Flock Inc.

The company

Flock Safety (Flock Group Inc.) is a surveillance technology company based in Atlanta. It was founded in 2017 by Georgia Tech graduates Garrett Langley, who is its CEO, Matt Feury, and Paige Todd.

In April 2026 it was reported to be valued at about $8.4 billion after a new funding round, up from $7.5 billion the year before, and to work with thousands of law enforcement agencies nationwide.

Flock says its technology helped with more than a million crimes and about 10,000 missing-person cases in 2025. Those are the company's own figures and have not been independently verified.

Sources: Wikipedia · Tech Startups (valuation) · Puck (Langley interview)

What it sells

• License plate reader cameras: solar-powered, pole-mounted cameras that photograph every passing vehicle and read its plate, building a searchable record of where vehicles have been.
• AI vehicle search: software that tags each image with details like make, model and color, so police can search for a vehicle by description and follow its movements across a shared network of cameras.
• Drones: in October 2024 Flock bought Aerodome, a drone-as-first-responder startup, reportedly for more than $300 million.

Sources: Community Impact · TechCrunch (Aerodome)

What's inside a Flock camera

In September 2026, a hacker group called stegan0gram took down a Flock camera from above a roadway in a Milwaukee suburb and copied nearly all of its data. It gave copies to 404 Media, WIRED and Distributed Denial of Secrets, which published the filesystem images. What researchers and reporters found in that data, in short: the cameras detect and log people, run an outdated and unpatched operating system, and store keys and credentials insecurely. The published teardowns did not find facial recognition on the device itself.

• An old, unpatched operating system. The camera runs Android 8.1 with an Android security patch level of June 5, 2018, even though the software build is dated June 2025. Its Linux kernel is version 3.18.71, released in 2017; the 3.18 series reached end of life in 2019. (Micah Lee; Hackaday)
• Hard-coded keys and plain-text credentials. Lee found an API key hard-coded into one of the camera's apps, and found that the camera stores the credentials it receives in plain text on a partition that isn't encrypted. He also identified publicly known Android and kernel flaws the camera is likely vulnerable to that could let a program gain root access, though he did not test them. (Micah Lee; Hackaday)
• An encryption key left in the open. Flock has described its cameras as protected by on-device encryption. The camera had several unencrypted partitions, and one of them, labeled "media," held the key that unlocked the encrypted section with much of the stored video and images. (Straight Arrow News; The Next Web)
• About 1.6 million images of roughly 50,200 vehicles from about 21 days of recoverable logs, around 3,300 vehicles on a typical day. Older logs had been overwritten, so this is not the camera's full history. (IBTimes UK)
• It detects people, not just cars. The software detects vehicles, license plates, people and bicycles, and when a person enters the frame it records where they appear and how confident it is in the detection. When WIRED ran the extracted models, they detected a reporter in a selfie. (Straight Arrow News; IBTimes UK)
• About 20 Flock-built apps handle motion detection, image capture, object classification, uploading and remote updates. The camera picks and crops useful frames and sends them to Flock over a cellular connection. Reading the plate and identifying the make, model and color appeared to happen on Flock's servers, not on the camera. (IBTimes UK)
• Built on Qualcomm hardware. A Lantronix case study says Flock's reader was developed on its Android-powered module based on a Qualcomm processor, and Flock's own job postings describe low-level work on Qualcomm-based Android and Linux device software. (Lantronix; Built In)
• Earlier warnings. In 2025, researcher Jon Gaines reverse-engineered a Flock reader and documented flaws that could allow root access. Flock said at the time that the findings required physical access to the camera. (The Next Web)

Flock says its cameras do not perform facial recognition, and 404 Media and WIRED found no evidence of facial recognition beyond features included in Android by default. Flock's response to the teardown was that removing and tampering with its cameras is illegal, and that it takes security seriously and asks researchers to report flaws through its vulnerability disclosure process.

