Flock Safety

Flock Group Inc., doing business as Flock Safety, is a mass surveillance corporation, which was founded in 2017 by Garrett Langley, Paige Todd, and Matt Feury. They utilize Artificial Intelligence/machine learning, computer vision, and other modern technologies to identify and locate/track people and vehicles. They also offer autonomous drones and gunshot locator (listening) devices, which in 2025, also began analyzing human voice. Flock is a privately held company, with no single owner, but they have shareholders consisting of both the three founders, and other investors.

Systems

Automated License Plate Readers

A Flock Falcon camera

Traditional Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) read license plates, and create a log of every license plate entering or leaving a location, with its time/date stamp. Flock's ALPRs essentially do this as well, but they also collect dozens of other data points about every vehicle, including, make, model, color, modifications (custom rims, trailer hitches, etc), visible damage, and photos of bumper stickers. The license plate is not actually read by the roadside scanner, but the photographs are processed by Flock's servers to extract the license plate's contents.

Flock uses all of these data points to create what they call a "Vehicle Fingerprint" which can be used to track that vehicle even if the license plate is obscured or removed. Every vehicle passing by is scanned and indexed, with its location and time included. On average, 28 photographs are captured of each passing vehicle (although sometimes that quantity exceeds one hundred). This identifying data, including a photo of the license plate and wider photo of the whole vehicle, are uploaded using a cellular connection from each roadside scanner, to Flock Nova, their analytics and search platform. Their stated goal is to build a "unified network" of these ALPRs, so that a vehicle cannot travel the roads without ALPRs reporting its location. As that vehicle continues to drive, it will continue passing numerous ALPRs along its journey, enabling near-realtime location tracking of the vehicle, as well as everything needed to determine the personal identification of the driver.

The main Flock ALPR product line, is named, "falcon." The standard model runs on an Android OS, with a Snapdragon 625 processor, 2GB RAM, 29GB storage, Wi-Fi, GPS, and onboard AI (YOLO + OpenCV) There are several variants, including a long range, short range, and "flex" option (for temporary installation). Flock also previously referenced the "Sparrow" ALPR line, which was a neighborhood-oriented surveillance device, which is visually almost identical to Falcon.

For more secretive deployments, Flock also partners with All Traffic Solutions to conceal Falcon vehicle scanners in speed enforcement trailers.

Human Tracking Cameras

Flock also offers surveillance cameras which identify and track individual people within the surveillance area. These typically have the additional ability to scan license places, but they are intended primarily to identify and track individuals, absent their vehicles. These were found in early 2026 to contain major cybersecurity issues (ignoring the privacy and legal issues), but Flock chose to deny the existence of those problems, while threatening to file lawsuits against the security researchers who discovered the problems.

Flock offers both PTZ (pan-tilt-zoom) Condor cameras, designed to be remotely controlled (by a human or the Flock AI), and "Condor Bullet" cameras, intended for fixed installation.

Flock representatives have stated multiple times that their services "don't track people" but their own training materials tell a different story. Additionally, police records which have become public, show hundreds of searches for people based on physical appearance, including: "heavy-set male with a black and white hat," "person on skateboard," and "person wearing orange vest and construction hat,"

Sound analysis

A Flock Raven listening device

Flock offers AI-powered internet-connected listening ("Raven") devices, for public spaces. These attempt to identify the sound of gunshots, car crashes, and human voice suggesting distress, "instantly linking them with LPR and video." Any suspected illegal behavior or distress is reported automatically to the customer (and data sharing partners), along with other surveillance data from the area.

Flock Raven is also triggered by other loud noises, such as revving motorcycles.

Autonomous Drones

Flock also offers autonomous drones, which can be automatically deployed by Flock's AI, to go provide surveillance over an area, or follow a person of interest. With an advertised speed of 60mph, and the ability to scan license plates from 2000 feet away, these enable the customer to identify and track anyone within range, where other surveillance equipment is not already installed.

"The Flock Safety drone, specifically, are flying LPR cameras as well" -Rahul Sidhu, Vice President of Aviation at Flock Safety

This capability was largely facilitated by the company's acquisition of another business, named Aerodome. Todd announced that the acquisition was bringing 26 staff members into Flock, and that they were also opening over a hundred additions job positions for engineering and sales of the system.

Third party camera feeds

Flock's systems can also take in video feeds from third party cameras, and perform the same types of target identification and tracing as they do with their own hardware. This service, called "Wing" was announced on October 20, 2020. At the time it was released, Wing focused on vehicle identification and tracing, but did not perform facial recognition. However, in 2026, Flock was simply advertising that it can be used to "Automatically identify and receive alerts on suspicious activities." It is unclear whether facial recognition capabilities have been added more recently.

Legal and Privacy issues

Although the AI-powered mass surveillance which Flock offers can be useful, it comes with some significant legal and ethical problems. The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution provides strong protections against "unreasonable searches and seizures," without a legal warrant, which clearly defines who is being subjected to a search, what place will be searched, and the duration of the search. It also needs to be signed by a judge. Based on legal precedent, tracking the movements of a person over time, is a form of a search, which therefore requires a specific and limited search warrant.

Unfortunately, these systems are also prone to abuse. There have been many cases of those with access to Flock's tracing data, using it to stalk former romantic partners,, groups of children, and others.

