> As an aside - can I ask why you left Flock? I assumed that the people who would've wanted to work there would be fully invested into the idea. What changed your mind?
The Flock of my recruitment process would be a lot less problematic. There was discussion of the obvious, the surveillance "state". But everything was a high ground of ethics and legality, ideas were supposedly run through groups to discuss "not just whether we could, but whether we should", protecting individuals whose data was collected by Flock but had no safety or LE purpose, retention, sharing controls ...
... the reality was much more "mask off". "Eliminate all crime, using Flock". Very Airbnb'ish. "We know your jurisdiction doesn't allow you to share this data. It's not our job to enforce that on our platform; if you're sharing it, that's not our concern - you'll still have access to all the tools to do so." Sales worked with Agencies who weren't allowed to gather data themselves, weren't directly allowed to partner with Flock for cameras, were asked where they saw or believed they'd most want said cameras, and Flock would aggressively work with businesses, HOAs, other government entities in those areas, and get them onboard, and then go back to the Agency saying "Hey, guess what, we know you're not allowed to collect this, but these customers are, and you're able to share their data."
That didn't sit well with me - there was nothing actively illegal Flock were doing, but they were openly helping Agencies flout the spirit of laws constraining them while staying within the letter (in the above examples, HOAs and others would often get deeply subsidized, at least, installations, knowing that Flock would be able to get a bigger contract with an Agency that would otherwise have no over very limited means of working with them).
These things, coupled with Garrett's "vision" that, he emphasized repeatedly, was his literal vision, "Eliminate all crime with Flock", were too much (and I think lead to some of their even more troublesome initiatives now, like "Have AI look for potential suspicious vehicle movements, even without a reported incident, and have it alert officers to go investigate in realtime", with talk of that being extended to conversations and audio).