Flock CEO calls for ‘compromise’ as surveillance company faces growing backlash | TechCrunch
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?”
I don’t know if corrupt is quite the right word. They all certainly engage in heavy amounts of corruption to gain their power, but they also heavilly engage in other horrid practices to the same end, such as exploitation of their collective workforce, userbase, and supply chain.
The root of all of this, of course, is capitalism, which not only enables, but encourages this sociopathic power-seeking behavior.
Also as illustrated again and again, from ICE hunting down good people to cops stalking women because they are pigs, surveillance is not safety. It’s rather the opposite. I want privacy so that I can remain safe.
I don’t think anyone who ever lived in a totalitarian regime would describe it post fact as having made them safer.
Yeah what even is the argument for that? Even if a crime is caught on one of these things they’re still not making anyone safer. The crime still happened and that’s the best case scenario where the crime is caught on tape. From what I’ve seen usually these things provide circumstantial evidence at best.
It’s a false dichotomy, pure and simple. They try to frame it in a way to make their invasion of your privacy seem as if it’s in your best interest, even though the opposite is true. Typical fascist rhetoric.
Correct, “safety” compromises our privacy. Now you’re getting it, captain shithead CEO! So with that in mind, there is no way we can accept these cameras.
How about we compromise by saying remove them all, give back the money spent, delete all data and in exchange you don’t get the treatments due one helping enable orwillian levels of suvelance
Hey question… its illegal (I think) to suggest or call for the hanging of someone. But is it illegal to publish and support legislation calling for the execution of public figures involved in X Y Z?
If not, I call for legislation to be passed that criminalized the usage of personal data for surveillance. Data collected without permission…
I need to think this through a little more but fuck it right? Make a proposed law that people can publicly support that show just how goddamn serious people are about this shit.
It’s been tried before, and abandoned because it’s generally a bad idea. What you’re describing is a bill of attainder, a law passed specifically to punish an individual or group.
Not sure exactly, but international trade law is weird, and generally bills of attainder are targeted at one or more individuals rather than classes of individuals. If a law defines a class, like “anyone selling goods from China” then I don’t think it qualifies as a bill of attainder. I did find this article on Lawfare from 2019 where Huawei challenged parts of the NDAA because it specifically forbade the executive branch from buying Huawei gear. The courts ultimately did not agree with Huawei.
that makes sense. but I can still legislate which actions he and everyone else is capable of legally doing… e.g. collecting data to surveil members of the public.
If a law punished a specific murderer or group of murderers it would be, but not if it punished an entire defined class of murderers equally. Lawmakers generally describe the qualifications of a crime (e.g. “anyone who knowingly and willfully causes the death of another person") and prescribe a punishment for anyone convicted of it, and then the courts determine whether or not individuals are guilty by whether they meet the qualifications laid out in the law. Bills of attainder are laws that define individuals or specific groups as guilty by identity, not qualification, which means they don’t get a trial and the judiciary doesn’t get to act as a check on the legislature.
why would “legislation to be passed that criminalized the usage of personal data for surveillance” fall under this attainer scenario? seems very similar to “legislation passed that criminalized murder”…
I don’t think it would. Congress could criminalize the behavior of corporate surveillance, then prosecutors could charge any individual or company that engages in that behavior. It’d only be a bill of attainder if it was selective by identity (e.g. a bill that proclaims “the CEO of Flock is guilty of criminal surveillance and should be arrested") rather than a defined criminal standard that applies to everyone.
All crimes punish the group of people doing that crime. A bill of attainder targets an individual or a related group of individuals (like family members). But legislation to criminalize an action that happens to be done by only a small number of individuals is not a bill of attainder.
its illegal (I think) to suggest or call for the hanging of someone
Only if it’s a specific, actionable threat intended to be taken literally. But if, for example, it’s advocating a prosecution that might end with capital punishment, that’s protected speech. “Let justice be done.”
is it illegal to publish and support legislation calling for the execution of public figures involved in X Y Z?
Hey buddy, you didn't ask us about shit before you started installing your creepy cameras to monitor us everywhere, so you can go ahead and fuck off now.
I AGREE! There IS common Ground between allowing the Epstein Class to SPY ON CHILDREN and the People who think CHILD RAPISTS Spying on Children is WRONG! Maybe just a COUPLE MILLION of Taxpayer Dollars to Spy on Children as a Treat?