Sources: Micah Lee · Hackaday · 404 Media · WIRED · Straight Arrow News · The Next Web · IBTimes UK · Lantronix · Built In

Data retention

On August 13, 2026, after a run of abuse investigations, Flock cut its default retention for license plate data from 30 days to 7, and added an "Evidence Mode" that lets detectives keep specific records longer for an active investigation.

Existing customers keep whatever retention period they already have unless they opt in, and agencies can still set retention to whatever their local policy allows. The ACLU says the changes leave the core civil liberties problems in place.

Sources: Flock Safety · Atlanta News First · ACLU

Misuse by officers

A Washington Post analysis of police and court records found at least 50 law enforcement officers charged with or accused of using license plate readers for unauthorized purposes, with Flock's system involved in 46 of those cases. Most involved tracking women.

• Indianapolis: five police officers were charged with misusing Flock cameras, one of them also with stalking.
• Katy, Texas: a former officer was charged with stalking and misuse of official information after allegedly tracking his ex-wife's car through Flock.

Most of these cases are still allegations working through the courts.

Sources: Gizmodo (Indianapolis) · KPRC Click2Houston (Katy) · Institute for Justice ALPR abuse database

Our neighbors are turning Flock off

Since August 2026, city after city around Cedar Park has ended its Flock program, most by unanimous council vote, and usually after residents found out who else could search their cameras' data.

• Pflugerville (August 25, 2026): the council voted unanimously not to renew its $87,500-a-year Flock lease. A resident's public records request for the system's audit logs showed outside agencies had run roughly 1.6 million searches of Pflugerville's data in six months. All 28 cameras were turned off and covered, and Pflugerville ISD dropped Flock on its campuses too.
• Leander (September 3, 2026): after a long night of public comment, the council directed staff to stop using Flock. The city has confirmed all of its cameras are down and police no longer use Flock cameras or data.
• Manor and Elgin (early September 2026): both cities ended their relationships with Flock in the days just before Leander.
• Liberty Hill (September 9, 2026): the council voted 7–0 to end its Flock program and not to use technology for mass surveillance in the future. City staff removed every camera on September 15.
• Hutto (September 17, 2026): the council voted to permanently end police use of Flock, noting that partner agencies with access to the data aren't bound by Hutto's own rules for it.
• Austin: let its Flock contract expire in June 2025 after residents raised concerns about data reaching immigration enforcement. In 2026, reporters found Austin police were still getting Flock data through neighboring agencies' cameras.

As of September, Round Rock police were among the Central Texas agencies still using Flock.

Sources: Community Impact (Pflugerville) · Austin American-Statesman (Pflugerville) · CBS Austin (Leander) · Community Impact (Leander) · City of Liberty Hill · CBS Austin (Liberty Hill) · KXAN (Hutto) · KUT (Austin) · KUT (who still uses Flock)

Across the country

Concerns about who can reach the data, including searches run on behalf of federal immigration enforcement, have led a growing number of places to drop or pause Flock.

• Santa Cruz, California: the city council voted 6–1 in January 2026 to terminate its contract, the first California city to do so, after reports that outside agencies had searched its camera data on behalf of federal law enforcement.
• Verona, Wisconsin: the council voted not to renew in late 2025. The cameras stayed up for months afterward, and the city covered them with bags until Flock removed them.
• Dayton, Ohio: the city deactivated all 37 cameras in May 2026 after finding a network-sharing feature had been switched on, then found two cameras put back in service without authorization.
• Texas: in August 2026, Gov. Greg Abbott paused state funding for new Flock cameras and TxDOT stopped issuing permits for license plate readers along state roads. Then Comptroller Don Huffines signed an executive order on October 13, 2026 barring grant money from his office from paying for license plate reader systems. Cities can still pay for them with local funds.

Sources: KQED (Santa Cruz) · Wisconsin Examiner (Verona) · WHIO (Dayton) · Texas Comptroller · Texas Scorecard