Flock Safety's CEO faces severe internet doxxing and congressional inquiries after publicly dismissing strict privacy concerns.

Fiza Ali Neowin @Fiza_Aliii · Aug 30, 2026 14:26 EDT

If you’ve been following the tech world over the last week or two, things just blew up around Flock Safety in a massive way. Their CEO, Garrett Langley, went on Fox News recently and argued that focusing too much on privacy "prioritizes the wrong thing" and that we all just need to accept a "compromise" between privacy and safety.

In case you aren't familiar, Flock is the company that installs those automated license plate reader cameras all over neighborhoods and cities to help police track cars. As you can imagine, the internet did not take the idea that privacy doesn't matter as much as safety well at all. The clip went viral on X, and almost immediately, people started posting what they claimed was Langley's home address online.

X’s moderation team has been scrambling to take those posts down, but users just tweak the text or put the address inside altered images to dodge the automated filters. Now, to be clear, doxxing someone is completely indefensible and dangerous because it puts real people in physical danger. But the irony here is thick.

Langley built a massive business on tracking ordinary people everywhere they drive, yet critics pointed out that his own neighborhood is blurred out on street view platforms. Furthermore, their cameras log millions of vehicle movements daily, creating a massive web of data that police departments and even federal agencies like Customs and Border Protection can search. Langley gets a level of location privacy that his cameras deny to millions of drivers every single day.

Under pressure, Flock recently lowered its default data retention period from 30 days down to 7, but digital rights groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which recently criticized Meta for removing opt-in encrypted chats on Instagram, called that fix a joke because local police can easily override it and keep the data longer anyway.

Now the whole situation has spilled over into Washington, and lawmakers are jumping in from both sides. Representative Keith Self introduced the PRIVACY Act to force federal agencies to get a warrant before searching license plate data, explicitly calling out Langley by saying the Fourth Amendment isn't up for "compromise." Meanwhile, Senator Josh Hawley launched a formal investigation into Flock's data practices.

Langley’s whole business model was built on the idea that your movements in public are free game to be recorded; however, now he is finding out what happens when that exact logic gets turned back around on him.

Source: Fox News via Gadget Review