Flock CEO Defends Surveillance Technology Amid Backlash, Says ‘We Shouldn’t Pause Progress’

“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 during a panel interview, according to TechCrunch. The report said he deflected hard questions about the criticism Flock faces, often answering with anecdotes from conversations with police chiefs and city leaders and accounts of crimes the company’s technology has helped solve rather than offering tangible solutions to concerns about privacy and abuse.

Langley positioned Flock, which makes license plate cameras and other recording devices, as an inevitable advance in technology. He stressed that if people wanted a better society with reduced crime, they would have to offer up their privacy in return, TechCrunch reported. The interview drew parallels to debates over artificial intelligence, which is marketed as improving lives and automating tedious tasks while raising concerns about consent and the cost of sharing personal information.

“Technology, at its core, in its definition, is just doing things better. It’s not doing things perfect,” Langley said, according to TechCrunch. He compared Flock to driverless cars, saying they are definitively safer than human drivers and that one accident should not lead to shutting them down; instead, the response should be to discuss how to prevent more accidents. TechCrunch noted, however, that driverless car makers pause fleets and apply fixes after crashes, while Flock wrestles with when it is the company’s responsibility to intervene. Langley indicated he would rather leave the ethics of how Flock should be used to others.

“We don’t want to tell city leaders how to do their job,” he said. “We will provide recommendations, we’ll provide defaults, but we’re going to minimize the number of mandated features, functions, and policies.”

Langley also rejected some criticism as misinformation, saying it had led customers to cancel contracts. He cited a customer who ended a contract because they believed the devices performed facial recognition. According to TechCrunch, Flock cameras do not have facial recognition, but they can detect and track people. Langley quoted an unnamed community leader to argue that society often judges technology against perfection rather than against the past, and said, “Flock is far from perfect; I’m far from perfect — I’ve made plenty of mistakes.”

He also positioned Flock as a more effective form of policing that allows departments to do more with reduced staff. TechCrunch reported that he pointed to a rapid decline in law enforcement employment over the past decade, particularly after COVID, and said San Francisco has hundreds of open positions that will probably never be filled. Flock, he suggested, could help fill those gaps.

Pressed about abuse and the invasiveness of his company’s surveillance technology, Langley did not offer substantive answers. “I think if the idea is to curb abuse, I think there’s a way to do that that doesn’t disrupt the legal system, that doesn’t disrupt the efficacy and flow of a police department,” he said, without spelling out what those ideas were, according to TechCrunch. The report said those issues appeared secondary to Langley because of his belief in Flock as a public good.

He said building a consequential company carries a price, and he considers it worth it because millions of people have better lives today because of Flock, while acknowledging that the company has made mistakes and that some people disagree with what it does.