Flock Safety to add privacy and data-retention guardrails amid US backlash

San Francisco officials have announced enhanced privacy measures for their automated license plate reader system. The new regulations limit data retention to 30 days and restrict access to local authorities. Additionally, officers must link searches to specific incidents, ensuring accountability in usage. Concurrently, surveillance startup Flock Safety is facing vandalism and significant contract cancellations across the country. These developments reflect rising public concerns regarding surveillance technology and its implications.

The sudden proliferation of Flock cameras and abuses has led to a response from Florida lawmakers, but they have stopped short of regulating this technology and its uses.

In the US, Flock Security cameras form an AI-powered surveillance network that records licence plates and other vehicle information. Their controversial use has become a political issue ahead of the midterm elections, and the cameras are increasingly being targeted by vandals. Caitlin Brown explains.

The architecture of automated license plate readers turns local cameras into a far-reaching surveillance network that can be accessed by agencies that never purchased the devices.

The bill would require warrants for Flock camera data as scrutiny grows over the company's vast surveillance network.

Flock Safety outlined a series of policy changes to its controversial database of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) as Washington mounts pressure on the company to prevent misuse of the technology. The letter from Flock's chief legal officer, Dan Haley, was sent earlier this month to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who is spearheading an investigation...

Surveillance cameras from Flock Safety have become a controversial privacy battleground, as the communities in which they are installed wake up to their sinister potential, and stories roll in of …read more

Flock cameras and civil liberties

Grass Valley authorities removed Flock cameras from their city, but later found that Flock had reinstalled them.

The company, which has a hundred and thirty thousand cameras monitoring the streets of the U.S., frames privacy as a worthwhile trade-off for safety and security, echoing the language of the post-9/11 surveillance boom.

Backlash to Flock cameras has been growing in recent months, but the surveillance equipment company isn't the only one that may be operating in your neighborhood.

Although police say the cameras are an invaluable crime-fighting tool, some critics say their pervasiveness amounts to unconstitutional warrantless mass surveillance.

Politicians on the right and left are pushing back against Flock as more Americans voice opposition to the techGrowing factions from both sides of the political aisle in the US are pushing back against surveillance cameras made by a single company, a rare response in a sharply divided country with a president pushing an unwaveringly pro-tech agenda.The bipartisan backlash against Flock Safety cameras resembles nationwide rage toward the construction of large datacenters that power artificial intelligence. Polling shows roughly 75% of Americans oppose new datacenter construction in their areas. Continue reading...

Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley says his surveillance company has become an easy villain as Americans vandalise its cameras and cities cancel contracts. Florida has ordered automated licence plate readers off state highways within 30 days, Texas has pulled funding, and 93 local governments dropped Flock in August alone. Flock has cut data retention to seven days and made abuse detection mandatory, but the ACLU and EFF remain unconvinced.

Flock Safety cameras, the most widely used automatic license plate readers in the country, are facing new pushback in response to privacy concerns.

Flock cameras sparked pushback, even as firms touted their crime-fighting benefits.

BBC Verify examines the expanding network of Flock cameras in the US and the backlash against it.

Mere months ago, Flock, an Atlanta-based security camera startup, was known mostly by its target customer base: police departments, cities and towns, with a smattering of colleges, neighborhood associations, and businesses. Today, Flock’s license-plate-reading, AI-driven cameras are widely familiar, and the company is practically a household name. In fact, it’s arguably the breakthrough brand of the year—for all the wrong reasons. This is, after all, a technology designed for cities and law enforcement. It’s not a consumer-facing brand. But reports of scandals involving police misuse were an early spark in turning Flock into a target earlier this year; not just for activists raising concerns, but vandals destroying the cameras. Since then the anti-Flock critiques have become steadily more widespread, and creatively viral—a full-on “Flocklash” as Fast Company’s Grace Snelling put it recently. A downed Flock in Houston, TX, 2026. [Photo: Raquel Natalicchio/Houston Chronicle/Getty Images] Along the way, Flock has become a de facto stand-in for a whole category of surveillance technology. DeFlock, for example, is an activist project aimed at mapping license plate readers in general, not just Flock’s. More broadly, Flock has arguably become the victim of a much wider unease: about AI, “smart” glasses rewriting the rules of public space, “surveillance” pricing, and a host of other assorted tech-culture anxieties. None of those other fights are about Flock. But if you’re looking for a specific brand to pick on, Flock has become a familiar, even safe, all-purpose choice. Partly this is a function of Flock’s success. Well before it became widely familiar to the general public, Flock was already quite successful with its actual customers. With a reported 120,000 cameras in cities and towns across the country, snapping images of 20 billion license plates every month, Flock was valued last year at $7.5 billion. The company has contracts with a reported 7,000 organizations, and recently told The Wall Street Journal that, Flocklash notwithstanding, it continues to sign new contracts “at a rapid clip.” Once you’ve seen a black Flock camera with a top-mounted solar panel, often on a black pole, they’re easy to spot. But all that familiarity can be a boomerang. Across dozens of states, Flock cameras have been stolen, smashed, covered in paint, and shot. There have been anti-Flock rallies in 44 states, and the cameras have become a midterm election issue. Critics range from Tucker Carlson to the American Civil Liberties Union, and from Bernie Sanders to Ron DeSantis. But the more viral front has been performative. Perhaps most notoriously, a guy in a Darth Vader costume showed up to a San Diego public safety meeting to mock prosurveillance rhetoric in a clip that racked up hundreds of thousands of likes. The underlying controversies are not frivolous. There have been multiple examples of police officers using the technology to track spouses, exes, or strangers they’re interested in. Flock employees have been accused of accessing camera feeds. Reporting from 404 Media connected Flock’s National Lookup tool to immigration enforcement, among other issues. Activists have argued its technology is too susceptible to infrastructure-hack attacks. And the latest concern from skeptics: The company is introducing a line of surveillance drones that travel 60 miles per hour, hundreds of feet in the air. Flock, of course, has had to adjust to the attention. It has announced a flurry of new operational “guardrails,” and its CEO, Garrett Langley, has apologized for instances of its technology being abused. But he has insisted that despite the criticism, the company’s mission ultimately creates a safer society. “When people talk about just one of these, privacy or safety, they’re prioritizing the wrong thing, and what we have to prioritize as a country is compromise,” Langley told Fox News. “How do we have our safety, and how do we balance privacy?” So far this has done little to slow the vandalism or the viral mockery. Flock critics say that shedding the surveillance-boogeyman image has to start with structural transparency, such as audited logs of who searched what data and why (something the ACLU has long requested), and similar measures. The bottom line is that, fairly or not, Flock has become, for some, a symbol of tech’s dystopian potentials. It’s going to have to learn to live with that scrutiny—and prove that it has nothing to hide.

