Flock CEO calls for ‘compromise’ as surveillance company faces growing backlash

The country needs to find a “compromise” between privacy and safety, according to Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley.

“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 said during a recent interview with Fox News. “How do we have our safety, and how do we balance privacy?”

Langley’s Fox News appearance was just the latest interview he’s given as the company faces a growing public outcry around concerns that Flock’s surveillance cameras, drones, and license plate recognition technology could be misused.

These concerns aren’t just hypothetical. The Washington Post recently identified 46 cases where police officers have been accused of using Flock technology for unauthorized purposes, including to stalk their wives, girlfriends, or exes.

After listening to an interview with one of the alleged victims, Langley told CBS News, “I apologize. It kills me that she went through that.” At the same time, he insisted, “I don’t think that Flock created police abuse. I think we’re the first company to ever shine a light on it and build the tools to find it.”

Just as the data center backlash has become a potent issue on both the left and the right, both Democratic and Republican politicians have begun to take aim at Flock.

On the left, Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed recently accused his opponent Mike Rogers of supporting “this mass proliferation of Flock cameras, any and everywhere, watching your every move to collect information without you even noticing.” And Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders posted, “STOP AI MASS SURVEILLANCE. STOP FLOCK.”

On the right, three House Republicans recently introduced a bill that would prohibit the federal government from purchasing automated surveillance systems that use facial recognition, biometric IDs, or license plate recognition, “including a Flock Safety camera.”

Flock has already made some changes in response to the criticism, reducing the default data retention time from 30 days to seven days and requiring that a case code be entered before accessing data. But both of these changes can be overridden — for example, police can save data for a longer time period by using a setting called Evidence Mode.

In its response to Flock’s announced changes, the American CIvil Liberties Union said, “While Flock has not shortened the default retention period to the ACLU’s recommended 48 hours, its proposal may be a step in the right direction. Whether this is a real change or just another Flock PR move, however, will depend on how its ‘Evidence Mode’ operates.”

For his part, Langley has said that state regulators should “pass bills that make [the illegal use of Flock data] a criminal offense.” And during his Fox News interview, he pointed to the changes the company has already made, while also saying, “Today, it is too often that in Flock and in other technologies, there’s no regulation. There’s no accountability, and we think that’s wrong.”

TechCrunch will also be asking Langley about these issues when he appears on-stage at our Disrupt conference in October.