When Garrett Langley talks about Flock Safety, he wants people to understand his company as a public safety partner rather than a private surveillance machine. In a video interview, the CEO pushed back against the idea that his company’s expanding network of automated license plate readers is creating something dystopian, insisting instead that transparency and accountability are central to how Flock operates. “Our end goal isn’t a dystopian future of surveillance; it’s one where we all feel safe,” Langley said. Flock was founded in 2017 with what he described as a simple goal: helping neighborhoods become safer. Since then, the company has become one of the largest players in the automated license plate reader industry, with cameras mounted on poles, apartment buildings, and other public locations that capture images of every passing vehicle, read its license plate, and feed that information into a searchable system for law enforcement. Flock currently has cameras in every American state except Alaska, and the company says it partners with more than 6,000 police agencies and more than 5,000 private customers nationwide. Langley says the technology has a tangible impact: in July alone, according to Flock, its cameras helped detect more than 1,000 missing people and more than 20,000 stolen cars, and over the past year the system supported more than one million criminal investigations and incidents. But as the company has grown, so has public unease. Communities across the country have debated whether to cancel or renew Flock contracts, protesters have appeared at city council hearings, and activists have called the technology a troubling step toward the kind of mass photography-oriented monitoring that ordinary people might never have expected to live with. Langley says that human recognition and accountability are part of the design, but many critics argue that no policy update can erase the fundamental concern: that a private surveillance network is quietly documenting the movements of millions of people who have done nothing wrong.
That opposition spans an unusually broad coalition. Chad Marlow, a senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, has studied Flock for years, and he says the company’s technology has managed to “win over” a broad set of Americans who rarely agree on anything. In his words, “Flock offends everyone, but for different reasons.” Libertarians see the system as government intrusion into ordinary life, some conservative voters view it as another sign of a deep state, progressives object to the policing applications, and many people simply wonder why their daily movements are being tracked in the first place. Marlow also pointed to a deeper legal concern: the network allows police to look up any vehicle that has driven anywhere near a camera without forward-looking suspicion and without a warrant. That, he says, is not just complicated, it is expensive. He argues that the Flock system empowers the government to track private movement on a mass scale, and the ALP data network is built in such a way that someone who has never been accused of crime can end up in a database simply by going to school, work, or the grocery store. That said, the data sharing has also been questioned. Flock does not sell its data directly to federal agencies, and there is no direct contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement or the Department of Homeland Security, but information can still flow to those agencies when local police share intelligence or when other partner organizations cooperate with federal enforcement. The ACLU says Flock’s model is still a form of data exploitation no matter how it is packaged; as Marlow put it, saying the company does not sell data is not very reassuring because data access is the service it offers.
Langley’s own background in engineering and business has shaped his views on how long that data should be kept. He studied at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and he has long argued that “data is a liability, not an asset.” That mindset is tied closely to the company’s newest round of privacy reforms, many of which are being announced against the backdrop of national recession and public anger. One of the biggest changes is a default data retention policy that shrinks the length of time Flock stores someone’s license plate image from 30 days to seven days. If a vehicle is never part of an criminal investigation, the image is supposed to be deleted after those seven days. Langley described that deletion as a hard delete. He says it applies to all systems, unless the image has become evidence in an active case, in which case it remains under separate legal rules. He also stressed that the shift makes Flock’s default far stricter than most current state regulations; the retention period allowed by law varies from place to place, and in some states it is much longer than seven days. The company says it now surpasses almost all existing maximums, except for states like New Hampshire, which already had stricter standards. But critics see this less as a sweeping reform than a useful but narrow update. The ACLU’s Marlow says a shorter default is better for privacy, but Flock’s change only sets the baseline. If a state allows longer retention and demands it, Flock cannot simply override the local decision. The updated policy also includes something called Evidence Mode, which allows data to be preserved beyond the seven-day window if a search or investigation is tied directly to a case number. That means defenders can still hold onto information if they feel they need more time to investigate, but the underlying promise is that no one’s movements will be kept forever with no reason for the tracking. Again, Marlow said the mode sounded vague, and it remains unclear what counts as part of the evidence or whether the tool might preserve more information than necessary.
