Flock CEO Garrett Langley on Controversy, "Surveillance State" Claims, and Privacy vs Safety

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - All-In Podcast, LLC

In this episode of All-In, host Jason Calacanis sits down with Garrett Langley, CEO of Flock Safety, a company specializing in license plate recognition (LPR) cameras and drone surveillance for

Key takeaways

• Flock's technology has contributed to solving over a million crimes and locating more than 10,000 missing people across the U.S.
• 90% of crimes are solved within seven days of data retention, suggesting shorter storage periods can still be highly effective.

Main topics

• Privacy vs. safety trade-offs in community surveillance
• License plate recognition (LPR) technology and its impact on crime reduction

Notable quotes

"We think 90% of crimes will get solved within seven days of data retention."

"This data is a liability on NASA. You should have a set retention period."

Conclusion

Garrett Langley argues that community-driven governance—through elected city councils—is the best way to balance

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) All right, everybody, welcome back to the all in interview. This is where we find the people building the future, sometimes a politician, sometimes a CEO, sometimes an investor, all the time, an important discussion. And one of the most important discussions of the moment is balancing safety and privacy. And there is one company that has, you know, is at the center of this. And we're so lucky to have Garrett from Flock here, Garrett Langley. Garrett, you and I spoke on This Week in Startups, my other podcast that I've been doing for 16 years. I don't know how many years ago that was, six or seven years ago. Speaker 2 (0:33) Six or seven years, yeah. Speaker 1 (0:34) And I've been following your company, full disclosure. I was like trying to invest at one point. I'm not a shareholder, but I've always been intrigued by what you're doing, on the margin sometimes concerned. And it seems like you've been so successful with Flock. which does safety cameras, license plate readers specifically. We're going to get into all the details today. But in the last year, because of the tremendous success of Flock, it has been adopted in many communities. We're going to get into that. And it's had a really great impact at reducing crime. We'll get into that. But there is now a group of people who maybe have privacy concerns. And you and I have talked over the years, and we're going to get into it. We're going to go right at... the controversies and everything and this grand debate we're going to have how much privacy am i going to give up to get safety and it's really interesting to me that there's been so much energy on this recently because when i see that kind of energy as an investor or as a podcast host here in the world's greatest moderator tm i know there's something at stake Speaker 1 (1:43) Applovin started with an $8 domain and no VC funding and became one of the largest ad platforms in the world. Now that same engine powers Applovin ads for e-commerce. Your ads run inside mobile games reaching over a billion people with full screen distraction-free attention. The platform finds buyers and optimizes for profit. You set the target. It does the rest. One cookware brand went from $4 million to $16 million, turned profitable, and is on pace for $80 million this year. Visit applovin.com slash all in to launch your first campaign today. I'm doing it. Tell us a little bit about flock safety and how many communities you're in now. And then also the drone component, because people know the license plate readers, maybe they don't know the drones. So let's just get that footprint and build a mental model for the audience here. Speaker 2 (2:33) That's great. Yeah, Jason, thanks for having me. So I started the company nine years ago with a pretty simple mission, which is to live in a safer neighborhood. And that was our initial pitch. You know, if you look at... our first two or three years in business, it was just neighborhoods. We sold the neighborhoods and we sold a license plate reading camera, which is pretty basic technology. A car drives by, we take a still image of a vehicle, we read the license plate. And the system has gotten more sophisticated with time. We can detect things like a roof rack or a bumper sticker or dent or damage. But that's at its core what the technology does. And if you look at last year, to your point, we've had a tremendous impact on the country. North of a million crimes solved using Flock. North of 10,000 people found who were missing. And that's everything from our grandparents with dementia to our children. Just last week in Atlanta, there was a stolen car that happened to have a two-year-old in the backseat. And thankfully, because of very hard work by Atlanta Police Department and our cameras, that little kid was safely returned within the hour. I don't know what that would have happened without Flock. And that's one story, but that's my own city last week. And you look at July as a data point, last month, it was about 1,125 missing people and over 20,000 stolen cars. And those are the cars we use to drive our kids to school, to drive to work. And so we're in roughly just over 6,000 or so cities across the country. And the consequence of being that consequential is... People have