The automated license plate reader company Flock Safety is abandoning plans to sell an acoustic gunshot detection device whose ability to detect screaming and other types of “human distress” sparked an outcry from privacy advocates when it was announced in October.
Flock quietly revealed on July 10 that it has decided to “remove” the product, according to a company blog post.
“This feature was designed to help identify potential violent incidents in areas where other public safety tools were less effective,” the blog post said. “The feature was only available to a small number of customers as part of a limited trial, and was never broadly released.”
Flock said the decision is the result of “community consultation.”
The ALPR company emphasized that the detection system was not designed to capture people’s voices in bulk.
“The system cannot understand speech, analyze language, or identify voices,” the blog post said. “It doesn’t now, and it never has.”
The backlash to Flock’s Distress Detection feature began not long after the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) reported on the product’s existence in October 2025.
The system is dangerous because of “the civil liberties concerns it poses, the possibility it could summon armed police to every loud interaction happening on the street, and because in several places this type of spying would be illegal under state eavesdropping laws,” EFF senior policy analyst Matthew Guariglia said in a July 17 blog post that noted Flock’s change.
Flock also was in the news earlier in the month after the Los Angeles Police Department announced it would be the latest in a string of law enforcement agencies to cut ties with the surveillance firm.
The department is seeking more protections for how the information collected by Flock is managed and stored, officials have said.
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