Flock Promised to Create an Ethics Board to Protect Privacy - Where Is It?
The short version: Business Reform digs up Flock's 2020 written promise to create an ethics oversight board — and asks why it still doesn't exist five years later.
Our Take
Credit to Business Reform for pulling receipts. A written promise from a CEO isn't a tweet that gets deleted and forgotten — it's a commitment on the record, made at the exact moment Flock needed to calm fears about a nationwide camera network with zero independent oversight. Five years and thousands of cameras later, the accountability structure Garrett Langley pledged to build is nowhere to be found. That's not an oversight, that's a pattern.
This matters because Flock has spent years selling itself as the responsible alternative to sloppy surveillance — local control, audit logs, community buy-in. But promises about ethics boards, audits, and guardrails only mean something if they're kept when nobody's watching anymore. An ALPR network that can track a car's movements across state lines doesn't need good PR, it needs enforceable limits. When the company writes its own accountability pledge and then quietly lets it evaporate, that tells you everything about how seriously privacy protections are actually taken internally.
If your town has these cameras and you want to know where, check our camera map. And if you think your city council should be asking Flock where that ethics board went, start with our take-action resources.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Business Reform, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.