Cat Gioino here. Everyone wants safer neighborhoods, right?
That was Flock CEO Garrett Langley’s pitch to VCs after he built Flock’s first prototype. The Georgia Tech electrical engineer was not yet 30 when a string of break-ins in his own Atlanta neighborhood convinced him local police lacked the right tools. Recruiting two former colleagues, Matt Feury and Paige Todd, he built what started at first a simple license-plate camera and has now expanded to include video, gunshot detection, drones, and AI-powered search software. Launching Flock in his hometown of Atlanta in 2017, Langley promised to create a network of camera data that could be compiled together to solve any department’s cases. Homeowners associations were the company’s earliest customers, all before law enforcement contracts came to dominate the business. Today, the company operates in more than 5,000 communities across 49 states. Flock told Fortune the company has since raised $500 million at an $8.3 billion valuation and crossed $500 million in annual recurring revenue in the first half of this year.
Andreessen Horowitz was an early backer, leading Flock’s Series D in 2021, with a16z general partners David Ulevitch and David George calling the company an “n of 1″ startup,”effectively the only game in town.” Tiger Global led the Series E in February 2022, a $150 million round at a $3.5 billion valuation, joined by new investors 776 and Spark Capital alongside returning backers a16z, Bedrock, Matrix, Meritech and Initialized. By March 2025, Flock raised $275 million at a $7.5 billion valuation in a round led again by a16z, with participation from Greenoaks, Sands Capital, Founders Fund, Kleiner Perkins, Tiger Global and Y Combinator.
But in recent months, Flock has been caught up in a swirl of intensifying controversy, with privacy experts and civil liberties groups alleging officers used the cameras to stalk people, including exes, or that departments shared data across jurisdictions, including with ICE and in violation of state law. Vandalism has increased: across the country, people are dousing cameras in paint, ramming into them with their cars, smearing unknown substances across the camera front, or even chopping them down with chain saws, as documented in at least 36 states.
The biggest sticking point is who actually owns the data that Flock collects. Flock says it’s its customers: the police departments, the HOAs, the private customers who hold that data for a certain amount of time, up to customer discretion. Privacy experts say instead that Flock’s contracts allow it to retain certain data to train its models, and are pointing to an LAPD’s inspector general report as reason why that police department—like many other customers of Flock—are now renegotiating their contracts to specifically include language barring the company from using collected data. In March, cities like Boston, Flagstaff and Santa Clara all dropped Flock following a now-viral Super Bowl ad from Amazon’s Ring, which subsequently pulled its Flock integration. For its part, Ring never blamed the ad but said the integration with Flock would require more resources than anticipated.
More recently, in July, the LAPD said it was renegotiating its Flock agreement over data-ownership concerns. The city’s own Inspector General audited the department’s Flock contracts this summer and quoted the actual signed language: one agreement lets Flock “retain the right to use the foregoing for any purpose in Flock’s sole discretion,” while a separate agreement grants the company rights to use anonymized footage for “training of machine learning algorithms.” Two privacy attorneys Fortune interviewed each independently described this same pattern from their own review of Flock’s contracts elsewhere. The experts say the stakes are beyond what one private company’s contract dictates—and they even pointed to cities that had pulled its contract with Flock only to sign on with one of its competitors, some of which are even less transparent regarding data collection. The experts sounded the alarms about what this means cross-jurisdictionally: once a department’s data can be pooled with other agencies’ data, what was once cross-jurisdictional collaboration now becomes a whole nationwide network that can let agencies (like ICE, for example) search the database, even in violation of state law or beyond the parameters of the initial contract.
Flock last week set out a new set of guardrails intended to curb abuse of its system, including advocating for a seven-day data retention policy for its customers. Previously, Flock’s default was 30 days, and the company maintains on its website that the shortened week-long window will still cover “over 90% of searches.” But still, it’s a recommendation and not a rule, meaning each city’s contract can set its own number. LAPD’s, for example, guarantees five years.
Garrett Langley told Fortune the company is “growing our customer base at ten times the rate of customer churn,” and stands by its record solving crimes and finding missing people. Flock built a business on the idea that watching everything makes communities safer. The question its contracts now raise is: safer for whom?
See you tomorrow,
Cat Gioino
X: @CatGioino
Email: catherina.gioino@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
