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Flock isn’t just at the center of a national debate, it hit at the center of my life after the system tracked me for days and led to four cops ambushing my wife and me. I was one of the countless mistakes made each month between police and the new technology, and the discussion throughout America concerning privacy, warrantless tracking, and the Fourth Amendment is loud at the moment.
Flock Safety Founder and CEO Garrett Langley sat down in an exclusive one-on-one interview on The Drivecast to discuss the growing public discourse over public privacy, the Fourth Amendment, and where Flock sits. The executive was definitive in he doesn’t believe there’s a legal issue today and won’t be one in the future either.
Listen to the entire conversation starting at the moment Langley discusses the issue of tracking and people’s rights.
Langley told me, “People tend to have three concerns or three questions about the company: privacy, constitutionality, and accountability.”
Addressing the Fourth Amendment and legal issue Langley said, “You mentioned the constitutional one. That one’s pretty cut and dry. You and I don’t get to pick what’s a constitutional violation and what’s not. We have judges, we have elected officials, there’s a process for that. We follow the law, we follow the Constitution. So far, in our belief and what will be for a long time, the courts have deemed this is not a warrantless search; this is a valid product as it relates to the Fourth Amendment. So I don’t see any change there.”
Regarding privacy and data retention Langley said, “On the privacy one, though, there’s some real questions that we ask as well. Here’s a good example: Before I started Flock, this type of ALPR data was stored in perpetuity. It was resold for commercial purposes by repo trucks to insurance providers. It was pretty nasty, in my opinion. We were one of the first companies to say there’s going to be a 30-day default retention, and we aren’t going to sell the data.”
Langley brought data into the privacy discussion noting, ” We solved just over a million crimes last year on the Flock system in partnership with local law enforcement. If I told you that if we reduce the 30-day retention to 14 days, 30% fewer crimes would be solved—so roughly 300,000 more victims without justice—would you make that tradeoff?” The Drive was not provided any verification of these statistics or their source.
Who should decide whether your community is using automatic license plate reader technology? According to Langley, “You and I shouldn’t pick. Actually, the Mayor of Plymouth [the city I live in and we used in countless examples during the discussion] and the City Council should make that decision, because that’s a fair tradeoff. We elect people who we believe match our values to make these very difficult, non-black-and-white questions.”
How cities use and implement Flock is up to them, Langley said. But those decisions will, according to Flock’s CEO, greatly impact public safety and the effectiveness of the system. “You could go down with something like Flock and say, ‘We like the idea of Flock, but we only want to focus on Amber Alerts and Silver Alerts.’ So there’s zero retention of the data, just alerts. I’d say, ‘Okay, you’re going to get about 50% of the value of the system, but if that’s what you want in Plymouth, great, we’d love to help you, but you’re still going to be safer.’ Now, you’re going to be less safe than San Francisco, but that’s an option,” Langley said.
Langley continued, “For us, we don’t want to push our opinion as individual citizens. I live in Atlanta, you live in Plymouth. We just wish that more elected officials would do their research, do their homework, form an opinion, engage the community, and then set a standard that makes sense for them.”
What makes sense for each city is unclear as debates and arguments rage on the topic of Flock and automatic license plate reader tech across America. But Langley wants Flock to expand from the 7,000 cities its in today to hopefully every one of America’s 17,000 cities in the future.
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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.
