as a national network: Police in one city or state can search data collected in another, and agencies can retain that data for months or years. Yet Flock itself says 90% of searches happen within a week of an incident. That suggests another possible bargain: Keep and share data only as widely and for as long as it’s actually useful for solving crimes. (The company recently changed its recommended retention time to seven days, but in reality agencies can hold onto data for as long as they like.)
In short, Flock could design its surveillance to be much narrower. If it did, some of the company’s critics might not cease. Chad Marlow, a senior policy counsel at the ACLU, half-joked to me that the most acceptable Flock contract by his standards is “one that is never signed” and emphasized that the best way to set limits on surveillance isn’t with new Flock guidelines but with new laws. (Flock CEO Garrett Langley, for his part, said he’ll “probably always have a different view than the ACLU.”)
And narrowing the scope of its technology would threaten the company’s entire pitch to police departments. License plate readers have been around since the 1990s, used for tolls and ticketing. Flock’s business model—and recent $8 billion evaluation—relies on instead leveraging its cameras into a massive network that collects rich amounts of data and offers police departments a modernized way to make sense of not just their own but others’.
Flock’s hand might soon be forced. Cities have canceled contracts with the company. Some have gone to competitors, while others are taking a beat as residents ponder how they want this tech to be used and write new rules for police to abide by. The result might be that communities drive their own bargains about how technology can be used to solve crime and how much surveillance people should have to accept for it to do so.
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