Flock Safety has been facing scrutiny amid concerns about privacy and police misuse of its surveillance technology.

Across California, cameras are quietly capturing the license plates and features of millions of vehicles—and allowing law enforcement to search where those vehicles have been. The cameras are operated by Flock Safety, a surveillance technology company whose rapidly expanding network has become the center of a growing debate over crime fighting, privacy, and mass surveillance....

Lots of people—dare we say most people—hate Flock. And, lately, they’ve been going to increasingly creative lengths to make it known.  Privately held Flock Safety is an Atlanta-based surveillance technology company that operates a nationwide network of automated cameras that record the license plate numbers and other characteristics of passing vehicles every day. Police claim that the tech is an important crime-fighting tool. Recently, though, it’s also become emblematic of citizen’s concerns about the ramifications of mass surveillance.  Flock is by no means the only company operating large-scale surveillance tools across the U.S. In fact, competitors like Axon, Vigilant Solutions (a subsidiary of Motorola Solutions), Genetec, and Jenoptik have all been cited by the ACLU as other installers of “creepy” license plate-reading cameras. But Flock, and its vocal founder Garrett Langley, have become the undisputed center of a broader public outcry against mass surveillance—and the Flocklash is reaching a creative fever pitch. Flock bottom? Right now, Flock is facing mounting pressure from local governments, citizens, and artists to reconsider the ubiquity of its cameras.  As Fast Company reported earlier this month, more than 50 agencies or jurisdictions have canceled, suspended, or rejected Flock contracts, or deactivated its cameras, since the start of 2026 amid concerns that the data can be accessed for immigration enforcement or used in unauthorized tracking. The pushback has been so intense that, on August 13, the company announced a flurry of new guardrails to its operations.  According to an NPR review published on August 21, Flock cameras have become the target of widespread vandalism. In at least 36 states, NPR found records of the cameras being stolen, sawed down, covered in paint, and even shot at with guns.  Meanwhile, some community members are opting to use art, protest, and social media to amplify the anti-Flock message as widely as possible.  Early this month, photographer Brendan North began posting videos of himself creating protest art at his local Flock cameras, which have collectively amassed several million views. These demonstrations include pointing a mirror at a Flock camera with the phrase “Go Flock yourself,” having a toddler hold a bunch of red balloons next to a camera to frame “the innocence of a child against the heavy handed overreach of the surveillance state,” and blindfolding a camera with the American flag. “Surveil the rebel scum” On August 20, an unidentified man showed up to a San Diego public safety committee meeting dressed as Darth Vader, where he proceeded to espouse his support of Flock. “We must continue utilizing Flock technologies so that we can follow and surveil the Rebel scum,” he said. One video of the meeting now has nearly 500,000 likes on Instagram.  Producer and data scientist Benn Jordan has been speaking out about Flock and other surveillance companies of its ilk for months. On August 21, he posted a video claiming that Flock blocked him from attending its annual conference, Flock Forward, and shared that, in retaliation, he set up a spy-movie-esque van outside the conference center full of its own surveillance equipment, which he used to watch and record data from the conference. That video now has more than 700,000 likes.  Watching the watchers Most recently, on August 23, a group of protestors from the climate action group The Sunrise Movement staged a demonstration outside the home of Chris Larsen, a cryptocurrency billionaire and a cofounder of Ripple Labs. Larsen has worked to install private cameras across San Francisco in recent years, including by reportedly financially supporting the San Francisco Police Department’s Real-Time Investigation Center, which uses Flock tech. At the protest, activists hoisted signs with phrases like “Does this make you feel safer, Chris?” and built their own paper surveillance cameras to “watch” the outside of Larsen’s property.  “Billionaires like Chris Larsen think they can fund the end of privacy and think they won’t be watched for it,” Sunrise Movement campaign director Kidus Gima told Fast Company in an email. “Young people are showing that this isn’t true. Young people are getting creative and using their first amendment rights to bring surveillance to millionaires and billionaires.” Flock did not have an immediate comment on these recent forms of protest against the company. In an interview with Fox News over the weekend, Langley called for a national “compromise” between promoting privacy and safety.