a lot of questions and people have a lot of debates. And I think it's a worthwhile thing to talk about what kind of society do we want to live in? I want to live in one where we're safer. And I want to keep my privacy while I do it. But that is hard. To find that balance is not easy. I Speaker 1 (4:22) remember when we had our first discussion, gosh, so many years ago on This Week in Startups, we were talking about it and I had brought up this, hey, well, what happens about abuse in the system? Because once in a while, you get a dirty cop. If you watch any kind of procedural TV, you watch Law & Order. You watch the Sopranos, the Sopranos, you know, Tony Sopranos got a dirty cop who's, you know, you know, in the hole for, you know, some gambling debt and they run license plate for them, right? This is like a trope on the news. And it's a trope because it's common, not like on a percentage basis, but we all know that any system that records data could be abused. We saw it at Facebook. You had engineers there famously stalking their ex. and like reading their unencrypted messages and the industry had to make a lot of changes. So I remember at the time you were telling me, hey, the settings, and this is where we're going to get really granular today. The settings are set by the local community and these cameras are installed by a local community. The communities I've lived in have had them. So let's answer these two questions. Number one, how does a community wind up? having flock cameras installed? What's that decision making process like typically? And then we'll get into very granularly what you're recording for how long, who has access, the audit logs, and then what's not recorded? Speaker 2 (5:48) Yep. No, that's a great question. So, you know, one of the reasons, Jason, we struggled so much to raise money as a business is because it is traditionally and was for flock very hard. to get contracts done with local government. The last company to go public that serviced local government was over 20 years ago. This is a really hard space because city councils have the final decision. Speaker 1 (6:14) And Speaker 2 (6:14) so every two weeks, a city council meets and the city manager's direct reports, be it a police chief or fire chief, public works, presents ideas, presents concepts they would like to get approval for. And Flock is on that list. And so I think last year, we went to something close to 10,000 city council meetings as a business. I have a huge team whose entire job is just going to city council meetings explaining what Flock does and what Flock doesn't do. And it's just the cost of doing business with local government. So it's really straightforward. And I was actually talking to the chief, our first ever police chief down in Jersey Village, Texas. I was talking to him a couple of weeks ago. And like that video, that council vote six years ago is still public record. Speaker 1 (7:00) Yes. City council meetings are famously recorded. It's tough. It's a wacky environment. Speaker 2 (7:06) It is. It can be particularly wacky. But we go, right? Because we want people to know what they're buying. So they buy the product. And what has been true for the last nine years, as we've always said, this data is a liability on NASA. you should have a set retention period. And that retention period for how long this data will be stored is going to determine the efficacy of the product. And so if you delete this data in a day or two, it's going to be less effective. It's still going to be better than nothing. And if you hold this for 30 days, it's going to be pretty effective. And if you hold it for a year, it'd be more effective. And we always believe city councils should have that final say for how long they want to store it and who they want to share it with. And so for the longest time, 30 days was our default. We've recently shifted that down to seven days. We think that's a reasonable trade-off, but we still think cities should decide, or states for that matter. But someone who is democratically elected should have the final decision of how this technology works in their community. But what I think you probably agree with, as a technology provider, we have to set strong defaults. Defaults matter Speaker 1 (8:12) is what we say in the industry. Yes. And if you think about the number of crimes, of 100 crimes, How many would, and I'm sure you have some idea of this, if we have 100 crimes that occurred, whatever the nature are, how many are solved with seven days of data, 30 days of data, or require more than 30 days? Do you have that? Speaker 2 (8:36) We have a good sense, right? I mean, I'm going to give you an aggregate data point across the whole country. We think 90 % of crimes will get solved within seven days of data retention. Beautiful. It is, Jason, but I would tell you, I've probably talked to two or three hundred police chiefs this week and they remind me and I tell them, you should tell your city council this, too. The 10 percent we're talking about, but the 10 percent you read about in the news, though. Oh, right. It's the it's the homicide that there was never a 911 call because someone was killed. And it takes five days to discover the body because of a welfare check. And then it's a complicated case or it's looking. I'm sorry to go to this topic. It's a rape victim who felt guilt, who felt shame, and she