One defense of Flock's usage, is that each customer can purportedly only access the data their own leased Flock equipment collects. However, each customer has the option to share their data with other customers, which quickly spreads the access to each customer's data, across the country. As of 2026, we also now have federal agencies such as the FBI, attempting to access nationwide tracing data from Flock and/or competitors.

Surveillance systems also have a societal effect. It has been proven that law-abiding people, will still change their behaviors when they know they are being surveilled. This is not crime prevention, but rather a so-called "chilling affect." When people know their voice is being recorded and analyzed (by things like Flock Raven), they will avoid talking about certain things. When they know their movements are being tracked, they will avoid going certain places. There are other examples of this as well, but this overall influence is known to psychologists as the "Hawthorne effect."

Tracking?

Flock's PR statements and marketing materials state that their systems "do not track" people. When considering a single ALPR, that is essentially true. It only identifies each person, and records the exact time, place they were seen, along with the direction they were traveling. However, Flock's network of surveillance devices are deployed in such a way that they are repeatedly doing this, potentially more than once per minute. This enables Flock's AI to track each person's moment over time, using essentially pins on a map. As soon as a person stops moving, Flock knows that person has stopped within the current surveillance perimeter. If these cameras are deployed in enough places, they can go beyond that, recording exactly where each body is located, who they are talking with, and so forth. This is inconstant with their public statements, and the materials they provide to their customers to calm concerned citizens. However, Flock's internal training materials have been found to clearly acknowledge that they are, indeed, tracking people.

Data retention

By default, Flock customers have been able to access their data up to 30 days in the past. Under public pressure, the company began reducing the default period to 7 days, in 2026. However, at the same time, Flock unintentionally made news, when they revealed that they had, in fact, five years of tracking data.

The city of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, was a customer of Flock, with 15 vehicle scanners deployed in their city. Although they were under the same restrictions as everyone else as to how far back in time they could search, Flock approached the city with a proposal. According to Mayor Eric Sorensen, a Flock sales representative contacted Sheboygan's Engineering department, offering to sell them five years of data about traffic speed and movement, which had been captured by those 15 Flock devices. The city decided to cancel their contract with Flock over the loss of trust, since they had been told that the data was only being retained for 30 days. However, Police Chief Patrick Patton and his department, decided to simply swap to a different vendor proving the same service, Axon.

History

Flock Safety was founded in 2017, by three Georgia Tech graduates. Garrett Langley (B.S. Electrical Engineering 2009), Paige Todd (B.S. Management 2007), and Matt Feury (B.S. Computer Science 2011) joined together as co-founders to establish the company. A wave of car break-ins in Langley’s new neighborhood was what initially prompted him create the new company. Existing ALPR systems were expensive, and he believed he could make such a system more affordable. "We cold-called 20 neighborhoods, and two bought on the spot. They transferred money to Garrett’s personal bank account." They quickly proceeded to assemble the promised system. "We built a very early version of the product, which was really just an Android phone in a waterproof box,” Paige said. However, the system did not remain that rudimentary for long. It quickly evolved, as more companies and HOAs signed up. A great deal of funding was also progressively secured from additional police departments, since their new company was offered a mass surveillance capability which those departments could not legally run themselves.

Flock grew a great deal during the COVID-19 lockdown. They went from about 60 employees beforehand, to over 900, spread across 40 states in the USA. Between 2021 and 2023, their revenue grew by 439%. Paige Todd said the company realized the pandemic shutdown provided an opportunity to re-evaluate whether it was time to spread beyond Atlanta.

Funding

Flock grew rapidly, in large part due to venture capital investments in the company. This venture capital was obtained by a variety of companies and groups, including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Founders Fund (Created by Peter Thiel), Greenoaks, Bedrock, Meritech, Matrix Partners, Sands Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Tiger Global and Y Combinator. Many individuals have been involved in providing this funding, including Sanjot Malhi, Tarun Davda, Sanuj Shah, Ankush Goyal, Rajinder Balaraman, Stan Reiss, Paul Ferri, Geoff Lewis, Alda Dennis, Ayush Chamaria, Sudipto Sannigrahi, Gourav Bhattacharya, Avnish Bajaj, Rajat Agarwal, Ben Altshuler, Andrew Verhalen, Anthony DeCamillo, Rob Ward, David George, Paul Madera, Akshat Jain, Marinda Luk, and Vikram Vaidyanathan.

2026 Financial setback

In 2026, Flock began showing some financial strain. A growing number of customers were canceling their contracts, under public pressure. Flock began offering voluntary buyouts to their staff, promising what they called generous severance pay to those who requested it. The internal communication of this separation program provides "greater agency" for its workers and "treats employees with transparency, respect, and choice." Employees who were not authorized to speak with the media, indicated that they expected layoffs would follow if a significant number of people did not accept the "buyout" of their roles. The offer was issued on September 18th, allowing until October 2nd for everyone to decide.

See also

• Axon Enterprise
• Motorola Solutions
• Rekor Systems
• BusPatrol
• ELSAG SignalTrace
• Verkada

External Links

• Crowd-sourced data about Flock deployments
• Lookup license plates against a publicly released "hot list"
• Atlas of Surveillance - list of known Flock customers