Facing mounting public backlash over the rapid expansion of its automated license plate readers, Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley called for compromise Thursday, suggesting a reasonable middle ground between a citizen’s constitutional right to privacy and a private corporation tracking their exact geographic location in perpetuity.
Langley urged privacy advocates to step back from their “absolutist” stance on not being monitored by a sprawling network of roadside cameras. He noted that while local residents want to move through their own neighborhoods unobserved, Flock Safety wants to log every vehicle’s daily transit history into a centralized, searchable database for police and homeowners associations, meaning both sides simply need to be willing to give a little.
We understand that nobody wants to live in a dystopian tracking grid, but we also really want to build one and charge a monthly fee for it. If we just sit down at the table, I’m confident we can find a solution where the public surrenders their basic anonymity and we successfully execute our roadmap.
Langley also proposed the rollout of a new public-facing API, which would theoretically allow concerned citizens to query an endpoint to see exactly which local law enforcement agencies and overzealous neighborhood watch captains are currently monitoring their trips to the grocery store.
As a further gesture of goodwill, the surveillance startup announced it is willing to concede on several key friction points. Executives pledged to paint future neighborhood tracking modules a reassuring shade of matte beige, and offered a sweeping concession on data retention, agreeing to completely delete footage of innocent civilians thirty days after it has already been viewed, categorized, and permanently fed into an opaque machine-learning model.
Langley concluded his public address by promising to take the community's feedback to heart, assuring critics that their vocal objections had been carefully geolocated, timestamped, and attached to their vehicle's historical transit dossier.