Flock CEO Says Americans Must 'Compromise' on Privacy; Then His Own Home Address Leaked Online

Garrett Langley has built one of the largest surveillance businesses in the United States on the argument that Americans must accept a little less privacy in return for greater safety. This month, after he urged the public to 'compromise' on that trade-off, critics answered by circulating what they claimed was his own home address.

The company he leads, Flock Safety, has become one of the most valuable private-security firms in the country. Founded in Atlanta in 2017, it now runs automated number-plate readers for more than 4,800 police forces across 49 states.

Investors have rewarded that reach: a funding round in March last year, led by the Silicon Valley firm Andreessen Horowitz, raised $275M (£202M) and valued Flock at $7.5B (£5.5B), up from $4.8B (£3.5B) a year earlier. Reports this year have lifted that figure to around $8.4B (£6.2B).

Backers including Founders Fund and Y Combinator have poured close to $1B (£736M) into the company, whose annual recurring revenue has passed $300M (£221M).

The Fox News Remark That Started It

The controversy began with a television appearance. Speaking on the Fox News programme 'Saturday in America', Langley was asked whether his cameras risked ushering in a surveillance state, and he rejected the framing outright. 'When people talk about just one of these, privacy or safety, they're prioritising the wrong thing, and what we have to prioritise as a country is compromise,' he said. 'How do we have our safety, and how do we balance privacy?'

The clip travelled fast. Within a day it had gathered thousands of critical replies on X, where many users made the same point, that Flock's cameras log the movements of millions of drivers who never agreed to be tracked.

The response soon escalated. Some users began posting what they said was Langley's home address, a few pairing it with blurred images lifted from Google Street View. One remarked that his call for compromise did not appear to extend to himself. The authenticity of the address could not be confirmed, and it is not reproduced here.

A Backlash With a Price Tag

For a company valued in the billions, the anger is more than a public-relations problem. More than 50 cities and towns, spread across some 20 states, have moved to cancel or switch off their Flock contracts this year, according to activist trackers. Every deactivation trims the subscription income on which the valuation depends.

The pressure intensified in early August, when a Washington Post investigation documented dozens of cases in which officers had used the network to track partners, former partners, or relatives. The issue has since reached Washington.

Senator Bernie Sanders has warned that Flock is helping to build a mass surveillance state and has promised legislation to rein it in, while Republican Representative Thomas Massie is drafting a bill to strip federal funding from police departments that use the cameras. No measure put forward so far would ban the technology outright.

What Flock Changed, and What Critics Say

Flock has responded with a package of changes. In mid-August it tightened its rules, cutting the default period it stores plate data from 30 days to seven, and said it would require officers to log a case number before running a search and introduce an audit tool, mandatory by the end of the year, that flags unusual activity and can suspend an account pending review.

Langley framed the measures as overdue accountability. '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,' he said.

Critics were unconvinced. The American Civil Liberties Union said the changes did not go far enough, and much of the tougher oversight will not take effect until year-end.

Supporters, among them many of the police chiefs who buy the service, credit the cameras with solving murders and finding missing people, and the company says its technology has helped clear more than 1M incidents.

For now, Flock's valuation rests on a bet that police forces and the public alike will keep accepting the trade-off Langley described.