Sorry, Not Sorry: On CEOs Who Apologise for Getting Caught Saying the Quiet Part

Saw this one and had to put my coffee down for a second. The CEO of Flock Safety, the company that’s papered half of America (and increasingly here) with automated license plate readers, called activists protesting his product “terroristic.” Then, when the backlash rolled in, he apologised.

Sure he did.

I’ve watched enough corporate apologies over the years to know the shape of them. This one has all the hallmarks: not “I was wrong,” but “I shouldn’t have said that out loud.” There’s a difference, and it’s not a small one. One is a change of heart. The other is a change of strategy once the heart’s contents became a liability.

What gets me isn’t the apology, it’s the reflex underneath it. When you build a business on mass surveillance and someone objects, calling them a terrorist isn’t a slip of the tongue. It’s the logical endpoint of how the whole enterprise sees the world: there are customers, there are threats, and dissent gets sorted into the second bucket by default. He said it because on some level, that’s genuinely how the org chart in his head is arranged.

We’ve got our own version of this creeping in, slower and quieter. Victoria’s had its own debates about numberplate recognition and facial recognition trials, and every time it comes up, the pitch is the same: it’s for finding stolen cars, catching serious crims, keeping the kids safe. Nobody pitches mass surveillance as mass surveillance. They pitch it as safety, and then act baffled when people ask uncomfortable questions about where the data goes, who can access it, and what happens when a tool built for “serious crime” gets quietly repurposed for something else. History’s not short on examples of infrastructure built for one stated purpose finding a second, less publicised one.

My daughter’s generation is going to inherit a world where nearly every movement they make outside the house is logged somewhere, by someone, for reasons that sounded reasonable in a pitch deck. I don’t know how I feel about that, and I’ve stopped pretending I do. I like feeling safe. I also know that “safe” and “watched” aren’t the same thing, and companies with billion-dollar valuations have every incentive to blur that line rather than clarify it.

The bit in this whole saga that actually reassures me a little is the backlash itself. People pushed, publicly, and a well-funded company had to walk back its own CEO’s words within days. That’s not nothing. It means the pressure is real enough to matter, even if the apology behind it is hollow. Companies don’t issue statements to appease people they’ve already beaten.

I don’t think Garrett Langley believes activists are terrorists. I think he believes they’re bad for business, and in the moment, those two categories collapsed into one convenient word. That’s worth sitting with, because it says something about how easily “threat to profit” gets rebadged as “threat to safety” once you’ve got enough lawyers and enough cameras.

The apology changes nothing about the cameras. That part’s still up to everyone watching.