Flock Safety's CEO advocates for a compromise between privacy and public safety concerns. The company faces criticism and vandalism over its surveillance technology deployment. Reports detail police misuse of Flock cameras, prompting an apology from the CEO. Flock has reduced data retention and requires case codes for access. The CEO also calls for stronger regulations on surveillance data misuse.

Cities are canceling contracts. Cameras are getting vandalized, and lawyers who have reviewed the company’s contracts say data ownership is not clearly defined.

Flock Safety faces a growing public outcry over concerns that its surveillance technology could be misused.

Flock cameras face vandalism and protests amid privacy concerns, leading CEO Garrett Langley to call for compromise between public safety and accountability.

Flock Safety is having a hard month. The surveillance technology company, which has sold more than 120,000 automated license plate reader cameras to some 6,000 police departments across the US, is up to its neck in cancelled contracts—at least 34 since the start of 2026—and public backlash. Dozens of police officers have lost their jobs […]

Flock, the maker and operator of surveillance cameras and license plate readers, has come under fire as critics accuse it of surveilling Americans and not doing enough to curtail abuse

Despite a public backlash against the tech, Flock's business is continuing to expand beyond license plate readers.

Thousands of US cities and towns have installed surveillance tools made by Flock Safety, a fast-growing Atlanta startup. The connected devices, such as sensors and automated license plate readers, have allowed law-enforcement agencies to map vehicles’ travel over long distances, which, they say, bolsters their ability to fight crime. But critics contend the network of cameras amounts to mass surveillance.

Flock Safety is facing a growing backlash across the country from communities and civil liberties advocates concerned over the surveillance technology company’s network of AI-powered license plate readers. Amid a wave of privacy lawsuits and terminated contracts, Flock announced changes to its privacy and data retention policies Thursday in an attempt to quell concerns around mass surveillance and misuse...

'Have I Been Flocked?' lets drivers check license plate searches as Flock introduces new privacy safeguards and oversight rules.

The company’s attempts to protect Americans’ privacy “will do nothing to protect innocent people from warrantless mass surveillance,” says an Institute for Justice attorney.

Some law enforcement officers have been accused of using the eyes in the sky for personal ends to stalk partners and ex-partners

Garrett Langley, Flock Safety CEO and founder, talks about rolling out new guardrails to enhance privacy protections and reduce instances of abuse. Some police officers have been accused of misusing the company's license plate readers. Langley says they are working to balance privacy rights and safety while holding people accountable for unauthorized use of the cameras and technology. He speaks to David Gura on "Bloomberg Open Interest." (Source: Bloomberg)

{beacon} Technology Technology   The Big Story Flock updates privacy policies amid backlash Flock Safety will implement new privacy and data retention policies as pressure grows on the automated license plate operator to prevent its technology from being abused or used to conduct mass surveillance. © Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images The company announced Thursday it will shorten the...

Flock CEO Garrett Langley stated that key platform updates will convert previously optional safeguards into mandatory features for all users by Jan. 1

CEO announces steps after reports that system is used to target immigrants or people seeking out-of-state abortionsFor nearly a decade, the company Flock Safety has gradually built out a network of cameras across the US that allows law enforcement officials to conduct about 20bn license plate scans every month.In that time, the company had largely left the decision to turn on safety measures up to its customers. Many of those organizations did not turn them on. Continue reading...

Flock Safety, the private AI-powered security camera company installing surveillance technology around the U.S., announced new security measures amid intensifying backlash and reports of law enforcement abuse.  The post Flock Safety Announces New Privacy Measures After Backlash, Reports of Law Enforcement Abuse appeared first on Breitbart.

Controversial surveillance company Flock Safety announced new privacy guardrails amid nationwide backlash.

Flock Safety will implement new privacy and data retention policies as pressure grows on the automated license plate operator to prevent its technology from being abused or used to conduct mass surveillance. The company announced Thursday it will shorten the recommended default data retention window from 30 to seven days to cut the amount of...

On Thursday, CEO Garrett Langley outlined new safety and privacy changes for the surveillance camera network "that came from listening."

Flock Safety plans to establish new guardrails for its technology following backlash over allegations that its automated license plate readers are being misused and enabling mass surveillance.