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?”
https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/23/flock-ceo-calls-for-compromise-as-surveillance-company-faces-growing-backlash/Open linkView original on sh.itjust.works
227 replies
Ole Ben Franklin is particularly relevant here:
In other words, Flock can go fuck themselves with a stiff wire brush.
What the fuck kind of compromise? "Let us technical loophole around your constitutional rights just a little bit?"
How about we compromise and let that guy in Tennessee hang you just a little bit.
Compromise: Quit now, and keep your head.
I like the whole "publicly hanged for treason" thing.
was about to make a similar post.
Stop building the invasive bullshit, or we start building guillotines.
Compromise dez nuts
Fucking fascist.
Here's my compromise: we give the Flock CEO twenty to life instead of sentencing him to public flaying like he deserves.
Im on board with this.
public flaying?
No, no.. Blood Eagle.
Elect me your president and I'll bring back tarring and feathering.
I don't think it was ever official policy so technically in never went away. Tar just got really expensive
I propose this compromise:
How about we don't duplicate George Orwells 1984 irl?
The compromise is you scrap every camera, or we do.
Little bitch is negotiating, and it's not even Halloween, yet.
Here's a compromise: how about you fuck off?
Compromise offer: you stop spying on us and we'll stop breaking your cameras.
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.
they give the data to palantir, they are pretty linked to gether.
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.
Source?
Before asking for a source for commonly known information, you should first demonstrate that you've done a modicum of searching yourself first.
I mostly agree, though the onus for proof is on the one making a claim. They could have provided a link to backup their claims.
Compromise: kill yourself
There is absolutely no reason to track people everywhere they go. We were fine before these things.
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.
Lead levels dropped
And the zombies said "all we want to do is eat your brains, maybe we can compromise..."
"We're not unreasonable; I mean, no one's gonna eat your eyes"
That will be stuck in my head for the rest of the day. Great reference
We promise to access the brains from behind so your face still looks great!
to be fair, to Magastanians, the eyes are more valuable. That way they wouldn't lose anything they'd miss.
Here is your compromise. Shutter your company & we won't hang you.
I can guarantee this has been said already, but the compromise is simple; no flock cameras (or comparable tech) anywhere.
Corporate CEOs can all have 1 camera each, on their front lawn, for them to hang from.
Take your cameras down and maybe people don't want to destroy them. Good compromise, eh?
What the US should prioritize is opportunity, education, corporate regulation, housing affordability, justice and dealing with corruption.
Gee, then they wouldn't need the surveillance state.
You're right, but all the 1% heard was: you think they should have less yacht money.
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.
Thr yact money is definitely too much.
With how things are going now, every day I am more amenable to this line of thinking.
No, Garrett, we don't negotiate with surveillance states.
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 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".
It falls in the "no entry without warrant" argument for me. If you need to surviel me, show me a warrant.
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.
No compromises with fascists.
Corporate CEOs can all have 1 camera each, on their front lawn, for them to hang from.
*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.
Garrett can get fucked.
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.
"So it protected her unborn baby from murder, see!"
-fascists
How many trafficking victims have been rescued using these?
None. They'll be used to find people to snatch up for trafficking, if they aren’t already.
I'd add to that, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
Tar and feathers are not expensive, and it's a hilarious thing to do to someone
To someone who deserves it. Thankfully/unfortunately, there's plenty of deserving tech CEOs for our amusement, including this asshat
I'm on board as long as we boil the tar.
isn't that pitch then?
I have no idea! I'm (not actually) ashamed to admit I know nothing of tar and similar roofing/lynching substances.
Iirc tar is a solid at room temp, so we have to heat it
Nice.
Feathers?!?! This situation demands Wool.
Sincerely, We aren’t flocking livestock
Tar is so hot, we don’t want the guy to die. No we can’t call for that online, hilarity be damned.
Let’s do honey and wool.
Give the people a chance to spit on him.
We had a compromise. It's called the bill of rights. Goes like this:
With the way things are going being pro-Constitution will soon be terrorism.
This is poetry to my ears.
If you edit this down you could sell this as a t-shirt at truckstops
Nah.
No compromise with our rights being infringed upon.
Destroy them all.
Eat shit, Garrett.
Funny. I don't know why but my brain keep reading the title as: "Fuck CEO".
Your brain was reading it correctly.
