Flock CEO defends surveillance tech: ‘We shouldn’t pause progress’

Flock founder and CEO Garrett Langley doesn't believe the risks of deploying surveillance technology at scale outweigh the rewards. Speaking Wednesday on a panel at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 in San Francisco, he put it bluntly: if society wants those who commit crimes to face a higher chance of being held accountable, then "we shouldn't pause progress."

Flock makes license-plate cameras and other recording devices, and it is weathering a wave of criticism that has already cost it contracts and triggered layoffs. Yet rather than offering concrete answers to tough questions, Langley reached for anecdotes — conversations with police chiefs and city officials, and tallies of crimes supposedly solved thanks to Flock.

Inevitable progress

Langley framed surveillance as a natural, almost unavoidable technological step: anyone who wants a society with less crime will have to surrender some privacy in exchange. "Technology, at its core, is just doing things better. It's not doing things perfect," he said.

His chosen analogy was driverless cars, which he considers safer than human drivers: one crash isn't reason to shut the whole fleet down, only to work on preventing the next one. The trouble, the article notes, is that autonomous-car makers do pause their fleets and ship fixes after crashes — whereas Flock seems to struggle with knowing when intervention is its own responsibility. The ethics of how Flock gets used is a call Langley would plainly rather leave to others: "We don't want to tell city leaders how to do their job."

‘Flock is far from perfect’

Langley blamed some cancellations on misinformation. One customer, he said, dropped its contract believing the cameras performed facial recognition; they don't, though they can detect and track people. He also chided a culture that judges technology against perfection rather than against the past: "Flock is far from perfect; I'm far from perfect."

He further pitched surveillance as a way to plug staffing gaps in policing, especially post-COVID — pointing to San Francisco, where he reckons hundreds of open positions will likely never be filled.

But pressed on abuse and the intrusiveness of his technology, Langley had no substantive reply, saying only that abuse could be curbed without disrupting police work — without saying how. For him these are secondary matters: "This is the price you pay" for building a consequential company, he said, "and it's worth it because there's millions and millions of people who have a better life today because of Flock."

Source: TechCrunch