didn't call 911 until a week later because she wasn't ready. Speaker 1 (9:23) Yes. Speaker 2 (9:24) And that's real life, right? Like I deal with this every day, so I'm probably less sensitive to it, but these victims deserve privacy. They deserve accountability for the people who attacked them. Yeah, it's a process Speaker 1 (9:34) to even identify the crime. So what you're saying is now with 30 days of the 10 % remaining that, you know, we're just ballparking here. But that last 10%, how many of those out of 10 would be resolved with 30 days of data? Speaker 2 (9:51) We think the majority. And look, we're not going to tell cities how to run themselves. And to be clear, there's states like New Jersey where state law is five years. And so every customer holds it for five years. In the state of California, there's a max retention. In the state of Washington, most states have now adopted regulation. And they set a maximum limit. But I think for me, Jason, what's important more than my just default is making sure city councilors and mayors are educated that they have control. They can make this choice and they should actually go spend time with their police chief and figure out what does he or she think is the best for that community. And I think, look, there's some communities who are going to push for two days or three days. And I think that's so much better than nothing. Because that Amber Alert and that Silver Alert, which are the things we all lose sleep over, they're still going to get solved too. Speaker 1 (10:44) So it's just about Speaker 2 (10:44) us. I Speaker 1 (10:44) literally lose sleep over. I got one at two in the morning the other day and I wake up, I read it. I'm like, I don't know what I'm going to do with this data at 2 a.m. I'm in bed. But okay, so this seems completely fair in terms of how you're expressing it. And to be clear, when I had you on Twist back in the day, I was like, well, don't you need... to know who's in the driver's seat. And wouldn't you want to get a picture of the windshield? And I was kind of finding myself advocating in my community, hey, I would be okay, just as J. Cal, the dad, and somebody who sometimes on the margins has some privacy security issues. They're not acute like for, I don't know, Sam Altman, tragically, and what's happened at his house twice. But I have my own security cameras. I use Unity. It's incredible. Yeah, great Speaker 2 (11:34) product. And I Speaker 1 (11:35) have a license plate reader on mine. I have facial recognition on mine. That's on my private property, of course. Some of it does look out on public roads because I have access roads. So I am technically able to record the license plate of everybody who drives by the front of my house. I think that's legal to do here in Austin. Speaker 2 (11:53) It is legal. So are Speaker 1 (11:56) there communities that are using other systems? that are not flock and recording every single person in and out. Because when I go in and out of private communities once in a while, I see there's four or five cameras. I know I'm on camera. So aren't people already doing full video in their communities, not using flock? Speaker 2 (12:17) Yeah, no, Jason, you're spot on. I mean, we don't do facial recognition. We don't capture video. We don't look inside the car. We don't even allow in our system to search for people. for our licensee cameras. And that's in direct conflict with some of our biggest competitors who do all of the things I just mentioned. And unfortunately, or fortunately, we've been very successful. And as kind of the industry leader, the spotlight's on us. And that's okay, because my hope is the changes we're making, the changes we'll continue to make, will force the rest of the industry to follow suit. And I hope counselors ask questions of the systems they have if it's not Flock. And maybe they'll switch to Flock if they want a privacy-first solution. Speaker 1 (13:00) And you guys have had a bit of a communication challenge. People were ripping down the cameras. People care about privacy, not just here in the United States, by the way. In the UK, people are ripping down cameras. There are a group of people who are entitled to this opinion, and I share it on the margins. When I had children... It changed dramatically because number one for me is security. I'm willing to give up my license plate data. If somebody knows my exact whereabouts for 30 days of my license plates, I'm okay with that Speaker 2 (13:31) because Speaker 1 (13:32) I have children and I'm okay with giving up that amount of privacy. I would be a little concerned, I think, with facial recognition, if I'm being totally honest. But, you know, it's kind of a moving target. And I guess the... reaction you guys had was, and I think I had talked to you about this, is you called them terrorists, like the people taking the cameras down and this kind of thing. Where does this audience, who's ripping down cameras, I mean, they're obviously not terrorists. I think they're activists, I would say would be a better descriptor. But you guys haven't communicated this perfectly, in my opinion. So where are people coming to you with valid concerns? Speaker 2 (14:15) And Speaker 1 (14:15) then how have you evolved your ability to communicate what you're doing? And that's one of the reasons I wanted to have you on this is because I looked at it and I was like,