Flock Safety's CEO gets a taste of his own medicine

What's this about?

The CEO of Flock Safety, the licence-plate-reader network, found himself on the receiving end of the kind of attention his product enables — most visibly by having his own home blurred on Google Maps and Zillow.

Why is this more than schadenfreude?

Because it is an unusually clean demonstration of the asymmetry. Flock's product argument is that public movement is not private, so recording it is fair. The moment the same logic is applied to the person making it, they take the available privacy protection — which reveals that the argument was never that surveillance is harmless, only that it is acceptable when pointed at other people.

Why is it worth noticing?

1. Third Flock story in a week, after the Texas insurance-fee funding and the officer who used the system to track an ex-partner over 2,000 times.
2. The blur request is legal and ordinary; the point is that it is available to him and the people in his database have no equivalent.
3. Backlash against this category is now sustained rather than episodic, which usually precedes regulation.