Flock CEO defends surveillance technology amid national backlash: ‘We shouldn’t pause progress’

It’s no surprise that the AI backlash shares some overlap with Flock. Much like AI, Flock is a technology that some feel has been forced upon the public without their consent.

For Langley, this is just the nature of progress, he explained.

“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’.”

But driverless car makers don’t shrug their shoulders at crashes; the companies pause their fleets and apply fixes. Flock, meanwhile, seems to wrestle as a company with understanding when it’s the company’s responsibility to intervene. 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.

Among the many rebuttals to his critics that Langley raised during the interview was the idea that misinformation about Flock had led to some of its customers’ cancellations. For instance, he referenced a time when a customer ended their contract because they believed the devices performed facial recognition. While Flock cameras do not have facial recognition, they do have the ability to detect and track people.

Langley also spent a fair amount of time admonishing those who think his technology, or any technology, should be perfect, attributing the quote to some unnamed community leader.

“He was describing that, too often as a society we judge technology not on how it compares to the past, but how it compares to perfect. And Flock is far from perfect; I’m far from perfect — I’ve made plenty of mistakes,” Langley said.

Another area of pushback was in positioning Flock as a more effective form of policing, and one that allowed police departments to do more with reduced staff.

“If you look at where policing has gone over the last decade, but particularly post-COVID, law enforcement employment is declining rapidly. I think about a place like San Francisco, and there’s hundreds of open positions. They will probably never be filled,” he said, positioning Flock as the tech that would fill in those gaps.

But pressed about abuse and the invasiveness of his company’s surveillance technology, Langley had no 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,” Langley said, without spelling out what those ideas were.

For Langley, those seem to be matters of secondary importance, because his belief in Flock as a public good is so strong.

“I think one of the unfortunate consequences of building a consequential company is this is the price you pay, and I think it’s worth it because there’s millions and millions of people who have a better life today because Flock,” he said. “And clearly we’ve made our fair share of mistakes, and there’s some folks who disagree with what we do, but it’s worth it because one day they might be a victim,” Langley added.