Flock CEO Defends Surveillance Tech Amid National Backlash (techcrunch.com) 58
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Flock's founder and CEO Garrett Langley doesn't think the risks of introducing surveillance technology at scale outweigh the rewards. "If we want to live in a society where, if you commit a crime, you have a higher probability of being held accountable, we shouldn't pause progress," Langley said, speaking onstage during a panel at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 in San Francisco on Wednesday.
During the interview, the controversial founder of the surveillance maker of license plate cameras and other recording devices deflected hard questions about the criticism Flock now faces -- which has since led to canceled contracts and even layoffs. Instead, Langley tended to respond to questions with anecdotes from conversations with police chiefs and city leaders across the United States, and tales of the supposed numerous crimes Flock has solved, rather than offer tangible solutions to people's concerns.
In doing so, Langley positioned Flock as an advance in technology that was somewhat inevitable. He stressed that if people wanted to live in a better society -- that is, one with reduced crime -- they would have to offer up their privacy in return. [...] "Technology, at its core, in its definition, is just doing things better. It's not doing things perfect," he said. "Driverless cars, I think, is a fair analogy. Driverless cars, I think, are definitively safer than human drivers. And when there's one accident, I don't think the answer is to shut down driverless cars. The answer is to say, 'Hey, let's talk about how we prevent more accidents in the future.'"
[...] From Langley's answers, it's clear that the ethics around how Flock should be used is a decision he would much rather leave up to others. "We don't want to tell city leaders how to do their job," he noted. "We will provide recommendations, we'll provide defaults, but we're going to minimize the number of mandated features, functions, and policies," he said. Langley went on to argue that society too often judges technology "not on how it compares to the past, but how it compares to perfect." He acknowledged that "Flock is far from perfect" but maintained that its technology helps police departments compensate for staffing shortages and improve public safety.
When pressed about potential abuse and privacy concerns, Langley offered few specifics, instead arguing that safeguards could be implemented without disrupting police operations. He insisted the benefits of what Flock offers outweigh the controversy. "There's millions and millions of people who have a better life today because [of] Flock," he said, adding that "it's worth it because one day they might be a victim."
During the interview, the controversial founder of the surveillance maker of license plate cameras and other recording devices deflected hard questions about the criticism Flock now faces -- which has since led to canceled contracts and even layoffs. Instead, Langley tended to respond to questions with anecdotes from conversations with police chiefs and city leaders across the United States, and tales of the supposed numerous crimes Flock has solved, rather than offer tangible solutions to people's concerns.
In doing so, Langley positioned Flock as an advance in technology that was somewhat inevitable. He stressed that if people wanted to live in a better society -- that is, one with reduced crime -- they would have to offer up their privacy in return. [...] "Technology, at its core, in its definition, is just doing things better. It's not doing things perfect," he said. "Driverless cars, I think, is a fair analogy. Driverless cars, I think, are definitively safer than human drivers. And when there's one accident, I don't think the answer is to shut down driverless cars. The answer is to say, 'Hey, let's talk about how we prevent more accidents in the future.'"
[...] From Langley's answers, it's clear that the ethics around how Flock should be used is a decision he would much rather leave up to others. "We don't want to tell city leaders how to do their job," he noted. "We will provide recommendations, we'll provide defaults, but we're going to minimize the number of mandated features, functions, and policies," he said. Langley went on to argue that society too often judges technology "not on how it compares to the past, but how it compares to perfect." He acknowledged that "Flock is far from perfect" but maintained that its technology helps police departments compensate for staffing shortages and improve public safety.
When pressed about potential abuse and privacy concerns, Langley offered few specifics, instead arguing that safeguards could be implemented without disrupting police operations. He insisted the benefits of what Flock offers outweigh the controversy. "There's millions and millions of people who have a better life today because [of] Flock," he said, adding that "it's worth it because one day they might be a victim."
crime rates (Score:5, Informative)
Crime rates are lower than ever. Why do we need more enforcement? It is not possible to solve all crimes or prevent all crimes, and it is a waste to try.
https://ourworldindata.org/us-... [ourworldindata.org]
Re:crime rates (Score:5, Informative)
If you check the statistics, median time for stolen vehicle recovery fell by 6.7% in jurisdictions that installed Flock, saving people a fraction of a day in the recovery of their stolen property. Share of vehicles recovered in 1 to 7 days did not change though, so if you're hoping Flock will get your car back, the statistics show we're in basically the same situation we were in before Flock.
