The founder and chief executive of the US surveillance technology firm Flock Safety has admitted the company took too long to act on police misuse of its cameras, licence plate readers and drones, as it introduces new safeguards aimed at curbing abuse of the system.
Asked directly whether it had taken Flock too long to protect its tens of thousands of devices from misuse by law enforcement, Garrett Langley told the BBC: "Yeah... yes."
Flock's technology, which is used by police across the US to help find stolen vehicles and missing people, has also been used to track former and current romantic partners and to stalk strangers. In one case reported by the BBC, the technology was used to track a woman who had had an abortion. Officers in several US police departments have quit or been fired over misuse of the system.
In one recent case, a man in Indiana said he discovered through a public records request that police had set a Flock alert for his vehicle despite him not being suspected of any wrongdoing.
The growing backlash has seen at least 50 US cities cut ties with Flock this year. However, Langley said 16 cities that had switched off the service had returned to the company in the past three months, and that Flock was generally gaining seven new customers for every one it lost.
As part of the changes, Flock is reducing the length of time most data is retained from 30 days to seven, and will automatically flag unusual or abnormal searches carried out by police users.
Langley said he had begun to question the scale of public concern around six months ago, after raising the issue with Flock's board. This was around the time Amazon's doorbell camera company, Ring, ended a partnership with Flock following criticism of a Super Bowl advert that raised fears about unwanted surveillance.
"Historically, my point of view as a chief executive of a private company was, I don't know if I should be making these decisions. I don't know if it's my job to say how long data should be retained," Langley said.
He said he had come to agree with civil liberties groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, that police should be required to have an active case number before searching Flock's data. "They're right. I think it should be required," he said.
Langley said Flock's own employees and the communities it operates in had made clear they expected the company to take a firmer stance. "I resisted that because I didn't want to have that responsibility," he said.
Cooper Quintin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation was critical of the changes, describing them as "piecemeal, voluntary, and reversible" and said they "fall short" of providing meaningful protection for people's privacy. "Simple safety 'feature updates' can and will be circumvented," Quintin said. "Invasive searches like [automated licence plate reader] database queries must require a judicial warrant."
While strengthening the safeguards, Langley continues to present Flock's products as important tools for tackling crime and improving policing. He claimed that cities choosing not to use Flock were effectively opting "to be less safe".
He did not deny, however, that the technology had been misused. "We're only as good as the data coming in," he said. "When you see these cases of wrongful arrest, the data was bad and the officer failed to follow the rules. But it's easier to pick a villain that's a company like us."
Langley said the visibility of Flock's cameras in cities and neighbourhoods made the company an easy target for broader public unease about privacy and technology. "Because you can see our cameras, it's easier to get mad," he said. The US currently has no comprehensive federal law governing the collection, use or sale of people's personal data.
Langley recalled meeting a woman in Cleveland who was strongly opposed to Flock's presence in her community. When asked why, she told him she saw it as a tool police could use to "abuse their power." He said police officers he had spoken to often expressed similar concerns about colleagues, telling him they had long suspected certain officers of wrongdoing but had no way to prove it.
That feedback led to the introduction of an audit feature earlier this year, which automatically logs searches made using Flock's systems and flags unusual search behaviour. Most police customers who tried the optional feature chose to keep it switched on, and Langley said misuse had proved widespread enough that Flock decided to make the audit function standard across all police users.
Officers who misuse the technology are "horrible", Langley said, adding that they should face stronger consequences than dismissal. "If anyone is going to be the one that spearheads getting rid of abusive cops? Sign me up," he said. "We trust these individuals with deadly weapons. I think a camera is very far from a deadly weapon, but I would say it's a very powerful tool. We should hold it incredibly accountable."
