Flock's CEO Faced Me After Its Cameras Led to My Wrongful Stop
In this episode of The Drivecast, host Joel shares his firsthand experience of being wrongfully tracked by Flock Safety cameras due to an error in the FBI's NCIC database. He sits down with Flock CEO Garrett Langley to discuss the incident, the company's response, the broader issues with the outdated NCIC system, and the public backlash over privacy and Fourth Amendment concerns. Langley addresses the need for modernization and the challenges of balancing local control with systemic improvements.
It's easy to potentially try to aggregate that down to 'Flock did this,' and a lot of mistakes happened to create this edge case. Sadly, you weren't the first person who's had an edge case.
- scrapcode
I am absolutely biased, but there is a lot of attempt to shift or at least share the blame here and not a lot of accountability. Flock themselves mis-translated the plate, plain and simple, and should not be being used in production for alerting authorities on very serious matters.
We are already very aware that the police overreact and make plenty of mistakes. The obvious here being that even if this was the exact plate criminals can very easily, and do, swap plates - so you shouldn't just aggressively be knocking down vehicles because of the standard screwed in license plate that is displayed on the back. When was the last time you checked your license plate and made sure it was still yours? Would you even know it is yours? It has happened to me.
- Cider9986
There's a map of ALPRs based on OpenStreetMap so you can see ones near you:
There's a lot more than just Flock, Flock is just one of thousands of terrible companies creating mass spying on innocent people. And there's also other ALPR companies like Axon and Motorola.
Flock may be worse than those because of the AI features and large databases, but other companies making surveillance tech are not avoiding the AI features because of moral reasons.
- sterlind
seems like:
- cop messed up, added an incomplete license plate number (34DTM) into the NCIC database.
- Flock cameras found his fancy car, a $155k Range Rover, which had a license plate like 34DTM10, and flagged it.
- cops didn't bother checking the police report before they went in and surrounded him.
thoughts:
- as much as I dislike Flock, it seems like it wasn't at fault here. this was a scene straight of Brazil, and Flock was the typewriter. it was an accelerant, not the cause.
- police are shockingly incompetent. the individual officers, the departments, the bureaucratic systems, they're bad at their jobs. probably because they're insulated from consequences - these are people who can shoot the wrong person by accident, and at worst they get fired (QI.)
- none of this would have made the news if it wasn't a $155k Range Rover being driven by a reporter. how many people in beat-up Carollas have faced this same situation?
- dylan604
"Inevitably what happens is, let’s take the rental car example: A car is reported stolen by the rental car agency."
I've heard stories of rental car companies being very aggressive in reporting a car stolen. It sounds like Flock is having to do a lot of work to handle reports made by rental car companies specifically. This leaves me wondering how aggressive rental companies are in reporting back to the department they made the stolen report notifying the car had been found. I'm guessing not very.
These rental companies need to be held responsible for their lackadaisical use of stolen car reports. It is not the police's responsibility for what is essentially a contract dispute. If I allow someone to borrow my car, the police will not consider this a stolen car situation even if they said they would bring it back the next day. This is no different than a car not being returned to the rental company, so why are the police willing to be involved?
- dundarious
If Flock has so many issues with this database, and all their solutions are patchwork, and those solutions remain local to the jurisdiction that is locally using Flock, then this is a bad product.
If you build a product on a bad database, you cannot load the blame for the resulting bad product on the bad database. If it was not fit for purpose, then the product designers are the problem as much as anything else.
This applies doubly for a product that relies so heavily on automation enabling speedy responses with heavy consequences.
I understand that this may smack of perfect being the enemy of good, but this domain is akin to medical devices in terms of impact.
- Ancapistani
I’d be interested in seeing a history of Mr. Langley’s movements for the past couple of years. Anyone know where I could obtain such a dataset?
- dundarious
Is there any evidence or other form of justification for the Flock CEO's claims about how it is responsible for SF's crime downturn? I find it hard to believe that Flock cameras are at the heart of such a wide-ranging effect. I am not a local, and I have only done a cursory search, but I don't see the elected officials making the same claim -- I have seen them say it has more to do with changing socioeconomic factors.
- f154hfds
> Garrett: At the highest level, nothing would make me happier than if we had state-by-state regulation on this type of technology. That to me is so crystal clear, because the lack of regulation on this type of technology just shows that our elected officials need to move faster than they have historically.
Agreed. We've had a lot of this - tech companies begging for tech regulation. Without the regulation it seems we'll always get these competitive races to the bottom of what's possible within the confines of the laws that do exist as less and less scrupulous companies enter the fray.