The value add that Flock pushes to police departments isn't that it is faster or recovers more. It's that it's other police departments are already using it. Pure bandwagon argument. Flock will tell them marketing based on their own flawed surveys, that "42% of the 330 agencies answering the stolen-vehicle question said Flock was involved in recovering at least half of the stolen vehicles in their jurisdiction." If I'm being generous, Flock might be cheaper than hiring more staff. But I don't have data to support that, I looked, and couldn't find it.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
That's your problem. If you survey people about crime rates they're going to tell you that they've gone up. Reality doesn't matter. And statistically you probably been the victim of some crime or another at some point if only porc
Re: crime rates (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If crime rates are lower than ever. Why do we need more enforcement? Because of all the new crimes about to be introduced.
How about make some actual progress first? (Score:5, Interesting)
What I know about Flock is the police are stalking their exes with it, innocent families are being held at gunpoint due to faulty data, and there's cameras in a children's gym/swimming pool that executives are checking out. Oh and ICE is being granted access they shouldn't have so they can detain anyone brown with a spanish accent.
What kind of progress is it they're trying to make here? Because it sounds like progress toward 1930's Germany.
Re:How about make some actual progress first? (Score:4, Insightful)
Mmmhmm. Flock's model appears to be to get their equipment put in, and once in, to let whomever they want have access to it rather than the original polity or agency that partnered for the install. And after the partnership ends they fight against their equipment being taken down.
Sounds to me like they specifically want to enable a surveillance state, but that this surveillance state operates about as accurately as the one from Terry Gilliam's Brazil .
Re: (Score:1, Insightful)
Because it sounds like progress toward 1930's Germany.
In the 30's, Berlin was the center of art and culture in Europe and the trains ran on time.
So no, it doesn't.
Flock you too! (Score:4, Insightful)
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -Benjamin Franklin
It is as true now as it was then.
We do not need to go to extremes to protect ourselves from rare risks. Life is pretty darned safe already. Really, it is.
Re: (Score:2)
Flock's founder and CEO Garrett Langley doesn't think the risks of introducing surveillance technology at scale outweigh the rewards.
And exactly how surprising is this? Did anyone expect him to say what would boil down to "You're right; this is an unsupportable invasion of privacy; legislate my company out of business and eliminate all the work and value I've put into the company, as well as put all my employees out of work"? If he actually thought ubiquitous surveillance was bad, he wouldn't have created the company in the first place, much less worked to get Flock cameras used everywhere he could get agencies to buy and install them.
Re: (Score:3)
It is as true now as it was then.
What has Flock got to do with the right to levy taxes? Or do you have no idea what Benjamin Franklin was talking about?
Here's a better quote for you:
"Benjamin Franklin is one of the most mis-quoted people on the internet." - Abraham Lincoln.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not questioning his point, just the dumb fucking misuse of a quote, while doubling down by attempting call back to the era from which the quote came.
And no, research the quote, it doesn't fit. The simplified understanding of the words may fit, but attributing it to a person who did not at all use them in the same context does not.
Safe-guards could be implemented? (Score:5, Insightful)
We keep hearing about cases where Flock was used, intentionally, to target and abuse innocent people. Where was the warrant? Where was the sign-off? How does the audit system force checks and balances to assure against misuse? Can the data be removed by the people it scanned? What happens on a false identification, or the fat ass police chief who can't be bothered to collect evidence first, and uses Flock to side step their job?
Re: (Score:1)
“Safe-guards could be implemented”, so fucking implement them!
lol No.
Why? Because his customers, the Police, don't want them. And he is a business man, meaning he gives his paying customers what they want, including ways to turn off the features they don't want.
And he throws those same customers under the bus. Bad actors using Flock to stalk their significant other? That's just them, not Flock...
Re:Safe-guards could be implemented? (Score:4, Insightful)
People aren't comparing Flock against perfect, they're pointing out the basic design is so flawed and abused it's a rapid deployment of digital molestation. He said it out loud, “Safe-guards could be implemented”, so fucking implement them! Does he honestly think people wanting their privacy and digital liberties respected is a call for perfect implementation? People don't want perfect, they want functionally reasonably and adequate, which Flock is not, by design.
