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.
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.
I think people need to just keep the pressure up regardless of the company. They’re all the same
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.