Flock founder and CEO Garrett Langley used a stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 in San Francisco on Wednesday to defend his company's surveillance technology, arguing that society should not slow the adoption of tools that could help hold criminals accountable. He said that if people want a society where committing a crime carries a higher chance of consequences, progress should not be paused. His remarks came as Flock, which makes license plate cameras and other recording devices, faces a national backlash that has led to canceled contracts and layoffs.
During the interview, Langley largely sidestepped pointed questions about the criticism directed at his company. Instead of offering concrete fixes for privacy concerns, he relied on stories from conversations with police chiefs and city leaders across the United States and on accounts of crimes he said Flock has helped solve. He framed the technology as an inevitable advance, arguing that a lower-crime society requires giving up some privacy in exchange.
Langley compared the trade-offs to those associated with artificial intelligence, which is marketed as improving lives and automating tedious tasks but requires sharing personal information with the companies behind AI agents. He also likened Flock to driverless cars, which he described as definitively safer than human drivers, and said a single accident should prompt a conversation about preventing future ones rather than shutting the technology down. Driverless car companies, however, pause fleets and apply fixes after crashes, while Langley indicated he would rather leave decisions about how Flock should be used to others.
He said the company does not want to tell city leaders how to do their jobs and will offer recommendations and defaults while minimizing mandated features, functions and policies. Langley also said misinformation has driven some customer cancellations, citing a customer who ended a contract over a belief that the devices perform facial recognition. Flock cameras do not have facial recognition, he said, though they can detect and track people.
Langley pushed back on critics who expect technology to be perfect, saying society often judges new tools against perfection rather than against the past. He acknowledged that Flock is far from perfect and that he has made plenty of mistakes. He also positioned Flock as a way for police departments to do more with reduced staffing, noting that law enforcement employment has declined rapidly over the past decade, particularly since COVID, and that a place like San Francisco has hundreds of open positions that will probably never be filled.
Pressed on abuse and the invasiveness of his company's surveillance technology, Langley offered no substantive answers. He said there is a way to curb abuse that does not disrupt the legal system or the efficacy and flow of a police department, but he did not spell out what those measures would be. He described the criticism as a price of building a consequential company and said it is worth paying because millions of people have better lives today because of Flock, adding that some people disagree with what the company does but that one day they might be a victim.
More company and startup news from TechManNews.
