Mere months ago, Flock, an Atlanta-based security camera startup, was known mostly by its target customer base: police departments, cities and towns, with a smattering of colleges, neighborhood associations, and businesses. Today, Flock’s license-plate-reading, AI-driven cameras are widely familiar, and the company is practically a household name. In fact, it’s arguably the breakthrough brand of the year—for all the wrong reasons. This is, after all, a technology designed for cities and law enforcement. It’s not a consumer-facing brand. But reports of scandals involving police misuse were an early spark in turning Flock into a target earlier this year; not just for activists raising concerns, but vandals destroying the cameras. Since then the anti-Flock critiques have become steadily more widespread, and creatively viral—a full-on “Flocklash” as Fast Company’s Grace Snelling put it recently. A downed Flock in Houston, TX, 2026. [Photo: Raquel Natalicchio/Houston Chronicle/Getty Images] Along the way, Flock has become a de facto stand-in for a whole category of surveillance technology. DeFlock, for example, is an activist project aimed at mapping license plate readers in general, not just Flock’s. More broadly, Flock has arguably become the victim of a much wider unease: about AI, “smart” glasses rewriting the rules of public space, “surveillance” pricing, and a host of other assorted tech-culture anxieties. None of those other fights are about Flock. But if you’re looking for a specific brand to pick on, Flock has become a familiar, even safe, all-purpose choice. Partly this is a function of Flock’s success. Well before it became widely familiar to the general public, Flock was already quite successful with its actual customers. With a reported 120,000 cameras in cities and towns across the country, snapping images of 20 billion license plates every month, Flock was valued last year at $7.5 billion. The company has contracts with a reported 7,000 organizations, a

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