Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley says the United States needs a “compromise” between privacy and public safety.

It’s a neat phrase, except I don’t like to see “compromise” and “privacy” that close together.

“When people talk about just one of these, privacy or safety, they’re prioritizing the wrong thing, and what we have to prioritize as a country is compromise.”

Langley call for compromise comes as the company faces intensifying resistance to its automated license plate reader (ALPR) network. The opposition has begun to affect Flock commercially and operationally, with agencies disabling cameras or canceling contracts.

The problem is that the public has already been doing the compromising: People’s movements have been routinely captured, stored, searched, and, in some cases, shared far beyond the communities that installed the cameras.

Flock’s ALPRs collect detailed records of where vehicles travel, then make that data available to law enforcement for investigations. Langley now says the company wants more regulation and accountability. Flock says it’s reducing its recommended default retention period to seven days and will require case codes for law enforcement and an audit tool designed to flag suspicious access by the end of the year.

Those are welcome concessions, but they do not resolve the underlying concern: A rapidly expanding, privately operated surveillance network can turn ordinary travel into searchable historical data.

The opposition has not faded; it has intensified. NPR reports that cameras have been vandalized in at least 36 states. Vandalism is neither a productive nor lawful answer, but its spread offers a useful measure of how profoundly many people feel excluded from decisions about surveillance in their communities.

A genuine compromise would not start with the assumption that widespread collection is inevitable and then negotiate the retention period. It would begin with democratic consent, strict limits on how the data can be used, independently enforceable access controls, public reporting, meaningful opt-outs where possible, and a clear requirement that surveillance be necessary and proportionate.

Calls to meet halfway are also harder to take seriously when the CEO has been accused by 404 Media of misleading police about the outlet’s reporting on an abortion-related case. According to 404 Media, his account is contradicted by court records and police reports. That accusation makes his public calls for compromise much harder to accept.

Flock is right about one thing: There needs to be accountability. But calling for “compromise” after the cameras are already up sharply limits the choices left to communities. Privacy is not a bargaining chip to be surrendered whenever surveillance vendors promise safety.

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A data breach at Paidwork, a platform that pays people small amounts to complete online microtasks, has exposed personal and financial information of more than 23 million users.

According to public breach reports, the intrusion took place in March 2026, with the stolen database first advertised on a cybercrime forum in April as an 11 GB dump allegedly taken from Paidwork’s production systems.

The exposed data reportedly includes full names, email and home addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, gender, education details, bank account numbers, transaction records, device and IP information, profile photos, personal interests, and passwords stored as hashes.

That is a lot of sensitive information to hand over to a site that, for many users, pays only a few cents per task.

Why this kind of breach matters

For cybercriminals, a dataset like this is a goldmine for targeted phishing, account takeover, and identity fraud. Banking details and transaction histories can be abused directly, while combinations of email addresses, password hashes, and personal details make credential stuffing and social engineering much easier. Even if passwords were hashed with bcrypt, weak or reused passwords can still be cracked and tried elsewhere.

Many Paidwork users likely signed up with their “throwaway” email and a reused password, thinking the risk was low because the amounts involved were tiny. But attackers do not care how much you earned. They care how much they can make by abusing your data.

Data for pennies, risk for years

More than anything, this breach is a reminder to think critically about who you give your personal information to.

Before you hand over your full name, home address, date of birth, and bank details to a site that pays a few cents per task, ask yourself whether the trade-off is worth it.

If any service wants sensitive data, check what security and privacy commitments it makes, whether it offers meaningful support in case of a breach, and whether you can limit what you share to the minimum needed. When in doubt, keep high-value data like banking details and copies of ID reserved for organizations that genuinely need them and can be held accountable when they fail to protect them.

Check if your data was exposed

While Paidwork has not publicly acknowledged the alleged breach, the stolen data is reportedly circulating in criminal circles, and we have indexed it in our Digital Footprint Scanner so you can check whether your information was exposed.

Use our Digital Footprint Scanner to check whether your email address appears in known breach data, including data associated with this incident. If it does, treat it as a prompt to take action rather than a cause for panic:

• Change your password on Paidwork (if you still use the service) and on any other accounts where you reused the same or a similar password.
• Enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) wherever possible, especially on email, banking, and other important accounts, and consider using a password manager to generate and store unique passwords for every site.
• Monitor bank statements for unexpected withdrawals or suspicious activity.
• Be prepared for phishing emails, texts, and phone calls. Cybercriminals can use the leaked information to make their scams more convincing.
• Consider an identity monitoring or identity theft protection service.

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