It’s not a matter of privacy or safety. It’s a matter of how does this technology benefit me? So far, that’s none at all. I live in a place of low crime, so it’s ability to keep me safer is minor if at all. Police abuse it and the upper classes seem safe from it. I do not see any benefit in it’s current form. Lock it down behind court orders without general police/organizational access and maybe? But I’ll still vote against it…
hey bb, i cn only reed the top fore lines, so u wan sum fuk den?
(I’d normally use a winky emoticon down here to indicate I’m being silly here, but I know you younger kids interpret that in contexts like this with sexual overtones. :shakes fist: Leave my 1980s emoticons alone, damn you kids! heh)
Skip the property crime altogether and threaten the human beings involved in this. People should be scared shitless of even suggesting installing one of these things.
How is that better? Who is going to investigate this? The people who use the cameras are going to investigate themselves and find that themselves did nothing wrong.
It like saying we created this tool but you guys only found out how bad is was because the people that use it are dishonest, unethical, and corrupt.
He’s kinda off too because what about police body cameras? What’s to stop someone from shutting off flock cameras temporarily or data suddenly goes missing.
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.”
Really? Wow. Okay, when you lose Republicans (well, some Republicans), you KNOW you’ve gone too far. Damn.
Just as a good to know, if feces (especially of unknown origin) are involved in a cleanup and restoration project, it becomes a biohazard and requires additional time and resources.
“How do we have our safety, and how do we balance privacy?”
Spoken like a true sales/con artist. I can almost hear the brand guidelines poking through… Always mention safety before privacy, always treat safety as a given and privacy as the buffer zone in which to find compromise.
The compromise is how far each town chooses to go above security tier 0: emergencies with immediate threat to life or property.
tier 0 is defined as covering 100% of law enforcement requests of all agencies with jurisdiction in the covered area.
I think one of the problems that encompasses the flock debate besides the privacy issues is the relationship that the police have with people in the United States. Most police view people as a threat and if you look at the police training they teach them to be extremely violent. During simple traffic stops most police are on edge and have an attitude like they might be violent with you. I’m just talking about the general atmosphere- I’m not even getting into all of the examples where police have killed people for no reason, falsified information to arrest innocent people, and generally abused their power.
Did police want to wear body cams or did they want to continue without accountability? Police have a responsibility and have taken an oath. They should be required to have cameras.
In a society where all of its parts work together towards the same goal, ALPRs would not be a problem. In the US this surveillance is very worrisome.
Maybe if there where not do many guns in your country and so easy to get them and hard to take them away from people with issues who shouldn’t have then, then maybe coos wouldn’t be so edgy on a traffic stop.
And yet drive through restaurant cashiers are able to interact with drivers daily. And toll booth operators as well. The biggest danger from writing a ticket on the side of the road is other vehicles. Police have the discretion of when to escalate a situation. For example, when to attempt an arrest- They can call for backup or wait until the situation can be safely resolved.
If police need to go to therapy and then they should. If they cannot do their job without suffering from trauma then they should resign.
Violent crime is driven by economic inequality, not by proliferation of guns. Tax the rich, pay people a fair wage, provide universal healthcare, investing in public infrastructure, etc. are how you reduce violent crime.
But rich people don’t want to do that. They want to hoard their wealth and oppress people as they please, so they distract the masses by claiming it’s due to proliferation of guns, atheists, LGBT folks, etc. The rich will use any scapegoat they can find to avoid fixing actual problems.
I think the window of compromise has long since passed. Flock as a company went in with a guns blazing, anti-privacy, record everything, give the information to anyone style business style, and then chose to double and triple down on the style when the controversy/outcry first started. Once you’ve hit the stage where there’s people starting to protest and riot and cities have started to go out of their way to ban the product and retract contracts due to the fact that they’re concerned about public support. It’s too late. That’s a fire that’s not being put out.
Like, I’m here for making it a crime for a cop to spy on someone without legal and professional justification, but I really just don’t see why we should let them have the tools to do it.
Also, I’m also worried about the legal uses of these things. A lot of our rights come down to the adversarial nature of interactions between the ordinary person and the state’s capacity to inflict violence. Surveillance without a warrant is unchecked police power.
Right. The root cause here is that companies are allowed to collect stupid amounts of information about private citizens - and then sell that information to a government or abuse it for their own purposes under the cover of an EULA of ‘we will collect [various information] for business purposes’. If I can’t apply for a job without agreeing to 3 EULAs that sign away my personal information, then I’m not agreeing to them; I’m being held hostage by them.
If flock was not allowed to store PII data (and PII was extended to cover location history, nearby devices, and a few other things), then their business model would evaporate.
