Washington Court Rules That Data Captured on Flock Safety Cameras Are Public Records

A Washington state trial court has shot down local municipalities’ effort to keep automated license plate reader (ALPR) data secret.

The Skagit County Superior Court in Washington rejected the attempt to block the public’s right to access data gathered by Flock Safety cameras, protecting access to information under the Washington Public Records Act (PRA). Importantly, the ruling from the court makes it clear that this access is protected even when a Washington city uses Flock Safety, a third-party vendor, to conduct surveillance and store personal data on behalf of a government agency.

"The Flock images generated by the Flock cameras...are public records," the court wrote in its ruling. "Flock camera images are created and used to further a governmental purpose. The Flock images created by the cameras located in Stanwood and Sedro-Woolley were paid for by Stanwood and Sedro Wooley [sic] and were generated for the benefit of Stanwood and Sedro-Woolley."

The cities’ move to exempt the records from disclosure was a dangerous attempt to deny transparency and reflects another problem with the massive amount of data that police departments collect through Flock cameras and store on Flock servers: the wiggle room cities seek when public data is hosted on a private company’s server.

Flock Safety's main product is ALPRs, camera systems installed throughout communities to track all drivers all the time. Privacy activists and journalists across the country recently have used public records requests to obtain data from the system, revealing a variety of controversial uses. This has included agencies accessing data for immigration enforcement and to investigate an abortion, the latter of which may have violated Washington law. A recent report from the University of Washington found that some cities in the state are also sharing the ALPR data from their Flock Safety systems with federal immigration agents. 

In this case, a member of the public in April filed a records request with a Flock customer, the City of Stanwood, for all footage recorded during a one-hour period in March. Shortly afterward, Stanwood and another Flock user, the City of Sedro-Woolley requested the local court rule that this data is not a public record, asserting that “data generated by Flock [automated license plate reader cameras (ALPRs)] and stored in the Flock cloud system are not public records unless and until a public agency extracts and downloads that data." 

If a government agency is conducting mass surveillance, EFF supports individuals’ access to data collected specifically on them, at the very least. And to address legitimate privacy concerns, governments can and should redact personal information in these records while still disclosing information about how the systems work and the data that they capture. 

This isn’t what these Washington cities offered, though. They tried a few different arguments against releasing any information at all. 

The contract between the City of Sedron-Woolley and Flock Safety clearly states that "As between Flock and Customer, all right, title and interest in the Customer Data, belong to and are retained solely by Customer,” and “Customer Data” is defined as "the data, media, and content provided by Customer through the Services. For the avoidance of doubt, the Customer Data will include the Footage." Other Flock-using police departments across the country have also relied on similar contract language to insist that footage captured by Flock cameras belongs to the jurisdiction in question. 

The contract language notwithstanding, officials in Washington attempted to restrict public access by claiming that video footage stored on Flock’s servers and requests for that information would constitute the