Meet Garrett Langley, the 38-year-old CEO behind Flock, who's promising to end nearly all crime in a decade

Fast forward one year and Langley and Flock, an $8 billion company, are under fire for what critics describe as misuse of the company’s automated license plate recognition, mass video surveillance and gunfire location systems designed to track down and identify criminal behavior.

Founded in 2017 by Langley, along with fellow Georgia Tech alumni Matt Feury and Paige Todd, Flock technology is so pervasive that it has over 120,000 cameras up and running that have supported about one million criminal investigations.

Yet the technology has allegedly been abused by law enforcement agents. In August, The Washington Post published an exposé revealing 46 cases in which law enforcement officers have been charged or accused of using Flock technology for unauthorized purposes. In some instances, license-plate cameras were used by agents to track and stalk wives, girlfriends, ex-spouses and women they sought to meet without their knowledge or consent.

Upon hearing one alleged victim talk about her experience Langley told CBS News, “I apologize. It kills me that she went through that.” In the same interview, Langley also noted, “I don’t think that Flock created police abuse. I think we’re the first company to ever shine a light on it and build the tools to find it.”

Finding a balance between safety and privacy

The Flock saga underlines a burgeoning issue in U.S. society: when do surveillance tools cross the line into invading someone’s privacy and at what cost?

Privacy experts say it’s not an easy call to make.

“Americans have had an uneasy relationship with automated surveillance for years,” Ryan Johnson, founder and managing attorney at The Technology Law Group, told Moneywise.

Johnson said American society has seen similar reactions to speed and red-light cameras, even though those technologies are not universally unpopular. “At the same time, we routinely accept visible cameras in banks, stores, homes and increasingly retail parking lots where businesses use them to deter theft,” he noted. “Flock sits somewhere between those worlds. There’s a legitimate security use case, but the scale, connectivity and searchability of its network raise a very different privacy question.”

Surveillance as a way of eliminating crime

Langley’s claim that Flock technology could eliminate crime or reduce it by 90% has also faced scrutiny. While there is some evidence that shows cameras can help reduce crime, the extent of their effectiveness in eliminating crime is debatable.

“There’s credible evidence that license-plate readers can help identify stolen vehicles, generate investigative leads and improve clearance rates in certain categories,” Johnson noted.

He cites a recent working paper examining Flock deployments across 216 agencies that found lower motor vehicle theft and higher arrest clearance, although the authors noted limitations around causation. “Yet other experimental research has found little evidence that simply adding license-plate readers to patrols creates a broad deterrent effect,” he said.

Privacy specialists also say that any crime prevention technology, especially a highly sophisticated and widely used toolset like Flock, has to have limits and highly restrictive ones at that.

“We could do a lot of things to reduce crime, but those things must always be weighed against the freedoms we give up in the process,” Paul Bischoff, consumer privacy advocate at Comparitech, told Moneywise. “We could put a police camera inside every home and workplace, monitor every phone call and text, allow police to access our bank accounts and transaction histories, track everyone’s location, or impose gun control.”

America doesn’t take those extreme measures, as citizens value their freedom and privacy, even if there is evidence Flock cameras reduce crime. “Yet they also give police too much authority, violate our privacy and have a chilling effect on our freedom of movement,” Bischoff noted. “The result is the huge backlash we’re witnessing now at town halls across America.”

Holding Flock accountable is a good step, but there’s more work to do

One big question is how much responsibility Flock itself should bear when customers abuse its technology and whether audit trails, case codes and shorter data-retention periods are enough to prevent misuse.

The issue is hardly clear-cut.