When a surveillance CEO tells you that pausing progress means fewer criminals held accountable, he is asking you to accept a trade you never negotiated. That was the pitch from Flock founder Garrett Langley, who spoke on a panel at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 in San Francisco on Wednesday. His line: if we want a society where committing a crime carries a higher chance of accountability, “we shouldn’t pause progress.”
Flock makes license plate cameras and other recording devices, and it now faces a national backlash that has already cost it contracts and led to layoffs. Pressed on that, Langley mostly skipped the hard questions. He told stories from conversations with police chiefs and city leaders, and recounted crimes Flock supposedly helped solve. What he did not offer was a concrete answer to the privacy worries driving the cancellations.
His framing was that Flock is a somewhat inevitable advance, and that people who want less crime must give up some privacy in return. That’s the same bargain sold with AI: convenience and automation in exchange for handing over everything about yourself. It’s no accident the two backlashes overlap. Both technologies feel imposed on the public without consent.
Langley leaned on driverless cars as his analogy. Technology, he said, is about doing things better, not perfectly, and one accident shouldn’t shut down the whole industry. But the comparison cuts against him. Driverless car companies pause fleets after crashes and push fixes. Flock, by Langley’s own account, would rather not decide when it should step in. “We don’t want to tell city leaders how to do their job,” he said. The company will offer recommendations and defaults, but wants to minimize mandated features, functions, and policies.
Read that again with privacy in mind. Defaults and recommendations are optional. Whatever protections exist depend on thousands of local agencies choosing to use them, and the vendor has said it won’t require them. That is a policy of not having a policy.
Langley also blamed some cancellations on misinformation, citing a customer who left because they believed Flock cameras do facial recognition. They don’t. But they can detect and track people, which is hardly reassuring. Dropping the facial recognition label doesn’t make a tracking system benign.
He argued too that Flock helps shrinking police departments do more with fewer officers, pointing to hundreds of open positions in San Francisco that will probably never be filled. That may be true. It’s also an argument for automated surveillance as a staffing substitute, which means more data collection on people who are not suspected of anything.
On abuse, the answers got thin. Langley said there is a way to curb it that doesn’t disrupt the legal system or the flow of a police department. He didn’t say what it is. Then came the closest thing to a real position: being a consequential company has a price, and it’s worth it because millions have better lives, and because critics “might be a victim” one day.
That’s the part to watch. Safety is a legitimate goal, and nobody serious disputes that. But a company that builds mass tracking infrastructure, admits it is “far from perfect,” and declines to mandate guardrails is asking for trust it hasn’t earned. The cancellations suggest cities are starting to notice.