Flock also announced additional community constraints as part of the updated protocols, including local control of search permissions, automatic audits of how officers use the system, and a requirement to attach a case code to every search. These changes appear to a remarkably structured approach to symbolic of that distrust. For example, local agencies are now able to block certain uses of their cameras, including searches that might be related to unpopular civil or political functions. The company says that privacy protections are not purely abstract, that a city can now control whether its data is used for, say, immigration enforcement. Flock is also making its audit assistance program mandatory, following incidents in which officers were accused of checking plates for personal reasons. The company would now monitor unusual patterns and lock out users whose activity seems suspicious until a supervisor restores them. Another major change is a requirement for a case code or investigation number for each search, rather than letting an officer query the database with vague keywords. Langley acknowledged that the company should have done that from the beginning, saying, “we got that one wrong.” The ACLU, however, has argued that voluntary policy plans have not so far been especially robust. Audits from law enforcement agencies have turned up searches marked with no reason form, weird comments, and filler phrases, suggesting the existing system was not sufficiently transparent. Marlow says locking or accessible surveillance data is a good idea, but that it is hard to know whether these changes are real improvements or simply the latest public announcement of PR.
Around the country, Flock’s camera network now has become a modern public debate. More than 80 communities have voted to cancel contracts, gone some struggle to leave unused cameras standing, and other cities are surprisingly forcing the company to remove them. The resistance is still notable because it is, as one expert, a first sustained rejection of a police surveillance technology. In Cleveland, city officials recently moved forward with a six-month contract renewal, and local police leaders defended Flock as an invaluable tool in solving homicides and other serious crimes. In Connecticut, a police chief says the license plate readers have been uniquely responsible for progress in several murder investigations. On the other side, a worked with city council and decided to leave the company after an audit found that records had been accessed by federal and state agencies in ways that were apparently not allowed by the agreed policy. A growing group known as DeFlock maps the location of cameras and tries to track where they have been rejected; it has counted tens of thousands of Flock cameras and dozens of local moves to turn away from the product. Residents in some cities have covered cameras with spray paint or physical covers, and city hall meetings, have been filled with frustration. Langley acknowledged that resistance has consequences, but disputes the depictions. He says that when about 16 cities recently experimented for a while with disconnection, many of them saw crime rates rise and decided they would return soon. But for the activists and the community groups that have spent hours pushing back, the real issue is not the camera, but everything that comes with it: unlimited time, federal sharing, and the possibility that friends, neighbors and also anyone who has never been accused of anything. I will be forced to be part of the government’s permanent memory.
The company, however, has no plans to reduce its original mission. Flock is still expanding beyond its famous camera network, into drones and hot-region cameras, and Langley says that despite the attention given to its ALPR business, those cameras now simply make up the different parts of its future lets. When asked whether these technologies contain the early warning signs of the Orwellian future, Langley disagreed, and said he owes paid the same taxes and has been through the same nervousness about the direction of the world. He said that if the company were truly building an invisible web of state surveillance, it was “so transparent” about the cameras and potential policy, unlike many direct-to-consumer apps that collect location without clear disclosure. But supporters and detractors agree that Flock it has become a breakthrough moment. Even if Flock disappeared tomorrow, the debate over license plate readers might continue with other vendors, which is why the ACLU’s Marlow calls Flock “a tip of the iceberg, rather than the iceberg.” The sustainable question is as widespread as the camera locations: how much tracking is necessary to let this feeling of security in return, and who decides when it has become too much? For now, the battle over Flock is far from over. But wherever the case is, each new installation and each repealed contract is not just a business dispute, but also a test of a long-term, suspicious relationship between local communities and increasingly endless, fast technological enforcement.