There should be no compromising our right to privacy and these cameras need to go. Fuck Flock and their cash grab.
Fuck flock AND Axon.
Fuck Flock, Axon, and the entire rest of the surveillance state, both government and private.
Palatir along with Meta and Google are all the surveillance state
You could list basically every Big Tech corporation here.
So true all of them are corrupt asf
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.
Are Axon cameras also tracked on the defrock website?
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.
No one trusts the police to genuinely enforce anything that could impact themselves.
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.
I call a guillotine a compromise.
Eat a dick bitch
A bag of dicks, even
The compromise is that he lives
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
Yup, the compromise is not sending him to Tennessee to be publically hanged.
What are you talking about?
https://www.wjhl.com/news/local/sullivan-county-commissioner-suggests-flock-ceo-be-publicly-hanged/
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.
We've kinda had that legislation for about 235 years, now.
They just don't give a fuck.
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.
wouldn't a law against murder also be punishing a specific individual or group?
No, but making it illegal to be named Garrett Langley and CEO of Flock would be
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.
Such as. ... a tariff aimed at one specific country?
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.
While not illegal to propose such a law, that would be a bill of attainder, and thus unconstitutional under article 1, section 9, clause 3.
Which toilet paper perforation is it between
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
A fair and just compromise imho
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
And every paid off city official should get the same sentence and an ankle monitor
I'll put $5 on nothing happens outside of him getting an extra couple of bodyguards.
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.
I propose they compromise by going out of business after deleting all data and removing their cameras from everywhere.
Here's the compromise: Take down the cameras and people won't guillotine you.
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.
Interesting that he’s framing it as a balance between privacy and safety instead of privacy and security.
Flock cameras haven’t been proven to make anyone safer.
If anything they actively make people unsafe by falsely flagging drivers with a partial tag match for a stolen vehicle
Don’t forget all the stalking by many various people abusing the database and live feeds
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.
They’ve proven that police are just dumb as fuck.
That was well known before Flock.
they are designed to flag dissidents in the end, nothing about it is safety. why all the sudden 120k cameras being installed in the last year alone.
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.
Fuck off with compromise. take your shit and get out no one wants you in case the guillotine wasn't fucking clear
Safety? They constantly put innocent victims at risk by misidentifying them as the criminals!!!
Odd description of 'safety'
I like the sounds of this. Here's an offer:
Fuck off, and the guillotine gets put away.
Everybody wins!
The only thing is we have to actually pull the guillotines out first.
So…. this weekend? :)
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.
flock and AXON feeds are linked to palantir, every reason to shut it down, no compromises. and the cameras have been specifically targeting poc, liberal areas, or any places where people are likely to gather and protest and low income areas.
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.
No quarter for flock cameras no compromise with surveillance tech ceos
We're already in the safest time for petty crime ever, and flock won't help with America's real issue of corporate crime. Safety will not be affected.
I dunno. Have they tried putting the cameras in the boardrooms?
Remember, it's Axon as well, and many more companies. and a major contrbuter who has linked in with all of these creepy services is Amazon and has the largest surveillence network in residential areas not just on travel corridors comprised of Ring doorbell cameras tied in to all of these systems.
Flock seems like the sacrificial lamb, to me. They are in your face, ther cameras are obvious, and their CEO runs his mouth so much everyone hates him.
It's like how Elon can't keep his mouth shut, but Ellison far more dangerous and nearly as rich.
If we're lucky Flock can be the catalyst for people turning against all of the other surveillance systems as well
I'm amazed at how their concern for our safety allows them to do all sorts of heinous shit for
profitour safety.ok.
we'll continue ripping down your shitty products and you can just shut the fuck up.
see, isn't that a nice compromise?
No! 😀
No, fuck off.
Get rid of them.
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)
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.
Okay, here’s the compromise: you close everything down, and we don’t feed you to a hungry business of ferrets.
Just wait til Flocko'ween.
I’ve already picked out my costume!!
Sexy Lumberjack?
A combo costume with my partner. Going as Kylo Ren and Stimpy
Inspired choice
Something easy to take off and stash in my bag.
It's wild, because when I was a kid, there was this huge conservative talking point about how trading freedom for security was bad.
Conservatives are liars and thieves who support felons and pedophiles.
Never trust a conservative.
Conservatives are all about freedom until there's profit involved.
