Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley is struggling to keep his ahead above water.
With the backlash against his company’s AI-powered surveillance network reaching a boiling point, Langley tried to reason with his critics by calling for a “compromise.”
“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 in a recent Fox News interview, as spotted by TechCrunch. “How do we have our safety, and how do we balance privacy?”
It’s the latest attempt from the Flock CEO to save the company’s image as residents of the municipalities where its cameras are stationed fiercely protest their presence and vigilantes tear down or obstruct them. In addition to the mass surveillance that these cameras enable, the furor has sparked around how law enforcement is abusing their access to the Flock network.
Earlier this month, Langley made a public apology after a Washington Post investigation found at least 50 cases of rogue police officers allegedly misusing Flock cameras and similar systems, including to stalk women.
In another damage control interview at the time, Langley said that the outcry against Flock was the result of some misunderstanding, insisting that “we’re not Big Brother.”
Amid the heightened pressure from the public and lawmakers, Flock announced that it would shorten the default data retention window of footage from 30 days to seven, and said that it would force law enforcement customers to implement an audit tool to flag abnormal uses of its search function.
It wasn’t enough to win over critics. The American Civil Liberties Union called it a “step in the right direction” but found that overall they were “merely retreads of previous inadequate safety measures.” The shorter default retention period Flock said it would implement could also be overridden by a customer.
Langley, however sincerely, professed in the recent Fox News interview that the company was committed to being held accountable.
“Today, it is too often that in Flock and in other technologies, there’s no regulation,” he said, per TechCrunch. “There’s no accountability, and we think that’s wrong.”
There’s good reason for Langley to be concerned about the company’s public image. Last week, a grand jury in Ohio refused to indict a man who was caught destroying a Flock pole — despite surveillance footage catching him in the act. Grand juries, historically, nearly always bring charges against the accused, making it a stunning indictment of Flock’s public reputation.
More on privacy: Flock Says It’s “Taking a Break” From Responding to Media Requests
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