Flock CEO Garrett Langley on Controversy, "Surveillance State" Claims, and Privacy vs Safety

The interview opens by calling the balance between safety and privacy one of the most important discussions of the moment and placing Flock at the center of it. The interviewer discloses having once tried to invest in the company and says they are not a shareholder. They describe a long-running interest in Flock that is sometimes mixed with concern. They also refer to an earlier conversation about six or seven years ago on This Week in Startups. The stated aim is to go straight at the controversies, especially the recent rise of privacy concerns that has followed Flock's spread into many communities.

In the account of the company's origins, the founder says Flock started nine years ago with the mission of living in a safer neighborhood. For its first two or three years it sold only to neighborhoods. The core product is described as basic license plate reading technology: a car drives by, the system takes a still image of the vehicle and reads the plate. Over time the system has added detection of features such as a roof rack, a bumper sticker, or a dent or other damage.

The company gives several figures for its impact. These are its own numbers and were not independently checked in the conversation. It claims more than a million crimes solved with Flock last year and more than 10,000 missing people found, from grandparents with dementia to children. One example is a stolen car in Atlanta, the previous week, with a two-year-old in the back seat; the child was returned safely within the hour. For July, the figures given are about 1,125 missing people and more than 20,000 stolen cars. Flock is said to operate in just over 6,000 cities. The founder links that scale to the public scrutiny the company now faces.

I want to live in one where we're safer. And I want to keep my privacy while I do it.

Asked how communities decide to install the cameras, the answer centers on city councils, which have the final say. A city manager's direct reports, such as a police chief, fire chief or public works head, bring proposals to council meetings, and Flock is one of those proposals. The company describes local government as a hard market. It says the last company serving local government to go public did so more than 20 years ago, and that this difficulty is one reason Flock struggled to raise money. By its estimate, Flock attended close to 10,000 city council meetings last year, and it keeps a large team whose job is to explain what the product does and does not do.

The discussion notes that council meetings are recorded and public. One example is the vote by Flock's first police customer in Jersey Village, Texas, six years ago, which remains public record. The council environment is called "wacky," but the company says it still attends because it wants buyers to know what they are buying.

Flock's long-standing position is that stored plate data is a liability, so every deployment should have a set retention period. The company is open about the trade-off. Deleting data after a day or two makes the product less effective, though still better than nothing. Thirty days is called "pretty effective," and a year more effective still. Flock says it has always believed city councils should decide how long data is stored and who it is shared with. Its default retention used to be 30 days and has recently been cut to seven. It maintains that someone democratically elected, at the city or state level, should make the final call, while the vendor has to set strong defaults.

When asked how many crimes each retention window would solve, the company gives a national aggregate estimate, framed as a belief rather than a measured result:

We think 90% of crimes will get solved within seven days of data