Outside Moscone Center in San Francisco, the air carried the unmistakable tension of a tech conference under siege. A small but determined group of protesters held signs reading “Flock out,” some wearing hand-built cardboard camera masks that stared blankly at passersby while audio clips from George Orwell’s 1984 played on a loop. Inside, on the TechCrunch Disrupt stage, Garrett Langley, the CEO of Flock Safety, was telling a largely sympathetic audience that the wave of anger aimed at his company is not really about privacy, surveillance, or even the misuse of data. “Much of the problem that I’m facing right now is this newer landscape where social media is so interwoven with politics and is so rife with misinformation,” he said, with the calm certainty of a founder who believes he has diagnosed the real disease. According to Langley, Flock’s biggest obstacle isn’t a broken product or a fundamental ethical failure—it’s the online narrative that has swirled around his license-plate-reading cameras, a narrative he believes is fueled by political polarization and viral falsehoods rather than by the technology’s actual record. The audience chuckled at a couple of his anecdotes, the kind of knowing laughter that comes from people who have watched internet outrage spiral before. But just outside the building, the protesters were not laughing. Their presence was a reminder that the story of Flock Safety is not merely a story about digital reputation management; it is a story about power, consent, and what it means to be watched without ever being asked.
Flock Safety is, by any measure, a massive operation. The Atlanta-based company, which was born in a Y Combinator cohort back in 2017, now has contracts with thousands of American cities, supplying sleek, pole-mounted cameras that read license plates and feed data to law enforcement agencies. Langley says Flock has around 6,000 clients, roughly 60 percent of them police departments and the rest enterprise customers, and the company has raised $1.2 billion from major investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund. But with that scale has come scrutiny. Over the past year, criticism has mounted from civil liberties advocates, local activists, and even elected officials who say the cameras are being installed in communities without meaningful public consent and without sufficient privacy protections. There have been reports of cameras being hacked, lawsuits alleging invasions of privacy, and disturbing cases of misuse. A Texas sheriff’s office allegedly used Flock’s database in an investigation into a woman who had an abortion. A San Jose police officer was fired for allegedly using the system to share information with a relative who was a suspect in a domestic violence case. Langley, however, insists these are exceptions in a system that is overwhelmingly net-positive. He told the audience that Flock has not canceled a single contract, though he left the door open for extreme cases. “If a customer knowingly broke the law, we would fire them,” he said. But he also framed the choices in moral terms: “If you believe—like we do at Flock—that we are very net positive for society, should we be taking our product away?”
The company’s relationship with government is more complicated than its critics often acknowledge. Langley was eager to point out that Flock does not have federal contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and he said the company ended trial projects with federal agencies in August 2025. But that is not the whole story. In California and elsewhere, immigration officials have gained access to Flock data indirectly, through state and local agencies that share their systems or search them on behalf of federal partners. A September 2025 investigation by The Standard found that San Francisco’s Flock license-plate database had been accessed 1.6 million times by out-of-state agencies, likely illegally, and an internal audit by the San Francisco Police Department confirmed that local camera data had been searched on behalf of outside agencies. For Langley, these are the nuances that get lost in the fury. He told a story about a councilperson in Illinois who canceled the city’s Flock contract because he disagreed with “facial recognition.” Langley said he replied, “Great, we don’t do that.” A few audience members laughed softly, as if the councilperson’s ignorance were the real problem. Langley said he sees a “big opportunity” in figuring out how to control his company’s story and make sure elected officials who are making critical decisions actually understand what Flock does and does not do. But the gap between perception and reality is not always the fault of misinformation. Sometimes it is the result of actual harms, like the officers who have misused the system or the communities where cameras have appeared without clear public debate.
In the Bay Area, the devices have become a local flashpoint. Cameras in Oakland have been covered in paint. A grassroots campaign called DeFlock SF has mapped the cameras and called on the city to cancel its contract. Langley acknowledged that Flock has made mistakes and said the company reevaluated its processes in August, including advising customers to reduce their data storage time from 30 days to seven. He also admitted that Flock made an error in piloting an audio detection system designed to capture the sound of gunshots and “human distress”; amid backlash over concerns that it could send police to nonviolent situations, the company rolled the feature back. Still, he deferred questions about responsibility to public officials, pointing to San Francisco Mayor Lurie as an example of a Democratic leader “leaning into the policy debate.” The company, he suggested, is a tool provider; the decisions about deployment belong to elected leaders. But Flock is not a passive vendor. It has about 1,500 employees, a valuation of approximately $8.4 billion, and a business model that depends on the expansion of surveillance infrastructure across the country. It announced this month that it will lay off about 18 percent of its workforce, a sign that even successful surveillance companies are not immune to economic pressure. Reports have circulated that Flock has considered selling to another company; Langley said he has “no desire to sell.” All of this suggests a company trying to have it both ways—claiming the moral high ground of a mission-driven organization while operating at a scale that inevitably shapes public life.
The protesters outside offered a different version of the story. Ashley Ortiz, a 33-year-old nanny from Sunnyvale who helped organize the demonstration, stood in the thin crowd with a simple conviction. “We don’t think that surveillance equals safety,” she said. Ortiz first began speaking out against Flock in March, showing up to City Council meetings as a member of the local activist group The Wolves. Beside her, Kara Starkey, a psychotherapist from Santa Clara, wore a red dress from The Handmaid’s Tale and a cardboard camera head. “We didn’t consent,” she said. “It’s basically a surveillance state we didn’t ask for.” For Starkey and the others, the cameras are not just tools that occasionally solve crimes. They are a permanent, unblinking presence in neighborhoods, often installed without the kind of public deliberation that accompanies other infrastructure projects. The protesters’ costumes and signs were theatrical, but their concerns were deeply personal: a sense that the places where they live, raise families, and go about ordinary life have been transformed into data collection zones for law enforcement. They are not necessarily opposed to every use of license-plate readers; they are opposed to the idea that safety can be achieved through automated watching, especially when the watchers are accountable to no one directly and the systems have already been misused in ways that disproportionately harm vulnerable people.
Langley, for his part, seems genuinely convinced that the company is on the right side of history. When asked whether the backlash—including death threats against his employees—was worth it, he did not hesitate. He said the short answer is yes, because when he compares his work to friends at “dopey companies” building enterprise software, what Flock does matters. “Clearly we’ve made our fair share of mistakes,” he acknowledged, but he returned again and again to the idea that millions of people have better lives because Flock exists. “One of the unfortunate consequences of building a consequential company is, this is the price you pay,” he said. “I think it’s worth it, because there’s millions and millions of people who have a better life today because Flock exists.” It is a powerful narrative: a founder who believes his product saves lives, solves crimes, and brings justice to families who might otherwise be ignored. But it is also a narrative that can become a shield. One attendee, a Bay Area adviser who works with startups and asked not to be named, said Langley should take more accountability. “He needs to be very risk-averse,” the adviser said. “I think he needs to run it almost like a healthcare company.” That kind of caution is hard to square with a company that has expanded into thousands of cities, piloted controversial features, and only rolled them back after public outcry. The real question is not whether Flock is net-positive or net-negative—it is whether a company with this much power over public space should be trusted to define the terms of its own story. Langley says he wants to control the narrative, but narratives are not controlled; they are earned. And as the protesters outside Moscone Center made clear, there are many people who have not yet been persuaded that Flock’s eyes should be watching them at all.