Flock Safety announced a voluntary employee separation program on Friday, offering a “generous” severance package to those who want to leave amid growing backlash against the surveillance technology company, according to an internal email shared with WIRED.
Applications for Flock’s voluntary severance program opened Friday, and employees have until October 2 to decide whether to leave the company. Flock expects to grant buyouts to the majority of workers who apply, according to the email. People familiar with the program but not authorized to discuss it publicly say they believe that a significant number of the startup’s roughly 1,500 employees may try to depart.
Flock is making the severance offers as it continues to lose customers amid growing frustration across the US about its sprawling network of license plate readers, which have raised concerns about privacy and misuse. In the last month, WIRED has documented officers allegedly abusing Flock to track former romantic partners and colleagues, exposed how widely some agencies share access to the system, shown how little is known about the manufacturing of the devices, and revealed in new detail how much information Flock’s cameras collect based on data from a dismantled Flock device.
I would imagine that this is a good way to get rid of the initial employees who really believed they were doing good. Now if you stay after this, or if you get hired after this, they can be confident that you have no moral issue with what they are doing.
Flock has done its part in soaking up public anger at pervasive surveillance, and can now be left to fail. Companies like Axon will step in to the breach, be slightly less obviously awful, and receive much less public pushback.
This isn’t going away until the very governments that benefit from it pass laws against it. For there to be any chance of that happening there has to be even greater public pushback.
And Axon already has a long history of supplying cameras to police, so this is going to lead to an even worse enemy holding the mass surveillance reigns.
Most people aren’t aware, but Axon already does AI-assisted surveillance software too.
Do your part, damage the cameras.
The article seems to conveniently hide the rampant corruption between Flock and local governments. Not that Wired has an obligation to include it, of course, but it’s still relevant context as to why everyone hates Flock.
I mean, at a certain point, you have to go with the angle of the current story. I know this is going to be a hell of a stretch, but that’s sort of like expecting any car review of a new Ford to include the founder’s anti-Semitism.
I don’t love this analogy. You’re comparing something out of living memory with something that’s still actively going on right this second.
I think it’s always worthwhile to at least mention it, or else you give the impression we’ve collectively moved on.
Right. The article is about loss of contracts, it seems more than reasonable to include a perfunctory explanation about how those contracts came about to begin with.
And why are they so mad at us for things we don’t do?
“We just make and manufacture weapons, we don’t use them, that’s other people, why are they mad at us?”.
And we just want people to be safe.
“Please bend over for your safety inspection, we want you to be safe, this is all for your own protection. How dare you be upset at us”
Yup. That.
license plate readers
This is a bit like referring to thermonuclear bombs as firecrackers. It’s very misleading.
Fuking cockroaches
‘Flockroaches’
