When the CEO of a company that places millions of surveillance cameras across communities is asked to pause its technology in the face of mounting public backlash, his answer is a simple refusal. Garrett Langley, the founder and CEO of Flock, took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 in San Francisco on Wednesday and made his position unmistakably clear: there will be no pause, no moratorium, and no retreat from the company’s aggressive expansion of automated license plate readers and companion cameras.
Why Flock’s CEO believes surveillance progress should not stop
“If we want to live in a society where, if you commit a crime, you have a higher probability of being held accountable, we shouldn’t pause progress,” Langley said during a panel interview. The statement encapsulates the core philosophy driving Flock through its most turbulent period to date. The company is facing a wave of cancelled contracts, a growing privacy backlash that has already resulted in staff layoffs, and public scrutiny that shows no signs of abating. Yet Langley is doubling down, framing the debate as an inevitable trade-off between privacy and public safety.
If we want to live in a society where, if you commit a crime, you have a higher probability of being held accountable, we shouldn’t pause progress.
Langley argued that technology, by its very nature, is about doing things better — not doing them perfectly. He invoked driverless cars as a parallel, arguing that isolated accidents should not lead to the wholesale shutdown of a safer system. “Driverless cars, I think, are definitively safer than human drivers. And when there’s one accident, I don’t think the answer is to shut down driverless cars,” he said. However, the analogy weakens under scrutiny. Autonomous vehicle companies routinely pause their fleets, investigate incidents, and roll out software fixes. Flock, by Langley’s own admission, has no intention of pausing its operations while the industry — or society — wrestles with the ethical implications of mass surveillance.
What is Flock surveillance technology and how does it work?
Flock manufactures automated license plate recognition (ALPR) cameras, pole-mounted devices that scan every passing vehicle and feed the data into a centralized cloud platform used by thousands of police departments across the United States. The system creates searchable records of vehicle movement, enabling law enforcement to retrace a suspect’s route, identify vehicles associated with crimes, and, critically, track individuals through their cars. While Flock cameras do not perform facial recognition, media investigations have reported that the system includes capabilities to detect and track people by body characteristics — a distinction that has done little to calm critics who argue it blurs the line between vehicle surveillance and mass person-tracking.
The company markets its technology as a force multiplier for understaffed police departments. “If you look at where policing has gone over the last decade, but particularly post-COVID, law enforcement employment is declining rapidly,” Langley said, citing San Francisco’s hundreds of unfilled officer positions as an example of a gap Flock is designed to fill. The pitch is seductive for cash-strapped cities: install cameras that never sleep, never take breaks, and never require benefits, all while shrinking the window in which criminals can operate undetected.
The privacy backlash that forced Flock to cut staff
Despite Langley’s confidence, the backlash is real and gaining momentum. In October 2026, TechCrunch reported that Flock had already been forced to cut jobs as the privacy backlash grew. Some customers have terminated their contracts after learning more about the system’s capabilities. Langley deflected criticisms as stemming from misinformation, recounting an incident where a customer ended their contract because they erroneously believed the devices performed facial recognition. But the distinction between facial recognition and person-tracking is, for many critics, a distinction without a meaningful difference.
Critics argue that Flock’s network creates a dragnet surveillance apparatus that operates with minimal oversight, where the burden of responsible use falls entirely on local police departments rather than the company supplying the technology. Langley’s response: “We don’t want to tell city leaders how to do their job. We will provide recommendations, we’ll provide defaults, but we’re going to minimize the number of mandated features, functions, and policies.” In other words, Flock builds the tool and walks away, leaving the ethical decisions — and the consequences — to others.
What are the risks of automated license plate readers at scale?
The risks associated with Flock’s technology are not hypothetical. The system generates a permanent, queryable record of every vehicle that passes one of its cameras — in many cities, that means millions of data points per day. Law enforcement can use this data to track suspects, but they can also use it to track journalists, activists, political opponents, or anyone else who attracts official attention. The potential for abuse scales with adoption. A single compromised police account, a rogue officer, or a data breach could expose the movement patterns of an entire community.
