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Flock is under intense pressure. Its own Chief Legal Officer publicly acknowledged that “every single day, I read a headline from somewhere in the country” about residents raising concerns. Dozens of cities have canceled or rejected contracts. Lobbying spending has skyrocketed. Two class action lawsuits are active. A new major lawsuit was filed this week. None of it is abating.
This week, Flock published a blog post defending employees who accessed cameras at the Marcus Jewish Community Center in Dunwoody, Georgia, calling allegations of inappropriate conduct “false” and warning that:
Accusing someone of spying on children is not a policy disagreement; it is a life-altering allegation.
Executive Summary
IPVM concurs with Flock on the specific allegation: there is no evidence that any employee accessed those cameras for malicious purposes related to children. Residents who called Flock employees child molesters on social media went beyond legitimate criticism into territory that is false and harmful, and those individuals should apologize.
At the same time, Flock’s CEO has spent years attacking privacy advocates, calling them terrorists and accusing critics of wanting to “normalize lawlessness.” Flock’s blog post argues that false, defamatory allegations against individuals cause real harm and should not be made, a standard the company has not applied to its own rhetoric. Consistency matters. This incident will likely harden Flock’s adversarial posture further, which would be the wrong response to a situation Flock exacerbated.
The accelerating negativity surrounding Flock, attacks on individual employees, on installers, on the company broadly, creates a cumulative burden. Many employees genuinely believe in the mission, but the sustained pressure of this kind wears people down and threatens the company’s ability to grow.
What Actually Happened
As IPVM documented earlier this week, Dunwoody’s mayor acknowledged Flock had been in “places they should not be” and confirmed Flock apologized to the JCC. Local resident Jason Hunyar had obtained event logs through a FOIA request showing 8 Flock sales employees accessed live and recorded feeds on Dunwoody’s network more than 480 times, including cameras inside the JCC’s gymnastics room, a pool, parks, playgrounds, and libraries. This directly contradicted Flock’s own public FAQ, which stated: “Nobody from Flock Safety is accessing or monitoring your footage.” The pledge was violated. That is a documented fact, separate from any question of intent.
IPVM Concurs: The Predator Allegations Are False
There is no evidence of malicious intent. The access was a sales demo, not predatory behavior. The “little Epstein” language at Dunwoody city council meetings and social media posts naming individual employees as child molesters is false and harmful. Those who made these allegations should apologize to the Flock employees they named.
For some of the examples of such comments on social media, see:
Similarly, see another commenter explicitly calling out Flock’s employees involved in this Dunwoody controversy in a comment under Flock’s YouTube video (IPVM has redacted the names of the individuals referenced).
Flock is even engaging directly with social media commenters, responding to an anonymous user with an opioid drug reference as their handle “LordofDarvocet” (e.g., see Flock’s response below to a person who currently has 15 followers on X):
Impact on Employees
Flock’s field staff, installers, and sales employees absorb the front-line consequences of the company’s growing opposition. When individual names appear in FOIA requests, social media posts, or city council confrontations, the personal cost is real. Even employees who took the job because they genuinely believe in reducing crime are not insulated from the cumulative weight of week after week of public hostility.
This is a material headwind for Flock. A company that depends on field staff engaging communities directly cannot afford employees who become reluctant to put themselves forward. Executives have the most to lose financially and are generally better positioned to withstand the pressure. The people who bear the disproportionate cost are the ones in the field, and sustained pressure on that layer of the workforce makes recruitment, retention, and community engagement meaningfully harder.
The Consistency Problem
That environment reflects a rhetorical posture that Flock’s own leadership helped create.
Flock’s blog post argues that random internet commenters’ allegations are “life-altering.” By that same standard, what should privacy advocates feel when Flock’s billionaire CEO, backed by the country’s most influential investors, publicly labels them terrorists?
CEO Garrett Langley has called privacy advocacy group Deflock a “terroristic organization” and said it is “closer to Antifa than anything else.” He has accused critics of wanting to “normalize lawlessness” and framed community opposition as a coordinated attack by activists trying to “let murderers go free.” The ACLU called that posture “simplistic, juvenile, and ultimately authoritarian.” Flock’s chief lawyer falsely alleged that civil liberties groups would have blocked LPR evidence in the Brown University shooting case, a position those groups had never taken.
Calling privacy advocates terrorists is not a policy argument. It is an attempt to delegitimize critics by associating them with violence. Flock now objects, correctly, to the same tactic being used against its own employees. The objection would carry more weight if the company had not embraced it.
The Consequence
When a company frames critics as criminal sympathizers and opposition groups as a terrorist organization, it should not be surprised when the opposition responds in kind. The predator allegations are wrong. They are also, in part, a product of the rhetorical environment Flock helped build.
The temptation after this week will be to escalate. But Flock is not losing this fight because it has been too conciliatory. It is losing ground because the rhetorical environment it helped build has now turned on it. More of the same is not a strategy.
