Flock’s big, bad brand moment

How Flock become the unofficial house brand of dystopia.

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.

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........

© Fast Company