Hey won’t be gullitined and instead he will just face prison time and have his mass survelence system dismantled and the rest of his assets seized and redistributed
Agree except the framing is imprecise: he must refund stolen taxpayer assets due to misrepresentation, corruption under RICO, and fraud. He must go back to zero and and TAKE THE BUS to his next job
Yeah, no, the interpretations of the 4th amendment that led to these things being legal were clearly made in an era where they relied on the high cost of surveillance to minimize the amount there is. A reasonable modern day interpretation of the 4th should ban these
The fact that it improves safety is a claim that can easily be challenged as recently it seems to have put people in harms way. Texas police used it to stalk a woman across state lines to find out if she got an abortion elsewhere.
*We didn’t invent police abuse! We actually shined a light on it and pointed it out"
Fuck right the hell off with this shit. You don’t get to sell your panopticon to a group that routinely abuses every tool they have, and feign ignorance in defense of the results.
I do not want Flock cameras surveiling me or my car where it will inevitably become data that’s combined with a million other data points on me that might be able to determine what I’m doing, what I’m thinking, and what I might do in the future, just to be able to say we’re “safer”.
I’ve been driving different routes as much as possible. One day this way, one day that way, once by bike, once by car, once on foot, sometimes making stops, sometimes going nonstop. Yeah, there’s still patterns, but I’m not beholden to them and at this point I know alternative routes as well as a London cab driver and I’ve found cool new parks, restaurants, etc.
Yup, violent crime has been dropping for decades and not an insignificant drop. We did not need mass surveillance, we did not want mass surveillance, nor do we want it now.
There is no compromise.
Garret,
You will be lucky to be alive here in a few months.
The only thing you can do is beg and grovel and give back every penny you and your company earned back to the American people and in addition, take down every flock camera.
And to employees of this company, run and Publicly denounce them so you have a CHANCE to be hired anywhere again.
The more you learn about Flock, the scarier it gets. They have FULL profiles built on EVERY american that has flock cameras nearby. All your shopping, driving, financial habits are tracked. They know who all your friends and family are and how often you visit, they track your vehicles specific identifiable features like bumper damage, stickers, faded paint, etc. All of that is a complete violation of the 4th amendment and all these companies need to be sued.
Even deeper, they claim to be able to read “pet tags,” which would mean they can read ANY RFID, they know your gym code, if you have a fob for your apartment they can clone it and get in like a kid with a Flipper 0.
Idk how it’s physically possible so hopefully they’re lying, they should have to be basically touching the tag, but they claim they can. I’d believe they can read UHF RFID but that isn’t what they claimed, they specified “pet tags” (which again, would mean they can do all tags.) And that would mean they can add NFC and read your cards in your wallet, if they wanted, because that isn’t far off from RFID. Now ostensibly they’d have to perform the handshake with your card so they’d only have the same partial info a Flipper could pull, but like, still not a fan of that personally.
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.”
Oh fuck off. You don’t get to call yourself a hero for making a problem worse.
Seriously. “Our product is as much a honeypot for corrupt policing as it is for public surveillance” as the way to whitewash this just goes to show how hard they had to workshop this press release. It’s indefensible.
I am not even against the yacht money, just fucking STOP with the ARISTOCRATIC behaviors, dynamics, incentives.
I support a wealth cap ample enough to own a yacht, but not enough to make rogue aristocravcy viable. At least for now. The billionaires are doing everything they can to convince me that maybe even the yacht money is too much wealth holding.
That’s how you know the reasons behind flock is nefarious, when they have to scale back what they’re doing because of how blatantly obvious the overreach and invasion of privacy.
There’s gotta be a compromise for how deep I can stick my unwashed poop-covered fingers in your bag of sugar. Do I not use the bidet and wipe too hard? Do I like exploring each turd in the toilet, or guessing how many pieces of corn are in each one while they’re coming out? That’s none of your business! Your only job is to decide how to tolerate my poopie fingers churning in your sugar.
Yes. I was trying to make the point that everyone should treat these invasive technologies the same way they would treat someone trying to mix feces into their sugar. No one who is even mildly serious about protecting themselves or cooking should welcome any compromise on either. They’re not safe, and they’re not sane choices.
Pillory this man. I am not joking even a little. Put him in stocks in the middle of a major city and encourage people to pelt him with rotting produce.
Flock rebrands to the shitty SaaS startup its name suggested it to be. I want to see the YouTube ads for “IrfanView, but paid and is a 500+MB chromium app”!
Here’s a compromise: liquidate the company and donate all your ill-gotten gains to the cause of smashing capitalism and ending the surveillance state, then we might consider treating you with a small measure of leniency.
