Privacy objections have cost Flock contracts and prompted layoffs, but founder and CEO Garrett Langley argued against stopping the rollout of surveillance technology. At a panel held Wednesday at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 in San Francisco, he maintained that deploying it at scale brings benefits greater than the risks.
“If we want to live in a society where, if you commit a crime, you have a higher probability of being held accountable, we shouldn’t pause progress,” Langley said.
What remained harder to establish was how Flock should act to stop abuse. Flock produces license plate cameras and other recording devices, and Langley indicated that city leaders should make many of the choices governing their use. TechCrunch’s report of the interview described him repeatedly sidestepping criticism by recounting conversations with police chiefs and city officials throughout the United States. He also told stories about numerous crimes Flock had supposedly helped solve, without giving concrete answers to the concerns people raised.
He made his position on required rules clear: “We don’t want to tell city leaders how to do their job,” he said. “We will provide recommendations, we’ll provide defaults, but we’re going to minimize the number of mandated features, functions, and policies,” he added.
Arguing that the technology should remain in use is not the same as setting out when its manufacturer needs to act. In TechCrunch’s view, Flock seems to have difficulty accepting that responsibility, while Langley would rather have others decide the ethical limits of its use.
His account also cast Flock’s technological development as somewhat inevitable. TechCrunch understood his position to mean that a society seeking less crime, and therefore a better life, would need to surrender some privacy as the price.
Autonomous vehicles were his example of why flaws shouldn’t halt adoption. “Technology, at its core, in its definition, is just doing things better. It’s not doing things perfect,” he said. “Driverless cars, I think, is a fair analogy. Driverless cars, I think, are definitively safer than human drivers. And when there’s one accident, I don’t think the answer is to shut down driverless cars. The answer is to say, ‘Hey, let’s talk about how we prevent more accidents in the future’.”
That analogy drew a challenge from TechCrunch, which noted that companies operating driverless cars respond to crashes by pausing their fleets and making fixes, not dismissing them. The criticism was not a demand for a flawless Flock. Rather, a defense of continued operation fails to establish when the company ought to intervene to address harm.
CEO: ‘Flock is far from perfect’
In Langley’s telling, misinformation explained some customers’ decisions to cancel. His example was a customer who terminated a contract under the mistaken belief that Flock devices used facial recognition. Although the cameras lack facial recognition, reporting by 404 Media says they can detect and track people. These capabilities are distinct, so clearing up the misunderstanding about one doesn’t settle concerns about the other.
Langley also objected to perfection as the standard for evaluating technology, saying an unnamed community leader had offered that perspective.
“He was describing that, too often as a society we judge technology not on how it compares to the past, but how it compares to perfect. And Flock is far from perfect; I’m far from perfect – I’ve made plenty of mistakes,” Langley said.
He further argued that Flock could improve policing and enable departments to work with smaller staffs. “If you look at where policing has gone over the last decade, but particularly post-COVID, law enforcement employment is declining rapidly. I think about a place like San Francisco, and there’s hundreds of open positions. They will probably never be filled,” he said. He framed Flock’s technology as a means of covering those staffing gaps.
According to TechCrunch, questions about abuse and the intrusive nature of Flock’s surveillance nonetheless received no substantive answers from Langley. He argued that safeguards need not interfere with police work, yet gave no details about what those protections would involve.
“I think if the idea is to curb abuse, I think there’s a way to do that that doesn’t disrupt the legal system, that doesn’t disrupt the efficacy and flow of a police department,” he said.
The resistance to AI provided another comparison in TechCrunch’s account. Marketing presents AI as something that improves lives, handles tedious tasks automatically, and adds convenience. In exchange, users can end up providing extensive personal information to the companies that make AI agents. Some people also warn that humanity’s destruction is a possibility. The point of the parallel wasn’t to suggest that AI and Flock carry the same risks. It was that some people regard both technologies as having been put upon the public without consent. Langley treated that tension as part of technological progress.
TechCrunch concluded that Langley’s conviction that Flock serves the public good appeared to put concerns about abuse in second place. “I think one of the unfortunate consequences of building a consequential company is this is the price you pay, and I think it’s worth it because there’s millions and millions of people who have a better life today because [of] Flock,” he said.
“And clearly we’ve made our fair share of mistakes, and there’s some folks who disagree with what we do, but it’s worth it because one day they might be a victim,” Langley added. His argument relies on the possibility of assisting someone who becomes a victim in the future. What protections Flock will mandate before misuse occurs remains an unanswered question.
