Why People Hate Flock

The company whose CEO wants every inch of America draped in his surveillance tech.

Credit: Vectorfair D.

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I live in a town located roughly midway between Cleveland and Columbus. It’s nicknamed the “World Headquarters of Nice People.” But lately, folks here have been angry. They’ve been smashing Flock cameras, leaving broken poles, battered solar panels, and dangling fistfuls of wire in their wake. The other night, somebody drove through one of the surveillance units, leaving a yard sale of car parts strewn across a two-lane street. I guess they thought sending a message was worth a trip to the body shop.

Flock isn’t the only manufacturer of cameras with automated license plate reader (ALPR) technology. But it is the largest, with more than 90,000 units silently watching highways, parking lots, and streets nationwide. Flock creates a visual fingerprint of your vehicle—the make, model, color, license plate, bumper stickers, even dings and dents—and then uploads it to a database, where users can access it. Its vast network of cameras can create a detailed record of an individual’s movements, effectively allowing for warrantless mass surveillance of anyone within its field of view. Naturally, that’s raised many concerns, and not only among groups like the ACLU, as evidenced by brewing popular discontent.

But Flock CEO Garrett Langley insists that all he wants is a safer country, even if it means encaging within a digital panopticon. The problem he faces is that most Americans aren’t prepared to turn privacy into a quaint artifact of the past in exchange for living under an orderly techno-dystopia.

One of the most common rebuttals to concerns about Flock is that mass surveillance would exist even if every one of its cameras were taken down tomorrow. We really gave away our privacy, the argument goes, when we embraced “surveillance capitalism,” defined by Shoshana Zuboff, professor emerita at Harvard Business School, as “the unilateral claiming of private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data.” Zuboff traces its origins to Google, the first company to learn how to collect surplus behavioral data and make it valuable to advertisers at scale in the age of the internet, though surveillance capitalism has long since escaped that limited context.

We rushed to the internet expecting empowerment, the democratization of knowledge, and help with real problems, but surveillance capitalism really was just too lucrative to resist. This economic logic has now spread beyond the tech companies to new surveillance–based ecosystems in virtually every economic sector, from insurance to automobiles to health, education, finance, to every product described as “smart” and every service described as “personalized.” By now it’s very difficult to participate effectively in society without interfacing with these same channels that are supply chains for surveillance capitalism’s data flows. For example, ProPublica recently reported that breathing machines purchased by people with sleep apnea are secretly sending usage data to health insurers, where the information can be used to justify reduced insurance payments.

The ubiquity of surveillance capitalism does not, by itself, justify it. Zuboff has noted that just before the September 11 attacks, “there were new legislative initiatives being discussed in Congress around privacy, some of which might well have outlawed practices that became routine operations of surveillance capitalism.” The Federal Trade Commission warned in a 2000 report to Congress of the urgent need for legislation to protect the privacy of consumers because companies could not be counted on to effectively self-regulate. It recommended Congress enact legislation to offer a baseline level of privacy for consumers, establishing “basic standards of practice for the collection of information online.”

“The Commission believes that industry’s limited success in implementing fair information practices online, as well as ongoing consumer concerns about Internet privacy, make this the appropriate time for legislative action,” the report concluded.

Fifteen months after the report was released, the Twin Towers were engulfed in flames. Privacy concerns took a backseat in the aftermath, and the federal government turned toward the surveillance capabilities being developed in the private sector, setting the stage for today’s public-private surveillance apparatus.

Zuboff contends that the current state of affairs was not inevitable, and she is correct. But surveillance capitalists and their allies did a good job of portraying their own interests as tantamount to technological progress. To impede their practices, to suggest the possibility of alternatives that do not condition participation in the digital on partaking in their economic model, was and still is framed as impeding a broader societal good. Downplaying or even defending, then, every additional intrusion on privacy in this light is akin to seeing a burning man, astutely determining that he is indeed on fire, and concluding, “What’s a little more fuel to the flame?”

