{"id":46414,"date":"2026-08-15T09:48:27","date_gmt":"2026-08-15T04:48:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/?p=46414"},"modified":"2026-08-15T09:48:27","modified_gmt":"2026-08-15T04:48:27","slug":"flocks-founders-defend-their-street-surveillance-system-against-criticism-on-privacy-issues-and-police-misuse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/?p=46414","title":{"rendered":"Flock\u2019s Founders Defend Their Street Surveillance System Against Criticism on Privacy Issues and Police Misuse"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><script>\r\n  atOptions = {\r\n    'key' : '644b717812d811d6a1c1fc5b6ccd6fa6',\r\n    'format' : 'iframe',\r\n    'height' : 90,\r\n    'width' : 728,\r\n    'params' : {}\r\n  };\r\n<\/script>\r\n<script src=\"https:\/\/www.highperformanceformat.com\/644b717812d811d6a1c1fc5b6ccd6fa6\/invoke.js\"><\/script>\r\n<br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p class=\"paywall\">On Tuesday, I flew to Atlanta to visit the new Flock HQ, which feels like a CB2 showroom met a high-end health-membership club. It has the open-floor, reserve-a-desk hallmarks of a Silicon Valley office. There were just a few dozen employees around. The remote-first firm moved to this space at the end of June, and they want the two-story office to be customer-forward: About a fifth of the space is taken up by classrooms with Apple Store-type screens meant to teach clients about Flock products. On the second floor, I saw a disconnected Flock camera, painted in gold, bearing a dozen or so signatures. \u201cEvery million dollars of revenue, we would do a camera,\u201d Langley says, referring to the memento. \u201cNow we do more like a million a day.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">It\u2019s a few minutes past 10 a.m., and he\u2019s fresh off of a <em>Fox &amp; Friends<\/em> appearance when he arrives to join his cofounder and Flock\u2019s chief people officer, Paige Todd, 41, in the conference room between their two offices. It\u2019s their first-ever joint interview with a publication.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">\u201cI think the mistake we\u2019ve made over the last nine years is not banging the table of every success story,\u201d Langley, the son of two salespeople, tells me. Across our hour-plus conversation, he peppered in stories illustrating the virtue of Flock cameras. These examples end on good notes, but they\u2019re also, well, horribly dark: One case concerned parents fleeing a welfare check in Arkansas with their children only to be caught by Flock cameras in Texas.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">Langley has a Flock-savior complex of sorts, and the cofounders\u2019 superpowers become clear just a few minutes in. They each possess an unrelenting, high-school-debate-champion eagerness to go mano a mano on criticism, but it\u2019s mixed with the Southern charm of two Georgia natives.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">One story driving Flock\u2019s villain era is a series of news reports on how police officers have used the technology to stalk their past romantic partners. But \u201cI think it\u2019s very rare that someone just wakes up and becomes a stalker because of Flock,\u201d says Todd. \u201cI think they probably were before, but now our tool is actually making it very clear that that\u2019s happening.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">In most cases, Flock launches aren\u2019t put to a direct vote in local communities. But \u201cthe way the system is designed, the last 250 years, is that the person who\u2019s democratically elected makes decisions on your behalf,\u201d Langley told me. \u201cSo I would argue people do have a choice, and if you don\u2019t like the decisions that a certain mayor or city council makes, you vote differently four years later.\u201d<\/p>\n<aside aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"PullQuoteEmbedWrapper-sc-efqGLV dYCNhz composition body pullquote bordered\" data-testid=\"pullquote-embed\">\n<p><span class=\"paywall\">\u201cYou will see over the next six months a dramatic increase in officers being arrested or fired for abusing Flock.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/aside>\n<\/div>\n<script async=\"async\" data-cfasync=\"false\" src=\"https:\/\/pl30214220.effectivecpmnetwork.com\/9ab3d4df8a7e1a6171e16ddbf732cc19\/invoke.js\"><\/script>\r\n<div id=\"container-9ab3d4df8a7e1a6171e16ddbf732cc19\"><\/div>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On Tuesday, I flew to Atlanta to visit the new Flock HQ, which feels like a CB2 showroom met a high-end health-membership club. It has the open-floor, reserve-a-desk hallmarks of a Silicon Valley office. There were just a few dozen employees around. The remote-first firm moved to this space at the end of June, and&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":46415,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/media.vanityfair.com\/photos\/6a7cf302e48124695b74298a\/16:9\/w_1280,c_limit\/VF0826_Flock_01.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-celebrity-gossip"],"brizy_media":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=46414"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46414\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/46415"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}