When pressed directly about abuse and the invasiveness of his company’s surveillance technology, Langley offered no concrete safeguards. “I think if the idea is to curb abuse, I think there’s a way to do that that doesn’t disrupt the legal system, that doesn’t disrupt the efficacy and flow of a police department,” he said, without specifying what that way might be. The vagueness was striking for a CEO whose products are shaping the future of policing in hundreds of jurisdictions.
Comparing the AI backlash to the Flock surveillance debate
The parallels between Flock’s struggles and the broader backlash against artificial intelligence are hard to ignore. AI is marketed as a force for efficiency and progress; Flock is marketed as a crime-fighting tool. Both are technologies that critics argue are being deployed on the public without meaningful consent. Langley’s framing — that technology is inherently progress and that friction is the price of change — mirrors the talking points of AI optimists who dismiss doomsday warnings as technophobia.
But there is a crucial difference. AI companies, at least in theory, can audit their algorithms, implement guardrails, and release safety frameworks. Flock’s business model is built on the absence of guardrails. By refusing to mandate policies or features, the company insulates itself from responsibility while equipping its customers with a surveillance tool of unprecedented scale. “We don’t want to tell city leaders how to do their job” sounds like deference, but critics hear it as a dodge.
Langley admits mistakes but refuses to bend
Langley did offer a rare admission of imperfection. “Flock is far from perfect; I’m far from perfect — I’ve made plenty of mistakes,” he said, attributing the quote to an unnamed community leader who had criticized society’s tendency to judge technology against an impossible standard of perfection. The acknowledgment, however, came without any commitment to change course. Mistakes, in Langley’s telling, are the natural, even acceptable, byproducts of building a “consequential company.”
“I think one of the unfortunate consequences of building a consequential company is this is the price you pay, and I think it’s worth it because there’s millions and millions of people who have a better life today because [of] Flock,” he said. The CEO framed the backlash not as a warning signal but as collateral damage. “Clearly we’ve made our fair share of mistakes, and there’s some folks who disagree with what we do, but it’s worth it because one day they might be a victim.”
How Flock positions itself as an inevitable technology
Langley’s Disrupt appearance revealed a strategy of inevitability. He positioned Flock less as a company making a choice and more as a technology riding an unstoppable wave. The subtext of his argument is that surveillance is the natural next step in policing, much like the body camera or the patrol car before it. Those who resist, in this view, are simply standing in the way of progress — and progress will not wait.
This framing conveniently sidesteps the central question: who decides what trade-offs are acceptable? Langley’s answer is that the market and local leaders will decide, one contract at a time. But opponents argue that once the cameras are in the ground and the data is flowing, it becomes effectively impossible to reverse course. The infrastructure is permanent. The data is stored indefinitely. The precedent is set.
What happens when the public does not consent
The clash between Flock and its critics is not merely a business dispute; it is a foundational debate about the role of surveillance in a democratic society. Langley frames privacy as a negotiable commodity that must be traded for safety. His critics see privacy as a right that cannot be efficiently exchanged at scale. The CEO’s refusal to acknowledge the validity of the opposition — his tendency to respond with anecdotes rather than policy proposals — suggests a company that has not yet internalized the depth of the resistance it faces.
Meanwhile, the layoffs and cancelled contracts are real. The public is paying attention. And a growing number of cities are asking not just how well Flock works, but whether it should be allowed to work at all. Langley may believe the rewards outweigh the risks, but for a growing number of communities, the calculation is shifting in the other direction. Whether Flock can survive that shift — or whether it will be forced to adapt — remains one of the most consequential questions in the surveillance industry today.
- What is Flock surveillance technology and how does it work?Flock manufactures automated license plate recognition cameras that scan vehicles and feed data to a cloud platform used by police departments.
- Who decides what trade-offs are acceptable?Langley says the market and local leaders decide one contract at a time, but critics argue the infrastructure is permanent once installed.
- What happens when the public does not consent?The clash represents a foundational debate about surveillance in a democratic society, with privacy advocates seeing it as a right not a commodity.