The issue remains one of consent, and the disregard that people like Langley seem to have for it. Indeed, Langley has characterized Flock’s critics, particularly DeFlock, an open-source project that maps ALPRs, as “terroristic.” He apologized for those remarks, but only amid a tidal wave of public fury. In framing detractors as dangerous, subversive forces, Langley took a page out of Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s book, who said that he loved “the idea of getting a drone and having light fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts that tried to screw us.” Notably, elements of the far-right have embraced mass surveillance (and Palantir specifically), viewing it as a way of monitoring, intimidating, and suppressing their domestic opponents, who they paint as fringe groups and “woke” militants, as Langley and Karp have. But that characterization is untenable. For example, I live in an overwhelmingly white, conservative slice of America. Langley, Karp, and their far-right fans could be forgiven for assuming these are their natural allies. And yet they’ll find few defenders of mass surveillance here. In the local Facebook community chatter group, opposition to Flock cameras seems to be one of the only issues that elicits bipartisan agreement. That shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Last year, a YouGov survey found that 71% of Americans “are concerned that surveillance powers could be used by the U.S. government to target political opponents or suppress dissent,” while 56% said that “collecting and analyzing Americans’ phone and internet data is an unnecessary intrusion into Americans’ lives, rather than something that is justified as a way to combat terrorism and crime.”

Most people simply hate this stuff. Just because “it’s already happening” does not mean they want more intrusions, more surveillance, less privacy. They understand that it can be a useful crime-fighting tool, but the cons still outweigh the pros in the mind of the average person, at least under the current arrangement. For good reason, too, as more incidents of misuse and abuse continue to make headlines.

Police in Lenexa, Kansas, used ALPRs to track down a technology writer who published an op-ed critical of their department. CNN reported Sunday that, in the last month, “five Albany police officers in Georgia were arrested and fired for allegedly misusing Flock, and police in Greer, South Carolina, fired two officers for misusing the product.” The Institute for Justice has documented several cases of cops using Flock to “keep tabs on their romantic interests, including current partners, exes, and even strangers who unwittingly caught their eye in public.” In Milwaukee, a police officer used Flock to track the location of his ex and his ex’s partner 124 times. He ended up resigning. So did one of the detectives who investigated him, after it was revealed that he had also been misusing Flock.

Some local governments have resorted to measures not so different from those my unruly neighbors have used to thwart Flock.

In Ohio, the Dayton Police Department announced that it would cease using Flock after it found more than 7,000 cases of “searches related to immigration enforcement made by outside entities,” Fortune reported. In response to that revelation, Dayton police assisted municipal workers in covering every ALPR with good old-fashioned black trash bags because the city is contractually prohibited from taking them down. Officials in Evanston, Illinois; Oxnard, California; and Renton, Washington, have undertaken similar efforts to “DeFlock” their communities after discovering that outside agencies had access to local data. In Oxnard, that data was accessed without the police department’s knowledge or approval, and despite the security settings restricting access to authorized users within California.

Flock has repeatedly downplayed data-sharing concerns, establishing a pattern of misdirection, obfuscation, and deceit. When a police chief in Loveland, Colorado, worried that federal agents were accessing ALPR data, Flock reiterated that it does not hold any federal contracts, dismissing the chief’s concerns. Flock later admitted that it does indeed have contracts with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security for pilot projects that enable those agencies to have access to data. Denver City Council President Amanda Sandoval said that Langley “lied to [her] face” about this issue.

Yet Langley seems undeterred by the groundswell of backlash. Speaking to Forbes, he predicted that within the next decade, Flock’s fixed and flying products could blanket the country in an inescapable surveillance field like so many unblinking eyes. It’s how we would eradicate all forms of crime, once and for all, he believes. Langley rejects the idea that living under the largest security state the world has ever seen would come at the cost of civil liberties. It’s unclear which one Langley would pick, if given a choice between the two. His ideal regime calls to mind the OneState from Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We.

Before Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, there was We, and Zamyatin’s vision of a shining, high-tech, totalitarian society in which all dwellings are made of “splendid, transparent, eternal glass,” depriving denizens of privacy whatsoever. Every aspect of life is algorithmically managed within the clear and sterile OneState under its ruler, the Benefactor. Orwell said that We provided him with a model for his own work. It’s unlikely Langley is familiar with Zamyatin, but I suspect he would come away from the author with the wrong lessons.