Google Agrees to Blur Images of Flock CEO’s Home After Address Leaked

Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley has a message for ordinary Americans: Give up some privacy in the name of public safety. But when Langley’s own home address was exposed online, he apparently decided that privacy was suddenly worth protecting.

Photo credit: Zumper Real Estate Listing

Google has agreed to blur images of Langley’s home on Street View after his address was leaked. There is nothing wrong with wanting to protect your home and family, but there is something deeply ironic about the CEO of a nationwide surveillance company demanding privacy for himself while telling everyone else that they need to accept less of it.

Langley has repeatedly defended Flock’s enormous network of automated license plate reader cameras, which photograph vehicles traveling through public areas and create searchable records of where those vehicles have been. When critics raise concerns about privacy, Langley does not deny that there is a tradeoff. Instead, he argues that Americans simply need to accept it.

“I value my privacy,” Langley said during a recent Fox News appearance. But, he argued, “when people talk about just one of these, privacy or safety, they’re prioritizing the wrong thing.”

According to Langley, the answer is “compromise,” asking, “how do we have our safety, and how do we balance privacy?”

Apparently, the balance means that everyone else gets photographed by Flock while Langley gets his house blurred. Flock Safety has installed tens of thousands of cameras across the United States (including one on Langley’s property, which takes photos of every car that passes by his house), creating a vast surveillance network that allows participating law enforcement agencies to search vehicle information collected throughout their communities. The company insists that the technology is overwhelmingly used to solve crimes and find missing people, and there is legitimate evidence that the cameras have helped police investigate serious crimes.

The problem is that the same technology can also be abused. Police officers have been caught using Flock to track people for reasons unrelated to legitimate investigations, including monitoring romantic partners and other individuals.

Flock has responded by implementing additional safeguards, including stricter auditing requirements and shorter default data-retention periods. Those changes are an acknowledgment that giving people access to a massive database of Americans’ movements comes with serious risks.

Yet Langley still wants the public to believe that privacy is something Americans should be willing to compromise. That argument might be easier to accept if Langley were willing to make the same compromise himself. Instead, when his own address became public, his home was blurred from Google Street View. Photos of the home have also been removed from most real estate listings, including Zillow and Redfin.

Americans should not have to choose between safety and privacy. They should be able to expect both, especially from companies collecting extraordinarily detailed information about their movements.

If Garrett Langley believes his family deserves privacy, nobody should argue otherwise. But he should extend that same principle to the millions of Americans whose vehicles are being photographed, tracked and stored in databases operated by the company he runs.

Privacy apparently matters quite a bit when the person being watched is Garrett Langley. Maybe ordinary Americans should get the same deal.