Flock’s founder and CEO Garrett Langley doesn’t think the risks of introducing surveillance technology at scale outweigh the rewards. 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 cancelled 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. A similar argument about the trade-offs and rewards could be made for AI, which is marketed to the public as vastly improving our lives, automating tedious tasks, and making things more convenient.
The flip side is the cost of sharing everything about ourselves with the makers of the AI agents themselves — and the possibility of the destruction of humanity, according to some. 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. It’s not doing things perfect,” he said. 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. 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.
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