Conservatives will say anything to align with the in-group, to hurt the outgroup, or for personal power. They have no internal beliefs beyond those.
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
If you get rid of your right to privacy, you get rid of your right to safety.
So the compromise is they get cameras, and we get to hunt them for sport.
We've just not been holding up our end of things.
My suggestion for compromise would be to bring back tar and feathering
Corporate CEOs can all have 1 camera each, on their front lawn, for them to hang from.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-Ben Franklin
In other words: Fuck you, Flock.
Came here to post this
What compromise? Where's your warrant to search our lives, our comings and goings? Rich people don't have to deal with this harassment.
The only compromise we want to see is the structural kind.
Fuck these clowns. Their “compromise” is finding some way to quiet the bad press while continuing to do what they’ve been doing.
“We’ll stop putting our cameras where people don’t want them and just put then where our clients want them.”
Remember that town Winona where all eight of their Flock cameras were cut down?
CNN has an interview with a town councilman who says “we’ll just wait until all the news dies down and everyone will forget about all this”
Our elected officials all think we should live in a big PRISON
Of course. It's the natural evolution of a police state to become a prison state.
I will lower your taxes and raise everyone else's!
Well, since you care less than zero about our safety, Langley, there will be no compromise.
He says as he continues to launch surveillance drones without asking anybody if they're okay with that...
Okay, here's the compromise: disband your company and we'll put away the guillotines.
Safety for who, exactly, Garrett? Because the common people aren't safer with this overreach
Safety for his fellow fascist pedophile Epstein class oligarchs; from the people.
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.
Work with evil, die with evil.
I agree
And the compromise no cameras, more privacy
the compromise is for you to put flock cameras in every room in your house.
The compromise is we let you take your cameras down instead of drawing and quartering you.
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.
"Lol" said the scorpion, "lmao."
Compromise is a dirty word.
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.
You don't negotiate with terrorists, Nazis, or billionaires.
The comprise is for the flock ceo to commit suicide with a shotgun
Ok. You spend the rest of your life in jail, and your immediate and extended family can live.
They won't be rich. They will be held accountable if they broke the law as well.
Or we can exterminate 50-100k people to give justice to billions.
Either option is acceptable to me.
We don't need to find shit. They need to go away before their heads start to resemble their cut down cameras.
Tired of this.
"Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
Asked and answered.
It’s afraid
Safety from what Langley? What are the cameras keeping us safe from?
"Us" is the pedophiles running things, and "keeping us safe" means attacking their critics.
“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.”
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.
This is him saying "Let them eat cake."
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.
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.
The rich will never feel save while we, their victims, have privacy.
They know better than even we do how much reason we have to be plotting against them.
Really? Wow. Okay, when you lose Republicans (well, some Republicans), you KNOW you've gone too far. Damn.
Flock CEO just needs to rape some kids and conservacucks will be back on Flock's side.
Those 3 just figured they will get caught going to see prostitutes. The other oner have not figured yet.
I agree. Our starting position is all flock cameras should be taken down and then shoved up Garrett Langley's ass. Every single one of them.
Now let us come to the table and find a compromise.
there's no compromise - take down ALL the fucking surveillance crap and take it down NOW.
Need to expand from pulling down camera to pulling down Flock buildings, manufacturing sites, etc.
Can't get manufacturing sites. They are all parts bin contract manufactured from lowest bidder garbage in China as cheap as possible. Warehousing tho
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.
Sure, the compromise is we cut them down until you stop. Sound good to everyone else?
the compromise could be that they should take their own cameras down then do door to door petitions on who actually wants them.
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?
-Centrists!
Langley needs to find a compromise between living and getting Luigi'd.
They're not even watching traffic though...
I agree, a good compromise would be life imprisonment for the CEO and every investor.
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.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
I drove my company at the wall. Dearest wall, give me a compromise, pretty please?
Die, Flock. The company would not be missed.
Flock off.
I call for something else lol.
Not an inch ! Not a mm!
You have both by not having you around, asshole.
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...
Fuck you, Garrett.
My privacy and freedom are invaluable to me, I don't give 2 shits about some CEOs profits. He can go rot in a ditch for all I care.
Ok. No
Lol, no.
"I'm being paid to fuck you all " now modified to "why can't we all just get along"
You can't make a deal w/ the devil.