The Flock Safety surveillance backlash is growing faster than the company’s reform announcements can contain it, with new data, a shifting public mood, and critics spanning the political spectrum all arriving at roughly the same verdict: the changes so far are not enough.
Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley has been doing the rounds. Fox News, CBS News, and a forthcoming appearance at TechCrunch Disrupt in October. His message, consistent across each platform: the country needs ‘compromise’ between privacy and safety. ‘When people talk about just one of these, privacy or safety, they’re prioritizing the wrong thing,’ he told Fox News. ‘How do we have our safety, and how do we balance privacy?’
It is a reasonable framing. The difficulty is that the facts keep getting worse while the framing stays the same.
The Misuse Count Keeps Rising
The original figure that drew national attention was 46 cases in which police officers were accused of misusing Flock technology, including to track partners and former partners. A Washington Post follow-up published on 19 August 2026 put the tally at at least 69 police officials accused, charged with, or convicted of misusing Flock’s system or other licence-plate readers. The same investigation found that its reporting led directly to the discipline of two officers whose own departments had not conducted basic oversight.
Langley acknowledged the human cost in his CBS News interview. ‘I apologize. It kills me that she went through that,’ he said after listening to one alleged victim’s account. He then added, ‘I don’t think that Flock created police abuse. I think we’re the first company to ever shine a light on it and build the tools to find it.’
Whether that framing holds is becoming harder to argue. A separate Washington Post survey published on 28 August 2026 found that more Americans now oppose law enforcement’s use of AI-powered licence-plate-reader cameras than support it, citing fears of invasive monitoring or abuse.
Flock Safety Surveillance Backlash Lands on Both Sides of the Aisle
The political pressure is arriving from directions that do not usually agree on much. Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed has accused his opponent of supporting ‘this mass proliferation of Flock cameras, any and everywhere, watching your every move.’ Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders posted simply: ‘STOP AI MASS SURVEILLANCE. STOP FLOCK.’
On the right, three House Republicans have introduced a bill that would bar the federal government from purchasing automated surveillance systems using facial recognition, biometric IDs, or licence-plate recognition, naming Flock Safety cameras explicitly. And, according to Fox Business, Knox County, Tennessee, Mayor Glen Jacobs has called for a national moratorium on the deployment of Flock’s cameras altogether.
Langley’s response has been to call for state-level regulation: ‘pass bills that make [the illegal use of Flock data] a criminal offense.’ He also acknowledged on Fox News, ‘Today, it is too often that in Flock and in other technologies, there’s no regulation. There’s no accountability, and we think that’s wrong.’
The Reform Small Print
Flock has made two concrete changes. The default data retention period has been cut from 30 days to seven days, and officers must now enter a case code before accessing data. On its official blog, the company said its analysis shows over 90% of searches without a full plate are completed within a week, which it cited as the rationale for the seven-day default. The company also said that Evidence Mode, which preserves specific licence-plate reader data in cold storage for active investigations, will be offered to existing customers who adopt the seven-day default at no extra cost.
Both changes have escape hatches, and critics have found them quickly. The American Civil Liberties Union warned that if Evidence Mode triggers retention of any searched data, rather than only hit results tied to a specific investigation, it ‘could indefinitely retain all the ALPR data Flock collects and shares nationally,’ potentially making the retention problem worse rather than better. The ACLU’s recommended default is 48 hours, well below Flock’s seven days.
Fox Business also reported the ACLU characterised Flock’s announced reforms as ‘a thinly veiled PR attempt to counter communities’ genuine privacy concerns with its mass surveillance system with largely hollow security promises, rather than an earnest effort to address them.’
Flock has also quietly pulled back in one other area. The Electronic Frontier Foundation reported that the company reversed course and ended a pilot for acoustic gunshot-detection devices designed to identify signs of human distress in voices, a product line that sat alongside its licence-plate reader network.
The 69-official tally and a public now majority-opposed to the technology give Langley’s ‘compromise’ framing an increasingly steep hill to climb. The ACLU’s Evidence Mode concern is the one to watch: if regulators or courts agree with that reading, the reforms Flock is currently marketing as goodwill gestures could be reframed as liabilities.
