Flock Safety's controversial CEO just got a taste of his own medicine

If you’ve been following the tech world over the last week or two, things 
just blew up around Flock Safety in a massive way. Their CEO, Garrett 
Langley, went on Fox News recently and argued that focusing too much on 
privacy "prioritizes the wrong thing" and that we all just need to accept 
a "compromise" between privacy and safety.

In case you aren't familiar, Flock is the company that installs those 
automated license plate reader cameras all over neighborhoods and cities 
to help police track cars. As you can imagine, the internet did not take 
the idea that privacy doesn't matter as much as safety well at all. The 
clip went viral on X, and almost immediately, people started posting what 
they claimed was Langley's home address online.

X’s moderation team has been scrambling to take those posts down, but 
users just tweak the text or put the address inside altered images to 
dodge the automated filters. Now, to be clear, doxxing someone is 
completely indefensible and dangerous because it puts real people in 
physical danger. But the irony here is thick.

Langley built a massive business on tracking ordinary people everywhere 
they drive, yet critics pointed out that his own neighborhood is blurred 
out on street view platforms. Furthermore, their cameras log millions of 
vehicle movements daily, creating a massive web of data that police 
departments and even federal agencies like Customs and Border Protection 
can search. Langley gets a level of location privacy that his cameras deny 
to millions of drivers every single day.

Under pressure, Flock recently lowered its default data retention period 
from 30 days down to 7, but digital rights groups like the Electronic 
Frontier Foundation (EFF), which recently criticized Meta for removing 
opt-in encrypted chats on Instagram, called that fix a joke because local 
police can easily override it and keep the data longer anyway.

Now the whole situation has spilled over into Washington, and lawmakers 
are jumping in from both sides. Representative Keith Self introduced the 
PRIVACY Act to force federal agencies to get a warrant before searching 
license plate data, explicitly calling out Langley by saying the Fourth 
Amendment isn't up for "compromise." Meanwhile, Senator Josh Hawley 
launched a formal investigation into Flock's data practices.

Langley’s whole business model was built on the idea that your movements 
in public are free game to be recorded; however, now he is finding out 
what happens when that exact logic gets turned back around on him.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/flock-safety-ceo-calls-national-compromise-
amid-camera-sabotage-public-revolt