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.
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.