The fact that Flock rolled out a mass surveillance network without having even the most basic safeguards in place before a single camera was turned on shows that the company is untirely untrustworthy for this task. Only a person so childishly naive that their understanding of law enforcement was no more sophisticated than a 6-year-old's would think the system wouldn't be widely abused. Transparency, traceability, warrant requirements, and compliance audits should all have been baked-in requirements for any department putting in a system like this.
That's all assuming mass surveillance is needed, justifiable, or compatible with liberty, none of which it is. It should be prohibited, probably at the constitutional level.
Re: (Score:1)
It is true that (Score:2)
Re:It is true that (Score:5, Insightful)
But there's expectation of not being stalked, and stalking is what these networked cameras do.
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If you don't want to be stalked, maybe you shouldn't be dating the cop's ex-girlfriend.
Crime statistics (Score:5, Interesting)
In a society that touts freedom as much as we do, the bar should be set extremely high for such a technology. Right now it's the lowest, rotten hanging fruit.
Re: (Score:2)
From their viewpoint that's all the justification they need. Kind of a self fulfilling prophecy.
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How many crimes have been committed DUE to Flock cameras? How many abuses that may not have been criminal but were unethical? In a society that touts freedom as much as we do, the bar should be set extremely high for such a technology. Right now it's the lowest, rotten hanging fruit.
Freedom is a buzzword that holds no actual meaning in the US any longer. If it ever did, we abolished its meaning right after 9/11, when we used the convenience of the tragedy to flip society's view of freedom on its head and decided that safety and security theater is far, FAR more important than what freedom actually means. We've become a marketing wing for freedom, democracy, and open society, while we clamp down harder and harder on all those concepts and try to pretend that we're some bastion of hope.
These questions, are on-topic (Score:2)
That's very true: Those judgements are a combination of "think of the children" and "I'm getting mine, fuck you" thinking.
/p. So, let's ask the important question: How many erroneous vehicle-stops at police gun-point, did the police do before Flock's cameras, arrived? How many police committed push-button stalking before Flock's never-stops-stalking database, arrived?
And here in lies the problem (Score:2)
Instead of conforming to what most of America wants, we get to fight flock. This is getting ridiculous, what does Langley want? To bury his company, because this is a PR nightmare, ad some point you would think this guy would say "Yeah, maybe we do need warrant checks on data" but nope.
"Some of you may die- (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
-but I will get paid for it!" - Tech Bro
Let's not forget, the tech bros are openly saying there's a 1/3rd chance that AI will wipe us out as a species, but "that's an acceptable risk." Because they might make a profit on the way to extinction. And we're letting them decide for all of us without pushing back.
Re: (Score:2)
it's clear that the ethics around how Flock should be used is a decision he would much rather leave up to others.
If you actually want to leave those questions to others, you don't lie to the public about what your technology does, force customers to sign NDAs, and coach police on how to hide where their information came from. That's what you do if you want to make the decisions yourself and force them on an unsuspecting public.
Title Correction: (Score:4, Informative)
"Privacy Rapist Defends Surveillance Tech Amid National Backlash"
There FTFY.
What could go wrong with the Digital Panoptocon :o (Score:2)
Re:What could go wrong with the Digital Panoptocon (Score:4, Insightful)
That sounds like the after effects of untethered social media.
You know what I think? (Score:5, Insightful)
Fuck flock, fuck this cunt and fuck anyone who supports this shit.
Define "crime" (Score:1)
I don't know why he is bothering (Score:2)
I guess what I'm saying is, we do not have enough Democratic institutions left to prevent these people from forcing these cameras down our throats and forcing 24/7 around the clock perfect surveillance down our throats.
We could get all that back but I mean for fucks sakes man they are
Hey idiot (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
We don't care about the 0.3% of the time it's used for crime. We care about the other 99.7%
In keeping with that thought, how many people (LEOs) abusing Flock data have been "held accountable" so far?
Also, I'm pretty sure Flock isn't going to help with high dollar/impact crimes committed by rich people and corporations.
