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Flock has become a lighting rod topic across America. I myself got caught up in the dragnet-like system, which tracked me for days resulting in four cops ambushing my wife and me. I was one of the millions of countless mistakes made each month. But beyond those millions of mistakes is the misuse of the technology and platform itself.
During an exclusive one-on-one interview on The Drivecast Flock Safety Founder and CEO Garrett Langley said, “The abuse is a problem.” The man in charge of Flock is aware of the problem and said, “We need to continue to get that down to zero. Any level of abuse is unacceptable.”
Listen to the entire conversation starting at the moment Langley discusses the issue of police abusing Flock’s systems below.
Langley admitted that years ago Flock did not require municipalities that subscribe to Flock’s services to use multi-factor authentication (MFA). Not using MFA would make it much easier for unauthorized users to get into Flock’s systems, and much harder for Flock or anyone else to perform an audit and follow a trail as to who accessed and viewed what. Flock now requires the use of MFA.
The mandating of MFA isn’t far enough and hasn’t solved the misuse issues. Langley said, “To your point on auditability and accountability, yeah, I actually think this is a problem more broadly in law enforcement—that we’re one of the only systems that actually has auditing and has abnormal behavior detection in it.”
Langley took credit and said, “All these cases you see happening are because our system is flagging, ‘That’s pretty weird.’ It’s not necessarily illegal—innocent until proven guilty—but a criminal investigation should have occurred.”
Going further, Langley leaned into the lack of regulations on how the tech his company is selling is used by saying, “I wish more state regulations pushed that every system law enforcement uses needed to have this level of sophisticated auditing and abnormal detection.” Continuing the thought with, “We’ve got to do more there.”
As for the abuse of Flock’s platform today Langley said, “The abuse is a problem. We need to continue to get that down to zero. Any level of abuse is unacceptable.” But Langley defended Flock’s services as whole by quickly following the abuse statements by saying, “To be very clear, but I don’t think we should miss the fact that over a million cases were solved last year with this technology, and the level of abuse is incredibly low relative to that.”
While MFA has been mandated and audit logs have been used to expose police misusing the system in various states such as Texas and Georgia, the latter is where Langley lives, the man running Flock did not expand on what guardrails are being put in place within the system to further make it so authorities can not misuse the system going forward.
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As Director of Content and Product, Joel draws on over 15 years of newsroom experience and inability to actually stop working to help ensure The Drive shapes the future of automotive media. He’s also a World Car Award juror.
