Meet Flock, the $8 billion startup backed by a16z and Tiger facing growing backlash against surveillance capitalism

On Dec. 13 last year, a stranger in a Brown University bathroom noticed a man dressed head to toe in black, wrong for the weather, mere hours before that same man opened fire on Brown University’s campus, killing two and wounding eight before vanishing. Investigators had almost nothing: no name, no plate, just a tip describing a gray Nissan with Florida plates. But that was enough: Providence police ran it through a network of more than 70 Flock Safety cameras, which reached back through 30 days of history, and found the car had passed 14 times since December 1st. “We were able to find the vehicle on Flocks, actually get the actual plate, learn that it was a car rental,” said the Providence police chief. Police tracked the car thanks to Flock and traced him to a storage unit in New Hampshire less than a week after the shooting.

Somewhere in Florida, at almost the same time, a different man was looking into Flock-collected data, but for an entirely different reason. Officer Christopher Goodson wasn’t hunting a stranger, but was watching for his estranged wife. Using his department’s access to Flock, he logged more than 700 unauthorized inquiries into her vehicle between Sept. 2024 and June 2026, and was arrested just last week.

Flock Safety has spent nine years promising to solve crime. At the same time it may have built the most pervasive surveillance network in American history—one that is increasingly drawing loud pushback from advocates worried about what’s been collected, and who has access to the data.

Flock’s network of solar-powered cameras doesn’t just record license plates, they log the make, model, color and identifying details of every vehicle that passes in more than 5,000 communities across 49 states. Then law enforcement offers can search that data using natural-language descriptions (for example car color or a bumper sticker) across thousands of jurisdictions simultaneously. Theoretically any police department with a Flock contract can reconstruct where you drove, when, and how often. The company says data belongs to its customers and is typically deleted in 30 days. But Fortune found the LAPD’s own Inspector General discovered that at least one Flock contract lets the company retain data for five years and use it for “any purpose in Flock’s sole discretion.”

The backlash is intense, and keeps growing: Residents in 36 states have vandalized or destroyed the automated license plate recognition (ALPR) cameras, 82 contracts have been terminated since 2021, and city council chambers from Boston to Santa Clara have become battlegrounds over a technology most residents didn’t know was watching them. Says Anne Toomey McKenna, a privacy attorney and visiting law professor at the University of Richmond: “Our Fourth Amendment was not designed for the persistent and pervasive surveillance environment which we live” in. She called it a “Catch 22″—the Supreme Court has ruled that accessing someone’s location data is a search requiring a warrant, “but then we step into this gray area” once police simply buy the data instead of compelling it.

When reached for comment regarding the controversy, Flock CEO Garrett Langley told Fortune that the company was started to solve crimes. “Every day, Flock helps solve crimes that would otherwise go unsolved. From finding missing children, to solving murders, violent crime, and recovering stolen vehicles, Flock gives investigators leads they didn’t have before,” Langley said. “That impact is why we started Flock, and it drives every decision we make about how this technology should be built and governed.”

It has been a very lucrative enterprise thus far. Flock is backed by blue-chip VC investors including a16z and Tiger Global. The nine year old startup told Fortune in April it had raised $500 million at an $8.3 billion valuation, has taken in $1.2 billion total, and crossed $500 million in annual recurring revenue in the first half of 2026. The company has now expanded into video, gunshot detection, drones, and AI-powered search software. The company........

© Fortune