Why Everyone Is Suddenly Mad at This AI Camera Company

What is Flock, anyway?

Flock Safety makes cameras that police departments mount on poles and street corners. The cameras use AI to automatically read license plates and track which cars drive past, then store that information so police can search it later — for example, to look up every car that passed a certain corner on a certain night. Flock has sold this system to thousands of police departments across the country.

That's the pitch: help police solve crimes faster. But lately, a lot of people are asking whether the system is being used for things that have nothing to do with solving crimes.

What went wrong

A newspaper investigation found dozens of cases — more than 40 — where police officers reportedly used Flock's cameras for reasons that had nothing to do with official police work. Some officers are accused of using the system to track down and stalk their ex-partners. That's a serious misuse of a tool that was supposed to help catch criminals, not spy on private citizens.

When Flock's CEO, Garrett Langley, heard about one of these stories directly from a victim, he said it "kills me that she went through that." At the same time, he's made the case that Flock itself isn't the villain here — the company just built the tool, and it was people misusing it who caused the harm. Critics find that argument less convincing when the tool makes this kind of tracking so easy in the first place.

A rare political alliance

Here's what makes this story stand out: criticism of Flock is coming from politicians who usually don't agree on much. Progressive Democrats have slammed the "mass proliferation" of these cameras as a surveillance overreach. At the same time, some Republicans in Congress have introduced a bill that would ban federal agencies from buying this kind of automated camera and license-plate-tracking system, calling Flock out by name. When politicians on opposite ends of the spectrum are both alarmed, that's usually a sign something in the middle needs fixing.

What Flock has changed so far

Facing the backlash, Flock made a couple of adjustments: it shortened how long camera data is normally kept, from 30 days down to seven, and it now requires officers to log a "case code" explaining why they're searching the data, so there's a record of who looked up what and why.

But there's a catch privacy advocates have pointed out: officers can still switch on something called "Evidence Mode," which lets them bypass those new limits. Critics say that loophole makes it unclear whether these changes are a real fix or mostly for show.

The bigger question

The CEO is now calling for some kind of national "compromise" between privacy and safety, and says he wants clearer state laws that would make it a crime to misuse this kind of surveillance data. Essentially, he's acknowledging that right now there isn't much stopping an officer with access to these cameras from using them for the wrong reasons — and that needs to change before trust in tools like this can be rebuilt.