Flock CEO Addresses Backlash Over Surveillance Cameras

Our Take

When a surveillance company's founder has to sit down with NBC to do damage control, that's not a sign of a healthy product — it's a sign the backlash is working. Brian Cheung's report lays out the numbers plainly: 120,000-plus Flock cameras across 7,000 cities, and a growing pile of stories about police misusing the network to track exes, help out-of-state agencies hunt down people crossing state lines for abortion care, or just poke around without any real oversight. Garrett Langley calling this an "overhaul" is the company doing what companies do when the headlines turn ugly — promise new guardrails after the fact, once the surveillance infrastructure is already bolted to the streetlight.

Here's the thing worth remembering: every one of these "protocol" announcements is reactive. Flock didn't build in audit trails, use restrictions, or public transparency by default — they built a nationwide plate-reading dragnet first and are now patching the trust problem after journalists and advocates forced it into the open. A policy update from a private company, written by that company, enforced by that company, is not accountability. It's a press release.

If you want to see how far this network actually reaches in your own neighborhood, check our camera map, and if your city council hasn't had a public debate about why it's paying for this, that's exactly where to start — see our take-action page for how to push back before the next camera goes up.