Surveillance Company Flock to Make Changes Amid Backlash

Our Take

Credit to NBC's Brian Cheung and the TODAY team for getting Flock founder Garrett Langley on camera to answer for a system that now blankets 7,000 cities with over 120,000 license plate readers. When a company that size starts talking about a 'major overhaul' only after sustained public pressure and documented misuse cases, that's not proactive governance — that's damage control. The scale alone should give everyone pause: this is one of the largest private surveillance networks in American history, built with almost no public debate about whether it should exist at all.

Notice what's actually being offered in these 'reforms.' Tweaked audit logs, updated dashboards, promises of 'better' policy language — none of it addresses the core problem, which is that Flock's business model depends on normalizing constant location tracking of every driver, regardless of suspicion, and then trusting thousands of individual police departments to use that power responsibly. History and this year's headlines both suggest that trust is misplaced. Cosmetic fixes don't change the fact that data-sharing between agencies, retention windows, and vendor access all remain largely opaque to the public paying for it.

We'll keep tracking whether Flock's promised changes amount to anything more than a PR reset. In the meantime, check our camera map to see what's watching your streets, and hit take action if you want to push back where you live.