"If". (Score:2)
If we want to live in a society where, if you commit a crime, you have a higher probability of being held accountable, we shouldn't pause progress
Except... We don't. Our laws, and in particular their associated punishments, are explicitly designed around low-probability enforcement. If every crime were guaranteed to be caught, "sending a message" and the entire concept of rehabilitation become completely irrelevant. There would only be two reasons to commit a crime: Passion / impulse; or, it's worth the price. In the former, fear of punishment isn't an issue. In the latter, the punishment is baked into the ROI.
If we as a society really wanted 100%
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If every crime were guaranteed to be caught, "sending a message" and the entire concept of rehabilitation become completely irrelevant. There would only be two reasons to commit a crime: Passion / impulse; or, it's worth the price. In the former, fear of punishment isn't an issue. In the latter, the punishment is baked into the ROI.
Criminologists have known for some time that crime is deterred most effectively by the certainty of being caught and not by the consequent punishment. And that completely blows up your thesis. You fear a world in which the actual punishment doesn't matter all that much, and don't realize we're already there.
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My comments about the level of punishment were primarily for emphasis on the cruelty of our current imperfect system - The "deterrent" effect is meaningless if we have a 100% success rate. More to the point, if we wanted to live in that world, we wouldn't have the third throug
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Don't get me wrong, How does that contradict my thesis? If there's a 100% chance of being caught, that has zero effect on "impulse" crimes, and in the transactional case where the reward exceeds the punishment, it's still "worth it".
You're saying such people can't be deterred anyway. You may be right, but I don't see how relaxing a 100% catch-rate would help.
My comments about the level of punishment were primarily for emphasis on the cruelty of our current imperfect system - The "deterrent" effect is meaningless if we have a 100% success rate. More to the point, if we wanted to live in that world, we wouldn't have the third through eighth amendments. It would be a heck of a lot easier to catch criminals if the police could randomly bust down our doors with zero judicial oversight, or hey, why not mandatory body cams for everyone all the time?
You're confused. A high success-rate is the deterrent. See my previous post regarding the findings of criminologists.
But we do have a bill of rights (in the US), we don't allow police unlimited discretion, and we have quite a few laws around where, when, why, and how surveillance is allowed. The facts speak for themselves - We very clearly don't want to live in that world.
Now I think I see your point: a 100% success-rate would imply we live in a police-state. Well ... not necessarily. You can have rights and have a highly-effective judicial system (maybe not with a 100% success-rate, but the higher the better.) I would argue you can
Making a better society (Score:2)
He stressed that if people wanted to live in a better society [...]
Putting up security cameras, high walls, and bars on your windows is not really making society better. It is the reaction you have when you have given up on that idea. You've decided that society has, and will always have, bad people, and you are just going to hunker down and protect your own. The task of making a better society is just too tough.
It's a bit like when there is loud music playing. You can negotiate with the person playing the loud music to have it turned down. But if you have come to feel tha
CEO doesn't think risks outweigh rewards (Score:2)
He should imitate Anthropic! (Score:2)
"Our camera system is so powerful, so invasive, it's dangerous!"
"Oops, our camera system just caught someone doing something in private, on private property!"
"We're holding off on releasing our next version because it's too powerful, we need some time to let governments review it."
Anthropic knows how to market it's product, for free, turning bad news into advertising. Flock should take notes!
Fuck him (Score:2)
Fuck him and the horse he rode on. Fuck his business. Fuck his technology. Fuck his company. Fuck his employees. Fuck his investors. Fuck his government ties. Fuck him defending this shit. Fuck everyone who wants this. Fuck the government for buying into it. Fuck the laws that allow this if they do.
It's the money that counts (Score:1)
This guy is a douche (Score:2)
In doing so, Langley positioned Flock as an advance in technology that was somewhat inevitable. He stressed that if people wanted to live in a better society -- that is, one with reduced crime -- they would have to offer up their privacy in return. [...]
Nowhere is anyone asking me if I want this. There is no opt out. This is not a choice I get to make. This is the fears of a few driving the ship. The reason the Constitutional Amendments exist is to prevent this sort of surveillance and from fearful citize
Mass surveillance isn't the solution (Score:2)
CEO Garrett Langley doesn't think the risks of introducing surveillance technology at scale outweigh the rewards.
His wife's boyfriend disagrees